I always knew there was English (UK) and English (USA) which has minor differences in spelling e.g. localize instead of localise, and words/phrases like “sidewalk” instead of “pavement”. UK folk can understand it fine, although we often joke about it not being “proper English”. In recent years, I’ve sometimes worked with Indian staff and quickly came across some strange words and phrases.
So it turns out there should be a English (India) too. Here are some classics:
- “Today morning” instead of “this morning”
- “Have some doubts” instead of “have a query/question”
- “Prepone the meeting” instead of “bring the meeting forward”. Prepone is the opposite of postpone. I actually really like that one. It’s incredibly logical and is easier to say.
- “to do the needful”. This one often throws me off. I think it’s like “please action this”, or “do whatever is required”.
- “Kindly revert”. Indians love prefixing sentences with kindly. Apparently “revert” means “respond” which is just weird. This causes confusion when they leave this as a code comment on a Pull Request/Code Review. You think they are telling you to roll back your changes, but they just want you to respond with a reply.
- “The same”. They use this instead of “it”, sometimes it sounds fine, other times it is really jarring. “Can you fix the bug and update the documentation for the same”.
Bonus one: Some people pronounce GitHub as “JitHub”. This probably is in the same category as the pronunciation of the Gif image format.
Stranger Coding Tings 