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South Asian English is the variety of English that has been used since the 17th century in South Asia. Usage varies greatly from area to area, primarily because of the influence of local languages on pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary, e.g., Bangla (formerly called Bengali) in Bangladesh and the Indian state of Bengal, Hindi in northern India, Tamil in southern India and Sri Lanka, Urdu in Pakistan and India, and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka. At the same time, however, there is considerable uniformity throughout the region as a consequence of British administrative, legal, and commercial usage, the presence of English-language-media schools based on British models, and, more recently, local television.
South Asian English pronounces r in words such as art, door, and worker. It tends to have full vowels in all syllables (e.g., seven is pronounced "seh-ven" not "sev'n"), and it is widely considered to have a singsong quality often compared with that of English speakers in Wales. Two widespread grammatical features are, first, questions without word-order inversion, as in What you would like to buy, please? Where you are coming from? Why you are doing this? Second is the end-of-sentence use of only for emphasis: He is coming once a week only for He only comes once a week. Widely used in the region are adopted local expressions such as: gherao (in industrial actions, surrounding people so that they cannot leave a place; also used as a verb, e.g., He was gheraoed yesterday); wallah "man," used in compounds like dhobiwallah meaning "laundry man"; and the numbers lakh "one hundred thousand," e.g., a lakh of rupees, and crore "ten million" in They have crores of rupees. Hybridization of English with indigenous usages is common, as in policewallah "policeman," and goondaism "behaving like a goonda or thug," itself a South Asian word.
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