Ha it was a bit difficult only…

This chapter discusses the use of the Hindi-derived discourse particle ha in Indian English on the basis of analyzing the private conversations section of the Indian component of the International Corpus of English . Comparing its communicative functions between Hindi and English revealed some similarities as well as differences, but all functions from Hindi are represented in Indian English (IndE). A sociolinguistic analysis of the discourse particle revealed that it is mainly used by male speakers in all but one age group and particularly frequently by older speakers. In terms of L1 backgrounds of the speakers, the particle is used largely proportionally to the number of speakers in the corpus, apart from Tamil speakers, whose use of ha is underrepresented, and Telugu speakers, who use it more often than expected. All these observations indicate that ha might be considered to be an indigenized – but not necessarily prestigious – discourse particle in IndE.