Present-day Indian English as a semi-autonomous variety
Present-day Indian English is largely endonormatively stabilized, but some features of ongoing nativization can still be detected (especially the typical complaint tradition and the widespread linguistic schizophrenia, see above ). What is more, while historically the English language has been subject to a process of acculturation and localization in the Indian context (resulting in structural nativization), today many users of English in India view high competence in English not only as a key to upward social mobility within India, but also as a major vehicle to get access to international job markets (e.g. the United states). This international perspective in using English, which can also be found in various other Asian Englishes, has led Bolton (2008: 11) to hypothesize that the globalization of Asian industries and workforce might result in a 'reorientation of linguistic performance away from localized, international norms towards a "native-like" performance'. In fact, one could argue that the centrifugal forces that move Indian English further away from native Englishes, on the one hand, and centripetal forces that keep the norns of Indian English close to native Englishes for the sake of international intelligibility, on the other, are in a state of equilibrium, determining a steady state of progressive force of language change and conservative forces of (native) norm persistence
It is in this context of the present steady-state situation of Indian English that the concept of Indian English as a semi-autonomous variety seems to be very appropiate. The notion of semi-autonomous captures three aspects of Indian English which have been pointed out repeatedly in a multitude of studies and which have, thus, been referred to in the description of Indian English in the preceding section