I've been keeping a file of samples of unusually poor English I encounter in technical programming forums etc. It's almost entirely from people with Indian names. Over decades of experience I've come to notice patterns in how certain native languages inform specific common errors (for a trivial example, native German speakers typo "und" for "and" all the time, even if they have many years of experience with English and are otherwise fluent).

But many of the samples I've seen from Indians (I don't know what their native languages are exactly, and fully admit I wouldn't be able to tell them apart) in the last few years are quite frankly on a whole other level. They're barely intelligible at all. I'm not talking about the use of dialectic idioms like "do the needful" or using "doubt" where UK or US English speakers would use "question". All of that is fine, and frankly not difficult to get used to.

I'm talking about more or less complete word salad, where the only meaning I can extract at all is that something is believed to have gone wrong and the OP is desperate for help. It comes across that they would like to ask a question, but have no concept of QUASM (see e.g. https://www.espressoenglish.net/an-easy-way-to-form-almost-a...) whatsoever.

I have also seen countless cases where someone posted obvious AI output in English, while having established history in the same community of demonstrating barely any understanding of the language; been told that this is unacceptable; and then appeared entirely unable to understand how anyone else could tell that this was happening. But I struggle to recall any instance where the username suggested any culture other than an Indian one (and in those cases it was an Arabic name).

To be clear, I am not saying that this is anything about the people or the culture. It's simple availability bias. Although China has a comparable population, there's a pretty high bar to entry for any Chinese nationals who want to participate in English-speaking technical forums, for hopefully obvious reasons. But thanks to the status of an English dialect as an official language, H1B programs etc., and now the ability to "polish" (heavy irony) one's writing with an LLM, and of course the raw numbers, the demographics have shifted dramatically in the last several years.

My observations largely match your own, and also applies more generally to non-technical interactions online. I help manage a group that runs a local LAN, and have run into both the general language issues, and people making long, incomprehensible requests that have major LLM smells.

I don't think it's just availability bias however, I think it's mostly a case of divergent linguistic evolution. In terms of the amount of people who speak English at an A level, India has the largest English speaking population in the world. With that, and a host of other native languages, came a rapid divergence from British English as various speech patterns, idioms, etc, are subsumed, merged, selectively rejected, and so on.

The main reason you don't see divergence to the same extent in other former colonies, even older colonies like Canada and the US, is that the vast majority of the colonists spoke English as a primary language.