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Your post reads like you've never actually been to India. I won't comment on the quality of Indian programmers, but I would say it's nearly universally accepte
by eitally 17y ago
Your post reads like you've never actually been to India. I won't comment on the quality of Indian programmers, but I would say it's nearly universally accepted that the Indian flavor of English* rates at about the middle school level in the US. I have never seen so much poor grammar and misspellings in public places anywhere I've been. My guess is that they are taught English phonetically and that as long as the spelling looks like it would be pronounced correctly, the fact that it's way off doesn't matter at all. Most Indians, provided they're from the same region, speak to each other in their native tongue rather than English (whether it's Kannada, Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Gujarati, etc). English is the fall-back when people don't share the same Indian language.
* I'm commenting on popular English, not scholarly works.
- wheels 17y agoI've spent about two weeks in India. Most Indians don't speak English. The college educated – a tiny minority – do. The mangling is somewhat typical of a lingua franca in less-than-cultured contexts. That a shop owner can't write properly in their third language doesn't say much about the intellectual class's abilities. Real Indian-English – the stuff you hear on the news – is a proper dialect (akin to, say, Scots), not simply bad English.
- pramit 17y agoRe: Most Indians don't speak English. The college educated – a tiny minority – do. The question isn't about no. of Indians speaking English. The question is: do Indian programmers (and professionals) speak English? Answer: 99% do.