1 Standardizing variation in a multilingual context: insights into the past and present state of Indian English. Rita Calabrese Abstract Over the last decades, New Englishes have been described in great detail at different linguistic levels. However, in almost all descriptive approaches to New Englishes the synchronic perspective of such description/s predominantly persists with respect to insightful diachronic analyses of the emergence and evolution of new Englishes. The present paper investigates the process of standardization Indian English is undergoing by analyzing both written and spoken data across different genres over a period of hundred years. Motivation The study of Indian English (IndEng) as a particular ‘post-colonial’ variety among the plethora of New Englishes dates back to the early 1960s when the local features of IndEng contributing to «the Indianness of Indian English» 1 started to be described in great detail at different language levels. Nonetheless, the expression ‘Indian English’ is not one on which all scholars and academics uniformly agree for two reasons: 1. the term often implies the underlying connotation of ‘bad English, 2. there is a number of Indian English varieties which cannot be neatly described in terms of features, even though it is generally recognized the existence of a set of shared features that can be considered as ‘pan-Indian’ 2 . The difficulty in establishing a fixed set of ‘pan-Indian’ norms also emerges from recent studies of register variation in IndEng 3 that, given its heterogeneous nature, disprove the idea of IndEng as a single language variety. Typical Indianisms are however said to be easily recognizable in spoken Indian English 4 which consequently proves to be the area of language «where the major changes emerge and then stabilize through exposure to and imitation of firstly model speakers and secondly, model written texts with the consequent emergence of new language standards» 5 . Contact between speech and written language would lead to the emergence of new spoken norms and a new spoken standard which combines structural and lexical elements of two 1 B.B. Kachru, The Indianness of Indian English, «Word» 21: 391-410. 2 R.S. Gupta, English in post-colonial India: an appraisal. In Who’s Centric Now? The Present State of Post-Colonial Englishes, edited by B. Moore. Oxford, OUP, 2001, p. 159; P. Sailaja, Indian English, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009, p.viii. 3 C. Balasubramanian, Register Variation in Indian English, Amsterdam/Philadelphia: J.Benjamins Company, 2009. 4 Ibid., p.233. 5 A. Deumert, W. Vandenbussche, Research directions in the study of language standardization. In Germanic Standardizations. Past to Present, edited by A. Deumert, W. Vandenbussche. Amsterdam: Benjamin Publishing, 2003, p.456.