GIESSEN, Germany — English as spoken in South Asia is evolving, but there is no sign it is turning into a separate dialect that English speakers from other continents might not understand, according to Joybrato Mukherjee, a top German linguistics scholar.

The University of Giessen professor uses computer analysis, based on one-million-word samples of Indian and five other South Asian varieties of English, to discover their distinctive words as well as slight regional differences in grammar.

English spread around the globe with the British Empire. Linguists say there is no authoritative standard English. All the spinoffs exist side by side and are “right” for the people who speak them. English in India functions a little differently from English in England. Take the word, “prepone,” the opposite of postpone, which most other English speakers have never heard of.

“In British English you would have to say 'bring forward in time’,” explained Mukherjee, who is of Indian origin.

“It shows Indian English speakers approach this very analytically. They use the prefix ‘pre’ and combine it with ‘pone.’ Actually, the question should be why there isn't any word 'prepone' in British English. It would be much easier,” he said. “Native languages are much more historically conditioned, whereas it's generally a tendency among post-colonial varieties that speakers handle their second language much more rationally.

“There are, for example, in Indian English lots and lots of words that end in -ee, like rewardee – the one who gets a reward – which is uncommon in British English, but very common in Indian English.

You say, the -ee ending is there, the word is there, I'll combine the two. It's completely rational.”

Mukherjee, who was born and educated in Germany, had early exposure to India, visiting Kolkata as a child to see cousins. At 36, he is now the president, or chief executive, of his university.

In the academic linguistics community, he belongs to the group that regards Indian English as being in a “steady state.”

“That does not mean it is fossilized,” he said. “Steady state is a term from chemistry, which means things are coming in, others are going out, but the balance remains the same,” he explained. Indian English has acquired its own peculiarities, but its “common core”with other Englishes is solid.

“The speakers want to remain comprehensible to other speakers of English,” he said.

Mukherjee described Indian English as “the biggest second-language variety of English worldwide.”

“According to most intelligent guesses, there about 50 million truly competent speakers, who have attended English-medium schools, who speak Standard Indian English,” he said.

Indians have been fascinated in recent years at how Hindi is absorbing English words and phrases, creating a “contact language” dubbed Hinglish, or what a linguist would call a pidgin or a creole.