Indian English at Standups: A Glossary for Daily Agile Meetings

If you join a daily standup with teammates in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, or Pune, you’ve probably caught yourself nodding along to a sentence you didn’t fully parse. “I’ll revert by EOD, just need to do the needful on the staging config.” It sounds confident and fluent—because it is. It’s just Indian English, a complete and legitimate variety of the language with its own vocabulary, idioms, and rhythm. And in the world of agile software, Indian English phrases in meetings show up constantly: in the fifteen-minute scrum, in the Slack thread that follows, and in every status update in between.

The good news is that following along is a learnable skill. Most of what trips up US engineers and PMs isn’t accent—it’s vocabulary. A handful of words mean something slightly different at work in India than they do in California, and once you know them, the fog clears. This glossary walks through the phrases you’ll actually hear in a standup, organized by the moment they tend to appear: status updates, blockers, estimates, politeness, numbers, and the little discourse fillers that glue sentences together. For each one you get the meaning plus a realistic line you might hear on the call.

If you work with an offshore team day to day, you may also want our deeper dives on working with offshore teams in India and the full complete guide to Indian English. This piece stays tightly focused on the agile/IT context.

Status & progress phrases

This is the heart of the standup—what did I do, what am I doing, what’s next—and it’s where Indian English at work is densest. The word that confuses Americans most is revert.

• Revert — to reply or get back to someone. It does not mean “undo a commit” here. “I’ll revert by EOD” = “I’ll get back to you by end of day.”
• Do the needful — do whatever is required; take care of it. A polite, slightly formal catch-all. “Can you do the needful on the deployment?” = “Please handle the deployment.”
• Prepone — the opposite of postpone; to move something earlier. “Can we prepone the call to 3 PM?” = “Can we move the call earlier, to 3 PM?”
• On priority — urgently, as a top priority. “I’ll fix the login bug on priority.”
• Basis — based on / according to. “Basis the latest logs, the issue is in the cache layer.”
• The same — it; that thing just mentioned (a formal anaphor from written English). “I’ve raised the PR, please review the same.”
• EOD / by today — end of day; often given as the implicit deadline.

For a fuller list of these office staples, see Do the needful, prepone, revert: 40 Indian English words at work.

A typical status update might sound like: “Yesterday I completed the API integration. Today I’ll be doing the needful on the test coverage and reverting to QA basis their feedback. The migration I’ll take up on priority.” Nothing exotic—just a different dialect of the same job.

Blockers & problems

When someone’s stuck, the vocabulary shifts again. The single most important word here is doubt.

• Doubt — a question, not skepticism. “I have a doubt about the auth flow” = “I have a question about the auth flow.” Nobody is doubting you.
• Facing issue / facing problem — encountering a problem. “I’m facing issue with the Docker build.”
• Getting error only — getting an error (the only is a filler for emphasis, not literal). “I’m getting timeout error only when I hit the prod endpoint.”
• Not coming — not working / not appearing. “The data is not coming in the dashboard” = “The data isn’t loading.”
• Hang / hanged / struck / stuck — frozen or blocked. “The build is getting struck at the lint step” = “The build is stuck at lint.” (“Hang” is used for a frozen app or pipeline.)
• Kindly check — please look into this. Formal and polite, not passive-aggressive.

So a blocker in standup might be: “I have one doubt—I’m facing issue with the staging deploy, it’s getting struck at the migration step and the logs are not coming. Kindly check from your side if the DB credentials are correct.” Translated: “Quick question—the staging deploy is stuck at the migration and I’m not seeing logs. Can you check whether the DB credentials are right?”

Quick reference: status & blockers

Phrase	Meaning	Heard in a standup as…
Revert	Reply / get back to	”I’ll revert by EOD with the numbers.”
Do the needful	Handle what’s required	”Please do the needful on the hotfix.”
Prepone	Move earlier	”Let’s prepone tomorrow’s sync to 9.”
On priority	Urgently	”Taking the prod bug on priority.”
Basis	Based on	”Basis the metrics, we should roll back.”
The same	It / that thing	”PR is up, please approve the same.”
Doubt	Question	”I have a doubt on the API contract.”
Facing issue	Hitting a problem	”Facing issue with the CI pipeline.”
Getting error only	Getting an error	”Getting 500 error only on POST.”
Not coming	Not working / not loading	”The chart is not coming on mobile.”
Struck / stuck	Blocked	”Build is struck at the test stage.”
Kindly check	Please look into it	”Kindly check the env variables.”

Estimates & commitments

Standups live and die on estimates, and Indian English has a distinctive way of phrasing how confident a commitment is. Learning to read the confidence level is more useful than learning any single word.

• Will try — a soft commitment; usually means “I intend to but I’m not promising.” If you need a hard deadline, this is your cue to ask a clarifying question.
• By today itself — by the end of today specifically (the itself adds emphasis: today, no later). “I’ll close it by today itself.”
• EOD / EOB — end of day / end of business. Crucially, this often means EOD IST, which—depending on your US time zone—can be your morning or even the previous evening. Always confirm the time zone.
• Tentatively — provisionally, not final. “Tentatively, we can ship by Friday.”
• Will do / Done and done — confirmation it’s handled.

