Prompted by comments against a previous ELL question about an Indian English usage, I found myself reading an article in The Times of India with the title Kidnapped doctor couple returns home, which ends with…
The IMA Secretary profusely thanked different organisations for showing solidarity with doctor and his wife in their hour of crisis. [emphasis mine]
I've no idea what status that publication has, either with the general public in India or more specifically with those in the educated classes who speak "good, fluent, native or near-native speaker" English.
My reason for looking at the publication in the first place was to satisfy myself that IE does indeed use the semi-archaic form thrice where most mainstream Anglophone countries now use three times. Many features of IE are similar, in that they preserve usages which have long since been abandoned in their country of origin (normally, Britain).
The native Anglophones who influence[d] uptake of English in India are almost exclusively drawn from the middle/upper classes (who once did use forms like thrice, do the needful, etc.). But the missing article (…solidarity with the doctor…) would only ever have occurred in dialectal/uneducated speech in Britain, so it seems likely to me this usage arose independently in India.
I realise this question risks being Primarily Opinion-based, but I'm kinda hoping there will be at least some native speakers of IE here on ELL (brought up speaking English as a mother-tongue, not just fluent, well-educated in English). What I'd like to know is whether they would consider the usage cited above "correct/acceptable" in the (relatively formal?) context of such a publication.
Best Answer
Hindi doesn't use articles and it is widely spoken as both a first and second language in India. Other Indian languages in the same family might be the same but I can't say for sure. So it seems very natural to assume that this usage arose there as a common mistake in translation that became standard usage over time.
Having lived in India and trained Indians in skills other than English it's been my experience that people there are sometimes perplexed when corrected on these kinds of mistakes that have become so common in India that they are in effect standard. Another example, "One of my cousin called me yesterday."
One might argue that because these mistakes are so ubiquitous they really indicate that the language is changing and developing into its own dialect. This is a question for linguists that I'm not qualified to discuss any more than I have already. However, I would point out that there are almost no native speakers of English in India. With the possible exception of some highly educated enclaves in big cities, English is learned only as a second language, albeit from an early age.