[alisonatwork]

This goes beyond a nitpick into reactionaryism, in my opinion.

I am a native English speaker who has lived and worked in many countries around the world. In some of those countries English was the primary language, in others it was formalized in the workplace as the business language, in others it was just a lingua franca used by immigrants and expats of many different backgrounds to communicate with one another. One of the best things about English is that it easily adapts to all these roles. It's a flexible language, and there are many different ways to express the same thing. I believe that's one of the reasons why it is so popular as a second language.

English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in Germany is different to the English as it is spoken in the professional sphere in the US or Canada or England or Australia, and that's fine. Ditto India, Singapore, Philippines, South Africa... Unlike Spanish, French, Chinese etc there is no central regulator that defines how the English language is supposed to be used. Grammar can change depending on where you are. English speakers all over the world essentially understand one another, despite using different structures and idioms.

While it is true that completely bastardized grammar can become more difficult to understand, and may result in the language being spoken getting classified more as a pidgin or creole, I don't think it's especially helpful to "nitpick" over this particular issue - a sentence structure that is easily understandable by anyone in the world who can speak English. If "do" gets dropped by English language speakers in the context of questions, what's the big deal? Especially in written language where we use a question mark anyway. Who cares?

[unfocussed_mike]

Right.

I really recommend "Oxford English: a guide to the language" by Ian Dear. It is/was published by Oxford University Press but if you look around on eBay, Abebooks, amazon secondhand etc., you can often find a very cheap "IBM Edition" -- they co-published it along with a dictionary of quotations (presumably they helped compile the latter).

It's a really fantastic volume that goes into such detail about Indian Standard English, for example, that it will make you love English even more.