Shit please

Non-Kannadigas in Bangalore who get a chance to interact with Kannadigas are struck by one of our eccetricities: adding an -u to every English word we adapt into our Kannada conversations. Thus, car becomes car-u, contradiction becomes contradiction-u, and so on... Many of our linguists say the moment we add an -u, the word becomes Kannada.

In Mumbai I noticed some eccentricities of the Hindi speakers. The sardar at an adjoining bed from my mother's was asking the nurse for a "shit". It turned out he needed a bed sheet (or bedspread, as the more proper English speakers would call it). A day after I recovered from his charming shortening of the vowel, I realised the habit was arbitrary, and that stretched vowels were as common. He was calling out to the Malayali nurse for "Caesars" to cut something.

At the cafeteria, the man serving customers said, "You want to wait for five minutes, uh?" It turned out he meant "You have to wait..." And the Marathi speakers leave out the last syllable in many English words. It's "an" for "and" and "as" for "ask".

Doctors visiting the hospital routinely said "cuff" for "cough", irrespective of where they came from.

And some people still think English is not an Indian language!