I often see questions on Stack Exchange sites which I presume are written by non-native English speakers who use the word "doubt" in place of the word "question". Is this a case of misunderstanding the correct meaning or are people being taught that this is correct usage?
asked Sep 2, 2010 at 21:16
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5Interesting. Can you provide a link or two, so we can at least guess what those people's native language is?– RegDwigнtCommented Sep 2, 2010 at 21:19
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7google.com/search?q=%22doubt+about%22+site%3Astackoverflow.com @RegDwight– mmyersCommented Sep 2, 2010 at 21:22
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6After browsing through the first five pages, the country that comes up most often is India. I'm sure our Indian contributors will shed some light on this.– RegDwigнtCommented Sep 2, 2010 at 21:41
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6Very good question. I have observed this for many years on international tech mailing lists. It seems to come mostly from the Indian subcontinent. So it may be a specific linguistic issue relative to the languages used there, or it could be a cultural issue, that you would rather talk about your own feelings instead of addressing someone else.– Peter EisentrautCommented Sep 4, 2010 at 11:09
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8Here in India, in most languages we speak (e.g. Hindi, Marathi), this is the valid and correct way it is expressed. People just translate it as it is in English! The para from the 'Vishy's Indian English Dictionary' in the answer by @cindi is very well true.– GopiCommented Aug 29, 2011 at 4:40
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7 Answers
This is Indian English. See Vishy's Indian English Dictionary.
July 12, 2006
Vishy's Indian English Dictionary: doubtdoubt. /DOWT/. A question asking for clarification. In standard English and American, the noun doubt is uncountable and refers to a lack of complete trust in something. Doubt may be expressed as simply as doubting someone's abilities or as profoundly as someone doubting their own religious faith. Not so in India. In India, doubt can be used as a countable noun. When a school teacher goes over an intricate concept in class, she invariably leaves some students with doubts in their mind about their understanding of the material just covered. Students ask her questions to get a better understanding of the concept and each such question is called a doubt. It is entirely normal to hear a statement like "I have just one doubt, miss" or "If you have any doubts before the exam tomorrow, come see me in the staff room". The doubts in the aforementioned sentences are not as much rooted in a lack of faith as in a lack of understanding. Attentive readers would have encountered the Indian English sense of doubt a fair bit on online message boards in threads started by Indians. Titles such as "Visual Basic .NET/Oracle doubt" are not uncommon for threads on programming-related message boards. It is my understanding that this sense is mostly prevalent in southern India, but I could be wrong on this count.
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this sense is mostly prevalent in southern India<-- I am from that country and this is prevalent nearly all over India.Doubtisn't the only word which sounds unusual to most people outside India -preponeis also used widely and accepted as an antonym topostpone. Nothing wrong in it. It does make sense even though it might not be in Oxford of Webster dictionary Commented Aug 29, 2011 at 6:12 -
18@Manish Sinha: "Nothing wrong [with] it" only when you're speaking to Indians, since this is not, e.g., valid American or British English. Commented Oct 17, 2011 at 19:42
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11This used to baffle me when I saw it on forums, until an Indian friend explained to me that the origin was "I have a doubt about my understanding". In any case, we've dealt with British English vs American English for so long, it really shouldn't be a surprise that "Indian English" is starting to go off in its own direction, too.– JayCommented Dec 8, 2011 at 15:11
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14@Chris Jester-Young: I didn't mean to invoke prescriptivism by saying "valid". But note this fails the descriptivist test (i.e. empirical usage), too, as speakers of neither British nor American English ever (to the best of my knowledge) say "doubt" instead of "question". As the accepted answer says, "This is Indian English". Commented Feb 22, 2012 at 22:08
A native English speaker does not recognize "doubt" as a synonym for "question". The examples given (like "Doubt about TinyMCE content css"), no matter how prevalent, are awkward. Even if it can be justified by picking a fitting definition entry, it's not something we would ever say. We understand it, but we also understand when a French person says "Let me explain you something".
Saying "question" instead of "doubt" is a better choice.
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23Do you consider Indians who speak English from birth "non native speakers"? This is clearly a dialect, and valid in "Indian-English". There are words in "American-English" that "British-English" would consider quaint or even wrong - like "pavement"/"sidewalk". I think your statement is unnecessarily categorical.– FlorisCommented Nov 14, 2015 at 18:15
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8@Floris Are there Indians (in India) who are native speakers of English? True, they may start learning at the age of 3-4, but does that make them native speakers?– insanityCommented Nov 23, 2015 at 13:07
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7@Floris It could be either French or English, or both; since the child would learn from native speakers of the language. But here's the difference: India only uses English as a common mode of communication, to interact with people who do not understand their native language. This, only in urban and semi-urban regions. Even there, Indians learn to speak English from their teachers, parents and peers, whose mother tongue is most likely one of the Indian languages, and highly influences English. So India cannot be named an English speaking country, unlike in your case.– insanityCommented Nov 23, 2015 at 14:14
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7Really bad answer, and Eurocentric. "No matter how prevalent, are awkward." -- only for an American or British speaker's ear. Far less awkward, I would add, then many peculiarities of American/British English that are considered standard. Commented Jun 23, 2020 at 14:45
In most cases when this happens the person is really a non-native English speaker as you said.
