Kindly, do the needful

The English language is a difficult thing to master --reference my ghoti post. It seems for every grammar rule, there's an exception. That makes it really hard for people to learn; even more so for people who are learning it as a second language. As English has become the de facto standard for business communication, that means even more people are attempting to dissect this strange language.

Wired Magazine wrote an article about the way in which the English language is becoming a melting pot of other languages. Subtitled How English Is Evolving Into a Language We May Not Even Understand, it talks about how the language is evolving to suit the variety of people that now live in the US (or elsewhere) and speak, or attempt to speak English. It's a funny thing to think about when you realise that there's already a chasm between American English and UK English. At times even those are so different as to need a different web page or translator on the Internet.

I've worked with many people in my career that had varying degrees of mastery of the English language. I've gotten used to most of the accents from Asia and the Middle East, Europe, Mexico and even Canada :-p. It kinda struck me as funny when a new bunch of engineers moved into my building a while ago and started talking with strong British accents -- I had a hard time understanding them at first -- and they were speaking English! The Queen's English, but English nonetheless.

Sometimes when people learn English as a second language in a different country they learn the Queen's English. This leads to a much more "proper" sounding conversation. It also leads to phrases that while grammatically correct (I think), sound really funny to us Americans. One that's stuck with me recently is from my Indian co-workers -- "Kindly, do the needful." I know what they're asking for is help in resolving a problem -- "Can you take care of this please" or something equivalent -- but it just sounds so very foreign. Polite, but foreign.

Here's another insightful post I found related to this titled It's Inglish not English.