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I apologize in advance if I am ignorantly and incorrectly assigning this to Indian English. When I was in medical school, I had a number of professors who were native to India.

Being a school predominantly made up of American English speakers we noticed that the Indian English speakers used the term "isn't it?" with a noticeable frequency. (I hesitated to put a ? at the end because it wasn't phrased as a question per se.)

In fact, for many of them it was practically a punctuation mark to every sentence. And, there did not seem to be any agreement of pluralization or tense. (e.g. "The students went to a party. Isn't it?")

Presumably, they use the phrase "isn't it?" in the same way that speaker of American English would use "you see" or "don't you agree?"

My question that has nagged me for years, why would this construct come to predominate in Indian English? It doesn't strike me as a particularly British English import. Is it a direct translation of a common phrasing in Hindi or one of the many languages of the sub-continent?

David M
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    Indian English has made considerable changes from British English in idiomatic syntax and phrase formation. Isn't it? has been frozen into an idiom in India, and it no longer varies the auxiliary verb or the subject of the tag question. In this respect it's the same as French n'est pas? or German nicht wahr?, which have the same meaning and also don't vary. – John Lawler Feb 14 '14 at 03:34
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    @JohnLawler That seems fairly consistent with what I experienced. Do you have any idea of the specific origin? It seems an odd phrasing choice. "Is it not" would seem more proper, especially for a language that is largely derived from BE! Although as I say that, I am hearing in my head the cockney "In'it". – David M Feb 14 '14 at 03:53
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    It's probly contracted from "isn't it true?" or some such. If a phrase has only one function, there's no information gain from echoing and rearranging complex phenomena like person, number, tense, or auxiliary. It's become a simple yes/no question particle (with several, though not many, syllables). – John Lawler Feb 14 '14 at 03:57
  • Well, there goes my romantic notion of it being some sort of direct construct that mirrors Hindi or something. :) Would you like to make this an answer and I will accept it? – David M Feb 14 '14 at 03:59
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    I would love to see a response from a Hindi (or other Indian language) speaker on this topic. –  Feb 14 '14 at 05:21
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    Isn’t it?

    Used in a sentence such as: ‘He went home, isn’t it?’ Instead of ‘He went home, didn’t he?’ Perhaps it can be attributed to a desire to simplify the language. link

     – Sandeep D Feb 14 '14 at 07:05
  • @SandeepDhamija Simplify in what sense? I find the premise believable, but I would like to know more on how you think it simplifies the language. – David M Feb 14 '14 at 08:54
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    @DavidM Just like the "ain't" is used in place of "Am not/are not/is not" and even in place of "has not/have not". While i was watching "No country for old men", I heard one of the actors saying "I ain't have no water". This is grammatically incorrect but people use it as they don't need to be accurate in general life. Nobody corrects them and they get used to it. – Sandeep D Feb 14 '14 at 09:19
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    @SandeepDhamija While I agree with you, I cannot stomach the use of Cormac McCarthy as a source of grammatical correctness! Reading his books is like running a cheese grater across your eyes! :P In all seriousness, the people who I heard using this construct were all VERY WELL EDUCATED. The people in No Country for Old Men are assuredly not. – David M Feb 14 '14 at 15:08
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    @DavidM My idea is the people you came across were well educated in the fields of engineering or medical sciences or chemistry or something that was not related to English language. You would never hear an English language professor using "isn't" inappropriately. I'm an engineering graduate from India and even I have heard people using "isn't it" in place of "doesn't it"(and they held doctorate degrees in engineering). For most people, who have not studied English grammar after high school, "isn't it" is a generalization of "didn't it", "didn't he/she", "don't they" and so on. – Sandeep D Feb 15 '14 at 06:53
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    @SandeepDhamija I guess my bias is that I get the notion in my head that English is the primary language for most Indians. But, in reality, it is the secondary language despite being the language of academic and cultural convenience. In AE and BE it would be highly unusual for someone to reach high levels of academic achievement in one field, yet retain a low level of proficiency when it comes to their primary language. In the context of a second language this makes much more sense! It's just a matter of re-calibrating my own brain. – David M Feb 17 '14 at 13:14
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    I think it's a British English idiom or idiosyncrasy, not unique to Indian British. I have noticed it and wondered about it in British movies or serials.