In some languages that grew from Latin the word that is used for doubt can also be used for question. Dúvida is the Portuguese for doubt, but it can also be used as question. For example, when kids at school say to the teacher Eu tenho uma dúvida (which word-by-word would translate as "I have a doubt"), they mean that they want to ask a question to the teacher about what has been taught. And if I go to a store in Brazil and say Eu tenho uma dúvida sobre esse produto ("I have a doubt about this product" in word-by-word translation), what I mean is that I want to make a question about the product.
The same happens with duda, which is the Spanish word for doubt. It may also be the case in other languages, but I'm not sure.
Therefore, when you give a presentation and native Portuguese speakers say "I have doubts about what you said", don't think that they don't quite believe in what you said. They may just have questions to ask you.
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15+1 Definitely a Spanish thing. Saying "tengo una duda" (I've got a doubt) when putting your hand up is a common way to make a question in class for kids. Makes me wonder about why English views interaction in terms of answering questions whereas Spanish (and Portuguese, etc.) sees it in terms of clarifying doubts.– CesarGonCommented Jan 15, 2011 at 18:27
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3@KevinVermeer: "tengo una pregunta" is perfectly valid too. But I find "tengo una duda" more idiomatic; this may of course change depending on country and region.– CesarGonCommented Oct 5, 2011 at 13:55
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3I am with CesarGon on this. As a native Spanish speaker I find "tengo una duda" more natural for a school context.– ymsCommented Oct 6, 2011 at 14:35
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3It's a Portuguese influence in this case, not Spanish (as such, if you see Portuguese and Spanish as separate languages rather than as dialects of the same language with an artificial political boundary between them). Not only was Portugal influential in India before the English got there, there are Portuguese-based creoles still spoken in areas like Goa.– byeCommented Jun 29, 2014 at 1:53
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4Italian speakers also say 'I have a doubt', based on a word for word translation Italian. Commented Sep 3, 2016 at 6:20
I'm not a language expert, but I've been dealing with a lot of those doubts…
By opening with "I have a doubt", you don't simply state "I have a question; …" followed by question's content, but instead you claim that "I understand all this, but …" before bringing to discussion a particularly unclear aspect of the topic. The construct as such is therefore not good or bad, nor is it in any way rooted in Latin as suggested above (my native language is of Latin origin and we don't/can't abuse the "doubt" either in original or in translations, while the Indians do it without having the Latin heritage). It is all about the correct usage in a given context.
The expectation when using this construct is that what follows the "I have a doubt", either the question itself or the whole conversation about it, should show that indeed you have gone to the process of analysing the problem at hand on your own, and you are stuck in a detail for which you need clarification. However, you will find that many of those asking have no idea about the big picture either and haven't tried to solve the problem on their own, and this is why you tend to answer them "No dude, you don't have a doubt, you simply have no clue about this subject". It is in such context that the use of "doubt" stands out and annoys in the conversation.
Now whether this is a vocabulary issue (unlikely) or it can be explained in the Indian context by a tendency to 'fake' knowledge by using "doubt" to make the question asked appear as a minor clarification request, that I leave to others to sort out.
Looking at some of the questions listed in mmyers's suggested search on Google, I'd suggest that "doubt" is being as a synonym for "uncertainty", which is valid.
For example:
answered Sep 2, 2010 at 21:47
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2When I read those questions titles, I interpret them as I have a doubt about TinyMCE content CSS, for example. Commented Sep 3, 2010 at 0:07
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7I think the point of the question is not that this usage is technically invalid, but that it is very uncommon among native speakers but is somehow consistently used by many nonnative speakers. Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 10:27
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2@Peter: my answer is stating the exact opposite, namely, that this is perfectly valid, and that as a native speaker, I could see myself writing this. Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 14:12
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4Yes, but the question is about "doubt" as a synonym for "question", which is not quite the same. Commented Sep 30, 2010 at 16:43
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7Even if one accepts doubt as a synonym for uncertainty, the usage is still incorrect. A native speaker of English doesn't say they have uncertainty/doubt about a subject, but rather that they have uncertainty/doubt about their understanding of the subject. (In contrast, note how one does say they have a question about a subject). Commented Oct 17, 2011 at 19:39
I often see Japanese people using "doubt" instead of "suspicion", and wouldn't be too surprised if they used it when they meant "question". My suspicion is that the Japanese use the same word for both "doubt" and "suspicion", and therefore don't know when they ought to use "suspicion" in English.
answered Apr 10, 2012 at 0:22
I'm sure I remember reading something about doubt being used this way in parts of northern England in times past. My memory, however, is vague.
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