grammatical form
Where you are?
also: What I said?, How often she goes?, What I must do?
The South African Indian English wh-question pattern: the question word moves to the front, but the subject and auxiliary do not swap places and no dummy 'do' is inserted, with tense staying on the main verb. This uninverted wh-question is the characteristic marker. The same absence of inversion in yes/no questions is NOT distinctive: the cited study notes that pattern is shared with informal English and other non-standard South African varieties.
Where it comes from
No one person coined this.
It comes from Indian-descended English speakers of KwaZulu-Natal. The record credits the speech community and the earliest citation that proves it, because South African Indian English was made by a community over time and not in a moment anyone wrote down.
1992 is the earliest scholarly documentation of the PATTERN with a page reference (Mesthrie, English in Language Shift, p. 47, verified via Wiebesiek, Rudwick and Zeller). The exact string used as this entry's headword is sourced to Wiebesiek's 2007 corpus, p. 110, not to Mesthrie 1992, which supplies a different example of the same pattern. Spoken use predates all of it by generations, and grammatical patterns have no first use in any case. Two things this entry will not claim. First, that the variety invented the pattern: Vernacular Indian English in India also lacks subject-auxiliary inversion and do-support, which suggests inheritance, though Mesthrie does not rule out convergent development. Second, that this is a neutral curiosity. It is a stigmatised feature; the 2010 UKZN study found profoundly ambivalent attitudes among young South African Indians toward their own variety, and its own authors flag that the race-based label 'South African Indian English' is itself problematic in post-apartheid South Africa and used only because it remains the most common one.
In use
Recorded means somebody said it and it was written down. Constructed means it was written here to show the shape of the word, and is an illustration rather than evidence.
- recorded
“What I said?”
What did I say?
Recorded in Wiebesiek's 2007 corpus, p. 110
- recorded
“How often she goes to her mother's place?”
How often does she go to her mother's place?
Recorded by Mesthrie 2004, p. 979
- recorded
“What I must do?”
What must I do?
Recorded by Mesthrie 1992, p. 47
The evidence
Community voices first, then the sources closest to the community. Press and dictionary citations are evidence about a word’s spread, not its origin.
- scholarshipcommunity voice
Rajend Mesthrie, English in Language Shift: The History, Structure and Sociolinguistics of South African Indian English (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 47. Verified at second hand via Zeller's citation, not from the book itself. Mesthrie was born in KwaZulu-Natal and writes on his own variety
- scholarship
“SAIE neither has subject-auxiliary inversion nor do-support in content or polar questions.”
Something wrong here? Correct it. Corrections from speakers of a variety take precedence over anything recorded here.