    Not yet mentioned, the phrase has an edge to it, as part of a defensive retort.

     – Bob Stein Feb 17 '14 at 18:31
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    @BobStein-VisiBone I said something similar to John Lawler above. You can certainly hear a cockney "in'it" being thrown around, but not with the same pervasiveness that is present in Indian English. – David M Feb 17 '14 at 18:33
  • Yes, @DavidM! So some kind of family tree with Victorian "is it not," cockney "in'it," and Indian "isn't it." Does only the cockney variant have the edge to it? – Bob Stein Feb 17 '14 at 18:40
  • @BobStein-VisiBone You're asking the wrong American . . . :) But, in my experience, the Indian variant is definitely not edgy. It's almost punctuation. – David M Feb 17 '14 at 18:42
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    Many Brits will say, "innit" as an ubiquitous tag question or statement. Translated in standard English it would be "isn't it". (I wrote this before reading any of the above comments). – Mari-Lou A Feb 18 '14 at 08:09
  • @Mari-Lou: I had actually read the first dozen or so comments, but didn't quite reach to BobStein-VisiBone's three above yours. I was about to post a comment myself, but just to be on the safe side I searched the page for "innit" and found your comment. I'm not really qualified to answer this question, but it shouldn't be left unanswered like this, so I think I'll start the ball rolling. (Extended pause while I make a cup of tea, have a fag, and mull it over... :) – FumbleFingers Feb 18 '14 at 13:08
  • This is also common in Kenyan English, and it has a direct analog in Swahili (sivyo?) -not sure which came first. I had always assumed it was originally British, since I had also heard it frequently from the (white) British people I knew. Kenya, of course, was once a British colony --however it also has a large and influential ethnically Indian population. (From neither Kenyans nor Brits, however, have I heard isn't it used as an ungrammatical idiom --in other words, it is either used correctly, or correctly varied to match the context). – Chris Sunami Feb 18 '15 at 03:06
  • English is still not the first language of Indian schools. 2) "Isn't it" is the question tag as "It is tough to understand, isn't it?", but in India, it is used (misused) even in convent schools, like: It is a good idea, isn't it? It is not a good idea, isn't it? You are wrong, isn't it? You are not wrong, isn't it? This indiscriminate use has confused, and it is still going on. There are people who use it correctly too. – Ram Pillai Mar 13 '20 at 02:34

4 Answers4

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As an English speaker growing up in an area with a high number of Hindi speakers & going to school with Hindi & Urdu speakers, I noticed a constant switch between using "hai na" and "innit", the transitional "hainit" they drop H in "ai na" and the transitional drop H in "ai n'it" and the formal "isn't it" depending mostly on audience & accent.

To be honest, with a colloquial English accent, most of these variations blur together when spoken. I personally think that it is this aural similarity combined with the similarity of meaning that has driven this use of language.

Neeku
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Duncan S
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Is it a direct translation of a common phrasing in Hindi or one of the many languages of the sub-continent?

You've hit the nail on the head. It's a direct translation of the phrase "hain na" which literally means "isn't it" or (confusingly) "right, no?" which can (even more confusingly) be simplified to just "right". Much like @Neeku already alluded to, it's very much like the British "innit", but somehow even more flexible than that.

Presumably, they use the phrase "isn't it?" in the same way that speaker of American English would use "you see" or "don't you agree?"

Right again! But while it can be used for both literally, it's mostly used more as "you see" and than "don't you agree?"

e.g. "The students went to a party. Isn't it?"

If I translate it back, the statement becomes: "The students went to a party, right?" Not really a question, more a statement.

Amin Shah Gilani
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As John Lawler comments above...

