By Alexander Baratta, Paul Vincent Smith and Rui He
The English language left its borders of origin in Britain long ago. It has been exported throughout the world through colonisation, travel and media.
This process has created not one English, spoken around the globe, but many Englishes. There are native speaker varieties, such as British, American or Australian English, but also multiple versions spoken by non-native speakers, such as Indian, Ghanaian and Singaporean English. In fact, the majority of people who speak English are non-native speakers.
In India English is spoken by around 125 million people, according to the last available data from the 2011 census. Indian English has its own grammatical constructions, such as “I am having a house”, and its own words, such as “prepone”, meaning to bring a meeting forward.