In Indian English, "itself" is widely used as an emphasis particle rather than a reflexive pronoun — "good itself" means "very good", "today itself" means "this very day" and "here itself" means "right here".
In Indian English, "itself" is widely used as an emphasis particle rather than a reflexive pronoun — "good itself" means "very good", "today itself" means "this very day" and "here itself" means "right here". The construction is a syntactic carry-over from Hindi (and to a lesser extent Tamil), where emphasis is normally added via a post-particle ("hi" / "tane"). Speakers of standard British or American English typically read these phrases as ungrammatical or redundant, but in South Asian English they are completely natural and convey precise emphasis. The pattern is most visible in time-and-place expressions: "now itself", "yesterday itself", "this office itself".
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Regional slang from around the English-speaking world — British, Australian, Irish, Caribbean, Nigerian, Filipino, AAVE, and the hyphenated-English dialects that make the internet sound local.
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A nonstandard or dialectal reflexive pronoun used in place of 'themselves,' common in AAVE (African American Vernacular English) and various regional dialects across the US and UK. It follows a consistent internal logic — paralleling 'myself,' 'yourself,' 'himself,' and 'herself' by using the subject pronoun form rather than the possessive. In AAVE in particular, it is a fully functional grammatical feature rather than an error, and appears in both spoken and written vernacular expression.
A tag particle of emphasis from Tamil and Telugu English speakers — "what-only happened?" means "what on earth happened?". A direct calque from Dravidian-language grammar where the emphasis particle "thaan" (Tamil) or "ē" (Telugu) attaches to a question word for added force. Comes across as quirky to North Indian and outside-South-Asian English speakers, but it is a fully grammatical and very expressive feature of South Indian English. Often appears in mild exasperation or wonder — "where-only did you go?", "why-only is this happening?" — and is one of the most recognisable markers of South Indian English speech online.
(now, chiefly, regional, especially, southern US, Caribbean, Singlish) (One's) self; used with a preceding possessive adjective to form a pronominal phrase.
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