'For the staff of the Delhi Metro this means brushing up on their English language skills and being trained to replace their local, Indian accents with clipped, British ones.
None of the students in the class are native speakers of English and the emphasis is on making sure they speak the language with the right pronunciation.
Continue reading the main story
“Start Quote
My English was never very good. But now I am much more fluent and a lot more confident”
End Quote Kailash Chowdhury Delhi Metro worker
Ms Gupta is from the Delhi-based British Academy for English Language and has been doing this for 17 years - teaching English language to those not familiar with it.
"The trainees who are here come from states like Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab and have a strong regional accent," Ms Gupta explains.
"So we first have to reduce their accent and then after neutralising it, we have to give them British accents, since that's the correct way to speak English," she says.'
Quite right to and a matter of pride to those being tutored but if a company tried to run a scheme like this in the UK, how long before they were called racist by the BBC? But the bigger point is that Indians like the British and want closer links but the last Labour government and their propaganda arm the BBC were obsessed with relations with India's old enemy Pakistan.
2 comments:
The Indians who do speak english seem to speak it better than most British.
Yes, for the BBC, the problem with Indians is that most of them are not muslims.
My father was born in Uttar Pradesh (actually in Faisabad) and speaks almost impeccable English. I thought you'd really like to know that ;-)
Post a Comment