Is it a mix of Queen's English, the American and the Desi?

Here is a thought:

Indian newspapers use the Queen's English or the American? Both are quite different, sometimes in usage, most often in spellings and pronounciation. Slowly, the latter is catching up with our English newspapers.

The newspapers do not mind writing a combination of the two and add the desi version, like "take action" when the intent was "act", "take a decision" when "decide" would suffice. Or the absured use of "return back" and the horrendous "revert" when the latter actually means "return to the original state." The user believes he means "come back to you."

English is not an easy language, more so for the Indians who think in their mother tongues. The idiom and the grammar of the language one thinks in gets transferred to English being written.

The best way is to have a good dictionary handy, like the COBUILD which provides the usage for every word they list, a Thesaurus and Eric Patridge's Usage and Abusage of English. The important thing is to use them.

-Mahesh Vijapurkar

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