On Correctness and Indian English

I was thinking deeply on linguistic matters, and it struck me that it is not possible to single out one particular variety of English and call it standard. Therefore it is not possible to make normative assessments about one variety of English (provided it be mature) by comparing it to another. American English, for instance, has an entirely different set of vowels from British English, and even certain syntactic elements. But linguists have long since desisted from trying to curtail this development, and have settled for giving American English its own standards.

Besides, British English cannot with a clear conscience have any pretensions to being standard and invariant. The Great English vowel shift will forever haunt it. If the Britons had resisted the Norman invasion, if the Britons had shown some sort of tendency to resisting language change, as the French did, however futilely, then their claims to being the only speakers of "correct" English might have had more ground. Besides, native speakers of American and British English tend to make far more flagrant grammatical mistakes than educated speakers who nevertheless speak English as a second language; and they get away with it, because linguists have a tendency to forgive the mistakes of the native speaker, and even do him the honor of changing the rules of grammar to accommodate them.

In my opinion, Indian English is now sufficiently mature to be considered a standard unto itself. Since grammar tends to change a lot more slowly than semantics and phonology, it is still safe to judge Indian English using universal standards. But the same cannot be said of pronunciation. There is a long list of words that even the most educated Indians tend to pronounce differently from Britons and Americans. Does this mean that an entire population has somehow learnt and is using an incorrect system of pronunciation? That would be a tenuous arraignment at best, and even unjust, in light of the historical inconstancy of those varieties of English that are regarded as standard.