I’m a bit lost here. Should I use british conventions? US conventions? Is there indian conventions? Or maybe cultural points I should be aware of?
Google is confusing me more than it is helping me?
Thanks.
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Just do the needful when intimating with the recipient.
Kidding aside, you need to provide more context. Is the reason for using indian english for the recipient to understand you? In that case you don’t need to, they should understand you fine with US conventions. If your intent is to act like a local, which I don’t know why you have to, try googling sample emails and go from there.
Ok I’m British and I don’t get this. Yes there are specific turns of phrase or idioms that are different in British/American/Indian but really, is anyone who can actually read and write going to stumble on them?
Example of British English (since I’m guessing most readers here are American): “oh, we suggested Wednesday by accident, shall we meet on Thursday instead”. Is anyone really going to struggle with ‘translating’ to “oh, we suggested Wednesday on accident, shall we meet Thursday instead”
Indian English is closer to British English than American English, so if you specifically want it to be in Indian English but don’t know that yourself, I’d use British English.
But unless you have some special reason to believe that it’s important I don’t think it really matters. All of the forms are pretty understandable by everyone else. I can tell that someone using British English isn’t from here in the US, but it’s not really an understandability problem. Long term, my guess is that they’ll just blend together due to international interchange anyway.
Maybe if you’re a professional journalist in the US and the publication you work at has specified American English in their style guide, they might care about your ability to specifically do that, but I can’t believe that there are many positions that would. I’ve worked with people who use British English on the job in the US.
The only specifically-Indian English word that isn’t present in other forms of English that I can think of off the top of my head is “prepone” – that is, to move to an earlier time. It’s a riff off “postpone”, to move to a later time.
There’s some notable differences with numbering – e.g. lakh, crore, and where to put commas when writing large numbers.
Just write it. US or UK doesn’t matter.
If you have a choice of conventions, ie you know how to implement these three kinds of English, then my recommendation would be to adopt the style of the audience of the email.
If the guy is British, use British English. If he’s Indian, use Indian English. If he’s American, use American English. When able, it’s simply polite to use language best suited for understanding by your audience.
Largely it’s going to depend on who your audience is. If you’re writing for an American audience, use American conventions. British audience, British conventions.
Things to be aware of:
Date formats:
US: 5/6/2024
British/India/Australia: 6/5/2024Currency formats:
US: $1,234.56
Europe reverses that, so €1.234,56
https://www.ricksteves.com/travel-tips/trip-planning/european-numbers
India: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_systemThat’s above and beyond things like Metric conversion which the US largely does not use except in soda bottles. 1, 2 and 3 liter bottles.
Spelling:
In the US, it’s “color”, in the UK it’s “colour”. There are LOTS of examples like this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_spelling_differences
As an American, I flip-flop (unintentionally) between British and American spellings on a number of words.
Unless OP is writing for a published doc, I don’t really think it matters all that much.
I’ve worked with Brits - English, Scot, Irish (and many Indians), and while they may write or pronounce things slightly differently than I’m used to, we understand each other just fine. I even appreciate hearing their construction and phrasing.
Avoid confusion in dates by saying May 6, 2024. This is the Canadian way because we had dd/mm/yy but American influence of mm/dd/yy led to mass confusion. Everyone switched to May 6 to avoid it all.
But then there’s also the European standard of “6 May 2024”. ;)
Are you serious? It’s spelt out. The other one you can confuse day and month.
The order is still different.
Not the point I was making.
There’s also ISO 8601, which does YYYY-MM-DD, though that doesn’t permit for writing out the date as a name or not specifying the year (the latter of which…might be a plus, I suppose). That’s internationally unambiguous. Anything of the format NNNN-NN-NN is YYYY-MM-DD everywhere.
I also like it because unlike either DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY, the numeric and lexicographic sort order is the same.
Oh we’ve canadianized this too. We have yy-mm-dd. The two digit year makes it really fun. Pretty sure I’ve seen yy/mm/dd too. And we have yy-mm-dd where the mm is a two letter abbreviation with MA and I have to look it up each time if it’s March or May. We also have yy-mmm-dd with the more common letter abbreviations. Those are all government abominations of ISO.
US: $1,234.56
Europe reverses that, so €1.234,56
Some of Europe does – but the UK doesn’t, and Ireland doesn’t.
Also, looks like India uses a period as the decimal separator, the way the US does.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:DecimalSeparator.svg
On the same note, a number of countries put the currency symbol at the end of a currency amount (postfix) rather than the beginning (prefix).
It looks like all of the UK, India, and the US use a prefix currency symbol (e.g. $100, £100, ₹100).
India starts getting odd with large amounts though which is why I linked to the Wiki, I can’t wrap my brain around how it works.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_numbering_system
“The terms lakh or 1,00,000 (one hundred thousand, written as 100,000 outside the Indian subcontinent) and crore or 1,00,00,000[1] (ten million, written as 10,000,000 outside the subcontinent) are the most commonly used terms in Indian English to express large numbers in the system.”
Soo…
"lakh: 150,000 rupees in India is referred to as “1.5 lakh rupees”, which is written as 1,50,000 rupees;
crore: 30,000,000 (thirty million) rupees is referred to as “3 crore rupees”, which is written as 3,00,00,000 rupees with commas at the thousand, lakh, and crore places."
I guess if you grew up with it, it makes perfect sense.
Definitely start with “Good Sir”, that’s what I learned from years of reading voLTE requests on xda
When I think of all the shitty emails I’ve received from all over the food chain I’d say it doesn’t matter. Getting your point across is much more important than imitating a specific culture.
And seriously, badly imitating some conventions is much much worse and insulting than using a phrase that might not be familiar to your audience.
