What constitutes acceptable English on Stack Exchange sites?

Question

It's well-established policy that English is required on Stack Exchange sites (language-specific sites aside). That policy led to the question of whether English means UK English or US English. The community decided that neither one was more correct than the other, and that it's not worth editing to change either one to the other.

The differences between US and UK versions of English are mostly confined to minor spelling differences. What happens when non-US/UK English — in practice, this generally means Indian subcontinent English — is thrown into the mix? We end up making lists of common idiomatic and grammatical errors, apparently. Until now, I have considered idioms like the ones on that list to be wrong, and have edited numerous posts to convert them to US English. Is that the right thing to do?

The heart of this question comes down to whether and when non-UK/US versions of English can be considered full dialects, equal in correctness to US and UK English for Stack Exchange purposes, as opposed to pidgins that need to be fixed. I'm hoping to not only get my specific question answered, but also to generate some discussion on how we know when a version of English is "English-y enough" or "correct enough" to be used on Stack Exchange sites.

N.B. As far as I know — and please tell me if I'm wrong — the rules of English grammar are the same in every variant of the language. That means nobody should hesitate to fix errors in grammar because of worries about dialectal differences.

Answer 1

I tend to think things like "doubt" (for "question"), "Lakh" (for 100,000) and "Do the needful" - things that look wrong to the untrained average anglo eye - can be edited. Not because they're not perfectly fine in themselves, but because they tend to create a lot of confusion and discussion among the rest of the audience.

This should by no means be enforced aggressively or rudely, though. Just quietly edit, and maybe add a friendly comment that American / British English is the predominant form used on these sites and it should be preferred for clarity.

Answer 2

As someone from the Indian subcontinent (though not from India itself), I believe "Indian English" is not really a dialect in itself. For most of us in the subcontinent, English is a second language and very different from the language (or languages) that we use. So it is not surprising that what we write often has mistakes and weird idioms (usually because we are trying to translate something literally from our native tongue - ending up with something that sounds strange in English). It is just the various quirks of our native languages showing through.

IMHO, expressions like "do the needful" or using "doubt" in place of "question" are simply mistakes, and I think it is completely appropriate to correct them. Just my $0.02.

Answer 3

As the (British) asker of the linked question, I am of course going to have some intrinsic bias when I say that "Indian English" isn't equal in stature to American or British English.

I think the main reason for not 'tolerating' Indian English idioms is that the differences between them and their British/American equivalents are large enough to have a completely different meaning.

One such example I used in my original question was "please suggest me", a phrase common to Indian English, it seems.

To a 'native' English speaker, this sounds rather awkward and literally means "I am the person you should suggest", rather than the intended meaning of "please suggest [a solution] to me".

Even when the meaning isn't changed, the constructs can be different enough to confuse or stall the flow of the sentence, such as "this is happening since two months" - it doesn't scan well when read, but the meaning isn't totally lost.

Meanwhile, the differences between American and Britsh English are largely confined to spelling variations and minor differences in how we name things. For example, lift/elevator; pants/trousers and pavement/sidewalk.

Brits do sometimes complain that American English has somewhat corrupted the "Queen's English" and I'll admit not all examples translate well: fanny, fag and pissed would be either 'butt', 'gay' and 'angry' (America) or 'vagina', 'cigarette' and 'drunk' (UK). But these tend to be well-known cases and rarely cause genuine consternation when used (and are unlikely to feature often on Stack Overflow!).

Let us not forget that even those who allegedly speak 'good' American or British English can be just as unintelligible when they get complacent and abuse the language by littering their posts WITH ranDom Casing, OMG txt spk LOL, "could of" instead of "could have", "it don't work :-(" and all sorts of other ugly things.

So let's all just make sure that language is used as an efficient tool for communication and if you see something that muddies the meaning or retards your reading, then get editing!

Answer 4

Yes, of course Indian English has the same stature as British English or US English. It's a rich linguistic resource with at least 350 million speakers, which puts it way ahead of pretty much every other English dialect bar US English, with which it's about even.

It's the primary English variant for what is probably Stack Exchange's largest potential geographic market to expand into.

Grammar is fairly constant between different dialects of English, but not completely so. Here's a quick guide to some of the grammatical differences between British and American English, for example.

Answer 5

When meaning is un-clear the question, or answer, should be edited. This might involve adding a note to say that Lakh == 100,000. The dialect of English (or first language) of the poster is irrelevant.

Remember that language, especially English, is fluid and changing. A busy international website like Stack Exchange is going to see a lot of variety in English usage. Some of this will be incorrect, and will need to be fixed. Some of it will be correct to the person writing and others from their area, but ugly to your eyes. It is just rude to "fix" such writing. And once you start down the route of fixing stylistic grammar and punctuation differences where do you stop? Would you force use of the Oxford comma?

Finally, there are very many more important things to be fixed on the SE sites. There are dead URLs; there are evil URL shorteners; there are duplicates; etc etc.