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Butler English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 February 2005

PRIYA HOSALI
PRIYA HOSALI
Affiliation:
Professor and ex-dean of the faculty of English Studies at the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages (CIEFL), Hyderabad, India.
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Abstract

An account of a highly distinctive variety of English in India. When the British set up colonies worldwide they brought with them a legacy that included their language, which many of the natives accepted and acculturated: it would after all be unreasonable to expect an imperial language to function in a vacuum with no local nuances. Indeed, gradual acculturation produced a number of varieties of English used as second languages. In their almost 200 years of not-so-peaceful stay on the subcontinent, the British and many Indians used English, fulfilling in at least a linguistic sense Macaulay's dream of an ‘imperishable empire’. In these 200 years, English in India slowly went through a process now labelled Indianization, evolving into the variety (or group of varieties) called Indian English. One subvariety, generally referred to as Butler English, though by no means confined to butlers, is described and discussed here.

Type
Original Article
Information
English Today , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 34 - 39
Copyright
© 2005 Cambridge University Press

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