English in private letters in India

Abstract

Some aspects of a corpus of personal correspondence.

English as used in business letters, job applications and different types of bureaucratic communication in India has become more or less standardized and is not much different from the language of similar letters written elsewhere in the English-speaking world. But this is not the case with private letters, which are intimate, informal and often lax. Since a personal letter is written to a friend, spouse or relative, the writer comes out with his/her ‘real self’ in the use of language. It may therefore be taken as an authentic indication of the extent to which one is proficient in English and also the extent to which nativised features of English in this specific genre are attributable to native socio-cultural factors.