I'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 lin

I'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.