Indian English has made considerable changes from British English in idiomatic syntax and phrase formation. Isn't it? has been frozen into an idiom in India, and it no longer varies the auxiliary verb or the subject of the tag question.

I think OP is mistaken in thinking BrE innit as appended to statements is "Cockney". It's now quite widespread, particularly among younger and less educated speakers. But I'm pretty certain it originally arose within "second-generation Asians" (i.e. - people who were born in the UK of parents who came from Indian or Pakistan). Their parents were already using IE isn't it; they simply Anglicised it to innit.

Obviously those younger people who took the trouble to Anglicise a form like that (or adopt it early when they heard it) would disproportionately include those who were both "proud" of their parents and wished to integrate into mainstream British culture. That being a much-admired characteristic in multicultural Britain, young people from other non-Anglo-Saxon backgrounds (esp. Negroes and West Indians) were also quick to adopt it.

5-10 years ago I used to sometimes nag my son (now 25) when he started using innit (I thought it sounded "ignorant", particularly when used in contexts where I'd expect pluralised aren't they). Obviously my son took no notice of me, and now I've just got used to it because it's everywhere.

I know it looks as if I'm banging on about the BrE "import", rather than addressing OP's specific question (how did it arise in IE in the first place?). But I think the underlying reasons for the uptake have much in common. The full-blown "tag question" form, requiring verb number/tense agreement, can be tiresomely "finicky". Probably part of the reason why mainstream speech went from is it not [so]? to isn't it[?] in the first place is that people actively seek informal usages that trample over traditional grammar.

My own feeling is it's slightly "traditionalist" to think of IE isn't it and BrE innit as "tag questions" at all. They're actually more like appending yeah[?] to a statement (or the stereotypical BrE toff's appending of what or what-what a century or two ago). Semantically and grammatically, the "question" element is long gone.

FumbleFingers
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    Revered FF, is it not pertinent that Hindi always puts its "to be" verb hain at the end of sentences - often with the negation there as well? – d'alar'cop Feb 18 '14 at 15:17
  • @d'alar'cop: Well, yes. But presumably that's because Hindi supports the concept of "tag questions" just the same as English, French, and German (as do many if not most languages, I would guess). Plus of course the British Raj and subsequent history probably massively influence current Hindi, just as they do IE itself (something of a two-way process though, I assume). – FumbleFingers Feb 18 '14 at 17:22
  • I quite like this quote from the OED: “Many Welsh people … say and accept as correct, such expressions as … ‘Shall we go out, is it?’, or even: ‘Like you know innit see, me mother, see, do always like tell me to do the washing up, innit see?’ Such creative use of tag questions! (Also, their first citation for innit is from 1959, so I think you and your son may have been a bit late in catching on. I have certainly grown up hearing it tossed around—and doing so myself—with gay abandon all my life.) – Janus Bahs Jacquet Dec 29 '14 at 16:58
  • @Janus: I recal that sometime since posting this answer I skimmed an article pointing out that trailing "blah blah, init?" (which in the UK is undoubtedly more prevalent among younger Indian speakers) reflects a relatively common Hindi use involving hain as raised by d'alar'cop here. I'm familiar with the Welsh usage, but I don't think that one would have been very significant in terms of causing the more widespread usage today (which is also imho quite strongly associated with "street punks" from a range of backgrounds in the UK today). – FumbleFingers Dec 30 '14 at 15:48
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I think the phrase is not only predominant in Indian English, I always hear it in British English too, we Filipinos always use it, but mostly just the translation of it. I think, through American Colonization, we FIlipinos also adopted it in our language.

Us Filipinos' Tagalog has hindi ba, contracted to 'di ba, colloquially used as diba, sometimes with or without a question mark, sometimes the contraction's first syllable is accented, sometimes it is not. The phrase literally means is it not, (re)translated back into English as isn't it.

So it left me thinking that if Filipinos got it from Americans and Americans got it from Britons, then it is reasonable that it originated from India... like tea. :)

rayjaypab
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