In a similar vein, there's also "I'll revert back" as a more formal "I'll get back to you".

It seems to be a direct translation of the word करणीय (karaniya, that which needs to be done) in many Indic languages.

A more idiomatic translation might be “please get this done”; the “needful” phrase might also be a signal that the writer isn’t that familiar with idioms used in other English-speaking countries.

Hobson-Jobson[1] had a great early compilation of some phrases that arose in the subcontinent— many are still in use.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobson-Jobson

PS. there’s some evidence from Google Books[2] that “do the needful” might be an old English legal term as well. More research is definitely required. The bigger point is, the phrase’s popularity in India may be because it mirrors a Sanskrit-derived word often still used in Indian legal contexts.

[2] A Glossary of Words and Phrases Usually Regarded as Peculiar to the United States, 1860

https://books.google.com/books?id=VXdIAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA428&dq=%...

As an Indian, I do not like this. Big banks like Hdfc also send emails with subject like - "Intimation to update account" or things like I had already sent an "intimation" email. Just makes no sense, you are a billion dollar bank, get it right.

Yes. "Please do the needful" and "revert", are the most common Inglish phrases I encounter when talking to our employees in that part of the world. More recently 'can I connect?' is a new one that is becoming common.

If postpone is to delay until later, and prepone is to bring forwards, can one peripone something (for it to be happening now)?

I agree. The articles misses some really good ones, - prepone, max-to-max (ज़्यादा से ज़्यादा), scanner (for payment QR-codes)

Prepone is now a word in Cambridge dictionary [1]. It acknowledges the origin to India.

[1] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/prepone

I wanted an opposite of "procrastinate", but it's not obvious because of etypmologies.

The best I could devise is "progesternate" (via "gestern").

Juggernaut is definitely one of my favourites. Also, bandicoot from Telegu’s pandikokku, literally “pig rat”.

Thats a good one. Also as an Indian I didn't know Anaconda, Pariah, Mango, Mulligatawny, etc originated from Indian languages

I have wondered if there are people in India who fit a description of certain europeans, in that they are said to speak 9 languages, none of them fluently. My father came from India originaly, but is of the type who is concerned with correctness in all things, but speaks fondly of the fun and games of multi lingual word play, and harder to master languages such as punjabi, and classical persian. I think that India is so multi lingual and large to begin with that there will be regional differences in the use of other languages...portugese, spanish, english, and many others and the concept of "indian english" is realy an intro into a much much vaster world of crosscultural exchange and cominication ongoing for millenia. edit: spelling, always spelling

Even Irish people whose main language since birth is English do this. There's a verb in Gaeilge which does exist in English but is translated as "does be". Examples:

- He does be eating his breakfast

- She does be out walking the dog

It's the continuous/habitual form of to be, so the implication is that she does be walking the dog everyday, or regularly. He does be eating his breakfast everyday.

The interesting thing is that you'll meet Irish people who were never fluent in Irish - learned it in school, sure, but never spoke it daily - who still use this conjugation when speaking English.

In my native Cantonese (and this probably applies to a lesser extent to Mandarin as well), pronouns are inherently non-gendered, and when we speak in English we tend to randomly pick one (he/she) and thus occasionally get the gender wrong.

That said I think there are "levels" to so called "mental translation" -- I don't think I consciously mentally translate anything at all, but I guess sometimes the neural pathways or whatever are kinda repurposed/re-used even if there are some differences between languages.

That is a common usage in British English as well. E.g “I will update the draft document and revert back to you”.

One of the most annoying things about Duolingo is that they haven’t spared a week of an intern’s time to come up with a way of substituting the British/Indian/Irish/Austrailian/New Zealand/South African… word for the American English word. OK there’s a lot of slang out there and you could really go down a rabbit hole but when the usage is well documented in e.g. Collins-Robert there’s no excuse really.

I worked in customer service and dealt often with people in other countries. I greatly enjoyed learning about customs and phrases, new cultural tidbits.

For Indian English, one of my favorites was “Do the needful”, meaning “Do what’s necessary”. Just thinking it reminds me of my friends and colleagues overseas.

As an Indian who moved abroad and comes back occasionally this is the hardest part. As an Indian I always think in multiples of 10: 100,1000,10000, 1 lakh etc, but abroad after a certain point people think in multiples of 1000. 1000, million, then multiples of 10..The Indian system to me is more logically consistent

> much more limited vocabulary

These days in my generation (Gen-Z) more youth watch movies and television series in English. Yet I find many of my more urbanized peers roll their eyes when I use a figure of speech i.e a metaphor.

In contrast, I picked up my language from technical books, blogs and documentation - and they sometimes find my choices of wording rather rude and insensitive.

I think I had to be more conscious about picking up the language because I did my early schooling in local language, and picked up reading English books on my own. For them it was natural in an urban environment. However, the urban english is "just enough" to get by. Since it is the "bureacratic" language (Indian schools too are as bureacratic as it can get), they had to be polite and standardized.

> However, as I understand, higher education is all conducted in English...

That english is way more limited, and higher education is way more mechanical than you folks have in the west.

> Is English language literature not widely read in school?

It depends on the quality of the education. I had the lower tier schooling (government-funded and similar). The English included is just rote-learned rather than understood - in high school we were expected to produce approximately same sentences as given in the textbooks, and any creativity in answers might lose grades!

There are better boards (school systems) like CBSE and ICSE, which are expensive and higher level. I have a few friends from ICSE who have much wider vocabulary than me. In the next generation, you will see Indians with better language skills, since most elite Indians now flock to these schooling systems.