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I don't know much about the languages spoken in India, so I'm going to assume the speaker is speaking Hindi natively.

I've noticed that whenever a question is asked in an English forum, and it contains "we", the user is usually from India.

Example:

How can we configure a webserver to serve PHP content?

In this case, it's a person asking the question, but the question is made in the plural form. For Western speakers, the question is most likely to be asked in the singular form.

Does this way of asking questions in the plural form come from the way questions are asked in Hindi? Or is it the default form used by "Indian English"?

Heartspring
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    These may help: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/165823/the-english-usage-of-the-subject-pronoun-we and here an Australian speaks: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/7855/correct-spelling-of-program The practice is not restricted to Indian English. – Greybeard Jun 07 '22 at 11:51
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    If he's setting up a web server, he's probably part of a team. Thus, we. – Brandin Jun 07 '22 at 13:30
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    As already observed in the preceding comments, this way of using we seems quite unremarkable and common among all English speakers. Is there any evidence for the assumption that it is more common among English speakers from India? – jsw29 Jun 07 '22 at 17:34
  • Related: How to use properly such generic person pronouns as one, people, you, we, and they. – Edwin Ashworth Jun 07 '22 at 18:33
  • Who knows how it got started. But it has surely continued because it is common in the Indian style of speaking English. – aparente001 Jun 08 '22 at 05:13
  • I suspect it's related to the "royal we". Or possibly the way medical professionals use "we" when they mean "you" -- "How are we feeling today?" – Barmar Jun 08 '22 at 20:11
  • Anyway, questions about why people talk a certain way are nearly impossible to answer. Things like this just come about as a natural result of language evolution. – Barmar Jun 08 '22 at 20:14
  • Although if the idiom is restricted to a particular group like Indians, a common cause is translation of a way of speaking in the local language to English. So if Hindi conflates "How does one" and "How do we", the latter may become the local phrase in English. – Barmar Jun 08 '22 at 20:16
  • It sounds perfectly normal to me (American English) especially in an educational setting. Teachers would ask the class questions like, "How do we bisect a line using a compass? Here are some 19th c. examples; it's been a pedagogical collocation for a long time. https://www.google.com/search?q=%22How+do+we%22&newwindow=1&sca_esv=560532532&rlz=1CATMUU_enUS1067&tbm=bks&sxsrf=AB5stBh8Gcswsi7DJvMo0-Uh4ZbYiOJsxQ:1693168391817&source=lnt&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:1800,cd_max:1899&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiA3afk1_2AAxVikokEHaJPBBwQpwV6BAgVEBY&biw=1319&bih=668&dpr=1 – TimR Aug 27 '23 at 20:31
  • To add to the list of 'relateds', here's another: Why do programmers use 'we' so often? – Heartspring Nov 04 '23 at 16:03

1 Answers1

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In the context that you outline, it seems quite natural for a speaker to use the we pronoun, because, as @Brandin notes, such jobs are normally done in teams. And anyway, it's part of an online forum, so the person's likely intent is to say "How does one configure a webserver to serve PHP content?" (similar to how on in French stands for both 'one' and 'we').

There's another explanation, though, and that does involve the royal we. As Wikipedia notes,

In Hindustani and other Indo-Aryan languages, the majestic plural is a common way for elder speakers to refer to themselves, and also for persons of higher social rank to refer to themselves. In certain communities, the first-person singular (Hindi: मैं, romanized: main, lit. 'I') may be dispensed with altogether for self-reference and the plural nosism [is] used uniformly.

I can confirm this- as a speaker of Hindi, this happens often and is not at all uncommon. Here's an example:

When I add two to two, I get four.

This even sounds a bit off in English! No, what we'd use is:

When we add two to two, we get four.

When one adds two to two, one gets four.

(Okay, that last one's also kinda weird) But the same is true in Hindi: a Hindi speaker would say 'Jab hum do ko do se milate hain, hume char milta he.' This is extended to nearly any situation in which the solution or outcome is applicable to everyone. Presumably, the answer to the original question (how you set up the webserver) is a solution that anyone can go and use.

Most of the time, though, it's just a phenomenon people naturally carry over from their native languages- in this case, Hindi (?) speakers doing in English what's natural for them to do in Hindi.

To answer the more general part of your question:

Does this way of asking questions in the plural form come from the way questions are asked in Hindi?

Yes.

Is it the default form used by "Indian English"?

Not necessarily, no. It depends on the experience, exposure and background of the speaker- not all Indian languages use the royal-we, and speakers of languages like (say) Tamil are less likely to do this.

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