Is Your Child’s English Mixing in Hindi Grammar? What’s Normal and How to Help

“He is knowing the answer.” “I go to market yesterday.” “Myself Riya.” If your child says things like this, you’re hearing some of the most common grammar mistakes Indian kids make. Almost none of them are careless. Most are Hindi (or Tamil, or Marathi) patterns carried into English, and a few are features of the English spoken all around them in India. Below: which of them are ordinary, which deserve a closer look, and where they fit in our parent’s guide to teaching English grammar.

The short answer

Most of these mistakes are nothing to worry about. A child who says “is knowing” or drops “the” is doing something sensible: using the grammar they already own to build sentences in a newer language. Many of these patterns last well into primary school, especially when English is mainly a school language. It’s worth a closer look when a child struggles to be understood in every language they speak. The same goes for errors that stay frozen for years despite plenty of English around them. Start small: notice which two or three patterns come up most, and work on those gently.

Why do Indian kids make these grammar mistakes?

Hindi has no word for “the”, so children have nothing to borrow for it and often leave it out. Hindi’s word for “a” is ek, which also means ‘one’, and Hindi doesn’t need it in every sentence the way English needs “a”. So “one” creeps in (“I saw one dog on the road”) and “the” goes missing (“I went to market”).

None of this is random. A study of Indian English speakers by Devyani Sharma (2005) found a steady logic. Speakers keep “the” where the listener might not know which thing is meant, and drop it where that’s obvious. Learners whose first language has no articles, such as Russian speakers, find “a” and “the” hard too, as a 2024 study of 660 learner essays found. Your child is applying a different grammar, and applying it very consistently.

Which mistakes are typical, and which are worth a closer look?

Is Indian English simply “wrong”?

No, and this matters for how you talk about it with your child. Indian English is a recognised variety with its own settled patterns, used by millions of fluent adults. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English (eWAVE) rates “-ing” on verbs like know as pervasive in Indian English. It rates questions without the word-order flip the same way. Research by Paula Rautionaho (2022) adds that Indian English uses forms like “is knowing” with its own meanings, so they aren’t simply mistakes.

So the honest framing for a child is “school English and home English sometimes say it differently, and your exams want the school way”. Many children already switch between two or three languages every day, so the idea of two ways to say something is familiar to them.

Five things that help at home

• Repeat it back, correctly, without a lesson. Child: “He is knowing my name.” You: “Oh, he knows your name? How?” Our narrate-your-day guide shows how to build more of this talk into your day.
• Pick one pattern a fortnight. Correcting everything at once just teaches a child to stop talking. If “is”, “am” and “are” are the muddle, our guide to when to use is, am and are has a Hindi shortcut that helps.
• Read aloud in English every day. Books give children “the”, “a” and a steady past tense thousands of times, without a lesson. Our six-week plan for teaching tenses to kids builds on exactly this.
• Play “school way, home way”. Say a sentence both ways and let your child pick which one the teacher wants. It turns correction into a game they can win.
• Save the fixing for writing time. When your child is telling a story, let it run.

What does school expect, and when?

Less than many parents fear. NCERT’s learning outcomes, which CBSE adopted for Classes I–VIII, spread these skills over years. By Class III, children are expected to tell simple past from simple present (3.E.LO9) and use full stops, question marks and capital letters (3.E.LO11). Words like “a”, “an” and “the”, called determiners, first appear by name in Class VI (6.E.LO12). Your child’s workbook may drill “a” and “an” from Class 1, and that practice helps. But since NCERT only names determiners in Class VI, a Class 2 child who still drops “the” when speaking isn’t behind.

When should you ask a professional?

For English grammar patterns alone, almost never; school and steady exposure sort most of them out. Start with your child’s class teacher, who hears your child next to classmates with similar home languages. See a speech-language therapist only if the difficulty shows up in every language your child speaks.

“When a child in my online class tells me ‘Ma’am, I am having a doubt’, I don’t hear a mistake first. I hear a child thinking in two languages at once. Once they know there’s a school way to say it, the fix is usually easy.” Monika Verma, Lead Trainer, Little Learns

Ask Mrs. Monika: quick answers

Every child develops at their own pace — see our learning-outcomes note. Nothing here is a medical assessment; treat it as a starting point for a conversation with your child’s teacher.