Sure, but a lot of times it's not really Indian English, it's English vocab mixed and matched with grammar rules from other Indian languages like Hindi or Urdu or Bengali. I've been on conference calls where Indians from different regions were speaking mutually unintelligible versions of English and had to act as a translator from english to english.
You may personally like one or another better, you may find some particular varieties easier or harder to understand, but that doesn’t make those people any more or less ‘actual’ English speakers than you are. They are ‘actually’ speaking English, just like you.
If you wanted to phrase this in a less fraught way, you might say “Yea but you can almost always tell it’s an Indian because they tend to write characteristically distinct from <your nationality> English speakers” -
and I would agree with you, sentence structure and idioms do usually make it pretty easy to recognize.
But many of the samples I've seen from Indians (I don't know what their native languages are exactly, and fully admit I wouldn't be able to tell them apart) in the last few years are quite frankly on a whole other level. They're barely intelligible at all. I'm not talking about the use of dialectic idioms like "do the needful" or using "doubt" where UK or US English speakers would use "question". All of that is fine, and frankly not difficult to get used to.
I'm talking about more or less complete word salad, where the only meaning I can extract at all is that something is believed to have gone wrong and the OP is desperate for help. It comes across that they would like to ask a question, but have no concept of QUASM (see e.g. https://www.espressoenglish.net/an-easy-way-to-form-almost-a...) whatsoever.
I have also seen countless cases where someone posted obvious AI output in English, while having established history in the same community of demonstrating barely any understanding of the language; been told that this is unacceptable; and then appeared entirely unable to understand how anyone else could tell that this was happening. But I struggle to recall any instance where the username suggested any culture other than an Indian one (and in those cases it was an Arabic name).
To be clear, I am not saying that this is anything about the people or the culture. It's simple availability bias. Although China has a comparable population, there's a pretty high bar to entry for any Chinese nationals who want to participate in English-speaking technical forums, for hopefully obvious reasons. But thanks to the status of an English dialect as an official language, H1B programs etc., and now the ability to "polish" (heavy irony) one's writing with an LLM, and of course the raw numbers, the demographics have shifted dramatically in the last several years.
I don't think it's just availability bias however, I think it's mostly a case of divergent linguistic evolution. In terms of the amount of people who speak English at an A level, India has the largest English speaking population in the world. With that, and a host of other native languages, came a rapid divergence from British English as various speech patterns, idioms, etc, are subsumed, merged, selectively rejected, and so on.
The main reason you don't see divergence to the same extent in other former colonies, even older colonies like Canada and the US, is that the vast majority of the colonists spoke English as a primary language.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/apr/10/amazon...