Long Live the “Abuses”: Two late-Raj Glossaries compared to modern Indian English

In the late 1930s, on the eve of the end of colonial rule in India, two British commentators, A.F.Kindersley and R.C. Goffin, published their own thoughts on the linguistic features – includingsemantic, grammatical, orthographical, and phonological aspects – that went into the make-up of theIndian English of the day. Due to the lack of lexicographical coverage of this stage of the variety’shistory, these two glossaries thus offer a valuable insight into late-Raj Indian English, or as it wasknown at the time, Anglo-Indian English. Comparing the content of those glossaries to present-dayIndian English thus enables us to assess the extent of change over the intervening 70 plus years. Theoverall picture is one of surprising stability given the natural growth and decay of language over time,with roughly half of the terms assessed found to be present in the Indian English of today, oneexample being the use of the term abuses to refer to a string of invective. What is especiallyinteresting is that many of these features have survived despite deprecation by the colonialists whoregarded local variations as “abuses” of English, and despite an exo-normative educational systemwhich was consistently antagonistic to them over the period. The outcomes of this research,particularly the establishment of the longevity of many features of Indian English, argue strongly for asystematicity and stability within the variety which has implications for discussions of notions of whatand who makes a “norm”.