A commitment exchange might go: “I’ll try to finish the refactor by today itself, tentatively before EOD. If the review takes long, I’ll revert by tomorrow morning.” The honest read: it’s likely but not guaranteed, the deadline is today in IST, and there’s a fallback. That’s a lot of signal once you can hear it.

Phrase	Meaning	Confidence read
Will try	Soft intention	Low–medium; confirm if you need certainty
By today itself	By end of today, specifically	Firm-ish; clarify the time zone
EOD / EOB	End of (business) day	Often IST—confirm
Tentatively	Provisional	Not final yet
Will do	Acknowledged, will handle	High

Politeness & email-isms spoken aloud

Indian English at work draws heavily on a tradition of formal written correspondence, and that formality often carries over into speech—even in a casual standup. To an American ear it can sound unusually polite or slightly old-fashioned. It isn’t a tone; it’s a register. Read it as warmth and respect.

• Kindly — please (more formal than “please”). “Kindly share the updated doc.”
• Please do the needful — please take care of what’s required. The single most iconic Indian-English office phrase.
• Revert back — reply (yes, technically redundant, but standard usage). “I’ll revert back once I hear from the client.”
• Gentle reminder — a soft nudge, often as the subject line of a follow-up but also said aloud. “Just a gentle reminder on the pending review.”
• Good morning, all / Hi team — common, friendly standup openers.

When a teammate says, “Kindly do the needful and revert back—gentle reminder, this is on priority,” nobody is being curt or bureaucratic. It’s a courteous, completely normal way to say “Please handle this and let me know; reminder, it’s urgent.”

Numbers & scope

This category trips people up less often in pure scrum, but it surfaces constantly when discussing scale, costs, data volumes, or user counts—so it’s worth knowing.

• Lakh — 100,000 (written 1,00,000 in the Indian numbering system). “We’re seeing two lakh requests a day” = 200,000 requests.
• Crore — 10,000,000 (ten million). “The table has three crore rows” = 30 million rows.
• “x” for times — multiplier, spoken as “into” sometimes. “Traffic went 5x” = five times. You may also hear “increased by 5 times.”
• Comma placement — Indian formatting groups as 1,00,000 (one lakh) and 1,00,00,000 (one crore), which can momentarily confuse if you see it written in a doc.

So “We’re handling around five lakh events per hour, and during the sale it spiked nearly 10x to almost a crore” means: ~500,000 events per hour, spiking ~10× to nearly 10 million. Quick mental conversion: 1 lakh = 100K, 1 crore = 10M (or 100 lakh).

Discourse fillers

These tiny words carry rhythm and nuance, and they’re the final piece of sounding like you truly follow the conversation. They rarely change the literal meaning—they shade it.

• na — a tag seeking agreement, like “right?” or “you know?”. “We deployed yesterday na, so it should be live.”
• only — emphasis or specificity, often placed at the end. “It’s failing in prod only” = “It’s failing specifically in prod.”
• itself — emphasis on exactness. “I’ll do it now itself” = “right now.”
• actually — softens or introduces a correction; very common as a sentence-opener. “Actually, the bug is in the frontend.”
• basically — introduces a summary or explanation. “Basically, the cache wasn’t invalidating.”
• yaar — an informal “buddy/dude,” friendly and casual; you’ll hear it among teammates who are comfortable, less so in formal updates.

In flow: “Actually, the issue is in the config only, na—basically the env wasn’t loading, so I’ll fix it now itself.” Strip the fillers and it’s simply: “The issue is in the config—the env wasn’t loading, so I’ll fix it right now.” The fillers add friendliness and emphasis, nothing more.

Phrases YOU can use to confirm understanding

You don’t need to adopt Indian English to communicate well—but mirroring a few phrases and confirming explicitly makes standups smoother and signals respect. Here are natural, non-condescending lines to keep things crisp:

• “Just to confirm, you’ll revert by EOD IST? That’s tomorrow morning my time.”
• “When you say EOD, is that your end of day or mine? Want to make sure I’m not blocking you.”
• “Got it—so the doubt is about the API contract, not the timeline. Let me clarify that.”
• “You’re facing an issue with the staging deploy and it’s stuck at the migration—do you need anything from me to unblock?”
• “When you say ‘will try by today,’ is that a firm commit or should I plan for tomorrow as backup?”
• “Quick check on the numbers—two lakh is 200K, right?”
• “I’ll do the needful on my side and revert once it’s deployed.”
• “Thanks for the gentle reminder—taking it on priority now.”

Confirming the time zone on every deadline, in particular, will save you more grief than anything else on this list. “EOD” across a 12.5-hour gap is a genuine source of missed handoffs.

Putting it together

Following an Indian-English standup effortlessly comes down to a small, learnable vocabulary plus the habit of confirming time zones and soft commitments. Once “revert,” “doubt,” “do the needful,” “on priority,” and the lakh/crore conversions are second nature, the standup stops feeling like translation and starts feeling like a conversation.

If you’d rather build that fluency through practice than flashcards, SpiceTalk drills exactly these phrases in realistic standup and scrum roleplay—you run a daily standup with an AI Indian teammate and learn to catch “I’ll revert by EOD itself” in real time, not after the call. Either way, the phrases above will get you most of the distance. The rest is just showing up to the next standup and listening with new ears.