This book is an empirical study of Indian English (IndE) conducted in a corpus-based framework. The book is divided into six chapters. In Ch. 1, Sedlatschek discusses the sociolinguistic significance of English in India. He argues that despite the fact that English is firmly entrenched in India, there is little empirical research on the structure of IndE. Ch. 2 provides the theoretical and methodological framework of the study. Placing IndE in the Outer Circle of Kachru's model of World Englishes, Sedlatschek provides a historical account of the transplantation, expansion, and institutionalization of English in India. Given the enormous variation within IndE, Sedlatschek clarifies that his study focuses on the “educated variety of contemporary South Asian English” (27). Sedlatschek also shows that the existing studies are based on impressionistic accounts, containing a list of features that are believed to be characteristic of IndE. He argues that an advantage of a corpus study is that it allows for a qualitative analysis of language use in context. His study is based on an analysis of the Kolhapur Corpus and the International Corpus of English-India, combined with his own micro-corpus. These closed corpora were supplemented with online newspapers.
In Ch. 3, Sedlatschek examines the lexical features of IndE. He makes the discussion rich by including the sociolinguistic contexts within which loanwords from Indian languages tend to occur. He shows that the use of loanwords is more common in texts that deal with socio-cultural realities of India than those that deal with general issues. He further points out that many loanwords show regional variation. For example, the loanword vidhan sabha is more frequent in the Hindi-speaking region than others. In Ch. 4, Sedlatschek examines the lexico-syntactic features of IndE and demonstrates that, contrary to the impressionistic accounts, his corpus study shows that only a tiny percentage of features show variation from Standard English norms. For example, he shows that in the category of particle verbs such as throw away, verbs that show variation from Standard English norms constitute only three percent. This suggests that any claims about the uniqueness of IndE based on the verb-particle feature are misleading. On a qualitative level, however, he shows that IndE has developed innovative uses of verb-particle combinations such as stress on, discuss about, and urge for.
In Ch. 5, Sedlatschek studies many morphosyntactic features of IndE, such as the use of articles, count and mass nouns, and the past perfect tense. He argues that, in quantitative terms, the use of articles in IndE broadly conforms to Standard English norms. Contrary to existing studies that attribute Indianism in the use of articles to a substratum influence, Sedlatschek shows that several discourse and pragmatic factors contribute to the variation. On a qualitative level, however, he discovers some unique features, including the use of the definite article with nouns describing institutions of human life (e.g. society). Another feature of IndE is that while the use of words such as legislation, equipment, and machinery as count nouns fell out of use in British and American English, it still survives in IndE.
In Ch. 6, Sedlatschek concludes by highlighting that his study goes beyond the decontextualized feature-list approach and provides a context-sensitive study of the structure of IndE. While norms of IndE broadly conform to those of Standard English, it has developed some structural and pragmatic innovations.
