It has been customary to deal with cross-cultural differences in language behavior either in terms of correlations between interference (i.e., the mapping of grammatical and phonological patterns from one system to the other) and independently determined cultural presuppositions or in terms of social norms. The aim of this chapter is to show how these phenomena interact at the level of discourse so that, in spite of surface similarities, some styles of English used by many South Asians are even more pervasively divergent from Western styles of English, and are systematically different not only in the social knowledge their speakers use as bases for conversational strategies, but also in the conventions and principles that guide how a given conversational intention will be signalled in speech.

The bulk of our data derives from recordings of natural conversations of Indian and Pakistani residents of Great Britain who know English well and use it regularly in the course of their daily affairs. We will refer to the style of speaking they employ in the examples we cite as Indian English and we will contrast it with Western English, i.e., the conversational style or styles used by educated residents of England and the United States.

We begin with some illustrative examples. First of all, Indian English sounds odd to Western ears because it has systematically different conventions at the sentence level governing lexicalization, syntax, and, as we have shown in Gumperz (1982), prosody. The following single Indian English sentences are extracted from natural conversational data.