Hinglish

Hinglish, a portmanteau of Hindi and English,[1] is the macaronic hybrid use of English and South Asian languages from across the Indian subcontinent, involving code-switching between these languages whereby they are freely interchanged within a sentence or between sentences.[2]

Not to be confused with Indian English.

The word Hinglish was first recorded in 1967.[3] Other colloquial portmanteau words for Hindi-influenced English include: Hindish (recorded from 1972), Hindlish (1985), Henglish (1993) and Hinlish (2013).[3]

While the name is based on the Hindi language, it does not refer exclusively to Hindi, but "is used in India, with English words blending with Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi and Hindi, and also in British Asian families to enliven standard English".[2][4] Sometimes, though rarely, Hinglish is used to refer to Hindi written in English script and mixing with English words or phrases.

History and evolution

Hindi has an approximately ten-century history. In this period, it has accommodated several linguistic influences. Contact with Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic and Turkic languages has led to historical 'mixes' or fusions, e.g., Hindustani, Rekhta. Linguistic fusions were celebrated by Bhakti poets, in approximately the 15th-17th centuries as 'khichdi boli' – or amalgamated speech.[5]

At the turn of the 18th century, with the rising dominion of the East India Company, also called 'Company Raj' (literally, 'Company Rule'), the languages of India were brought into contact with the foreign element of English. In colonized India, English became a symbol of authority and a powerful hegemonic tool to propagate British culture, including Christianity.[6] The political ascendancy of the British reflected into social and professional roles; this meant that the legal system as well as the studies in medicine and science were conducted in English.

This led to an interest in the promotion of English into the society of Indian natives. Educated Indians, or 'brown sahibs', wished to participate in academia and pursue professional careers. Raja Rammohan Roy, a social and education reformer, advocated that English be taught to Indians by certain British gentlemen for the benefit and instruction of the native Indians.[7] Charles Grant, the president of the East India Company's board of control, championed the cause of English education as a 'cure for darkness' where 'darkness' was 'Hindoo ignorance'. The Charter Act was passed in 1813. This legalized missionary work by the Company, including the introduction of English education.[8] By the beginning of the twentieth century, English had become the unifying language in the Indian struggle for independence against the British.

Meanwhile, English was on its way to becoming the first global lingua franca. By the end of the twentieth century, it had special status in seventy countries, including India.[9] Worldwide, English began to represent modernization and internationalization, with more and more jobs requiring basic fluency in it.[10] In India especially, the language came to acquire a social prestige, 'a class apart of education', which prompted native Indian or South Asian speakers to turn bilingual, speaking their mother tongue at home or in a local context, but English in academic or work environments.[11]

The contact of 'South Asian' languages, which is a category that refers inclusively to Hindi and Indian languages, with English, led to the emergence of the linguistic phenomenon now known as Hinglish. Many common Indic words such as 'pyjamas', 'karma', 'guru' and 'yoga' were incorporated into English usage, and vice versa ('road', 'sweater', and 'plate'). This is in parallel with several other similar hybrids around the world, like Spanglish (Spanish + English) and Taglish (Tagalog + English).

In recent years, due to an increase in literacy and connectivity, the interchange of languages has reached new heights, especially due to increasing online immersion. English is the most widely used language on the internet, and this is a further impetus to the use of Hinglish online by native Hindi speakers, especially among the youth. Google's Gboard mobile keyboard app gives an option of Hinglish as a typing language where one can type Hindi sentence in English script and suggestions will be of Hindi language word in anglo script.

While Hinglish has arisen from the presence of English in India, it is not merely Hindi and English spoken side by side, but a language type in itself, like all linguistic fusions (see Multiple language mixing, Bhatia, Tej K. 1987. English in Advertising: multiple mixing and media, World Englishes 6.1: 33-48). . Aside from the borrowing of vocabulary, there is the phenomenon of switching between languages, called code switching and Code-mixing, direct translations, adapting certain words, and infusing the flavours of each language into each other.[12][13]

The Indian English variety, or simply Hinglish, is the Indian adaption of English in a very endocentric manner, which is why it is popular among the youth. Like other dynamic language mixes, Hinglish is now thought to 'have a life of its own'.[14]

Computational analysis

With its widespread use in social media such as blogs, Facebook and Twitter, the analysis of Hinglish using computers has become important in a number of natural language processing applications like machine translation (MT) and speech-to-speech translation.[15][16]

Alongside Hinglish, Benglish is a term that has been used in academic papers to describe a mixture of Bangla (Bengali language) and English in academic papers, for example Benglish verbs are described as a particular type of complex predicate, which consists of an English word and a Bengali verb e.g. /EksiDenT kOra/ ‘to have an accident’, /in kOra/ ‘to get/come/put in’ or /kOnfuz kOra/ ‘to confuse’.[17][18][19]

Dictionary

A dictionary using the term Hinglish in its title has been published. In fact, it covers a number of words from Indian languages that are commonly used in urban Britain.[20]

Users

Hinglish is more commonly heard in urban and semi-urban centers of the Hindi-speaking states of India[21] and is spoken even by the Indian diaspora.[22] Research into the linguistic dynamics of India shows that while the use of English is definitely on the rise, there are more people fluent in Hinglish than in pure English.[23] David Crystal, a British linguist at the University of Wales, projected in 2004 that at about 350 million, the world's Hinglish speakers may soon outnumber native English speakers.[24]

gollark: Hmm, there is an "applied category theory" room on matrix.
gollark: No.
gollark: I only do elastic collisions myself.
gollark: Nope.
gollark: GTech™ neutrino absorption scanners seem to suggest that you're *underneath* Antarctica.

See also

References
  1. "The rise of Hinglish: How the media created a new lingua franca for India's elites".
  2. Coughlan, Sean (8 November 2006). "It's Hinglish, innit?". BBC News Magazine. Archived from the original on 4 January 2009. Retrieved 19 May 2015. Alt URL
  3. Lambert, James. 2018. A multitude of ‘lishes’: The nomenclature of hybridity. English World-wide, 39(1): 25. doi: 10.1075/eww.38.3.04lam
  4. "Hinglish is the new NRI and global language". The Times of India. 2 February 2015. Retrieved 29 July 2015.
  5. Kothari, Rita (19 April 2011). Chutnefying English. Penguin Books. p. 37.
  6. Mukherjee, Alok (18 October 2009). This Gift of English. Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. p. 175. ISBN 978-8125036012.
  7. Braj Kachru (1986). The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-native Englishes. The University of Illinois Press. p. 7. ISBN 9780252061721.
  8. Mukherjee, Alok (18 October 2009). This Gift of English. Orient Blackswan Pvt. Ltd. pp. 114–116. ISBN 978-8125036012.
  9. Crystal, David (1 March 1997). English as a Global Language. Cambridge University Press. pp. 1–2.
  10. Carla Power (7 March 2007). "Not the Queen's English" (PDF). Newsweek MSNBC International.
  11. Braj Kachru (1986). The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-native Englishes. The University of Illinois Press. p. 1. ISBN 9780252061721.
  12. Kothari, Rita (19 April 2011). Chutnefying English. Penguin Books. p. 39.
  13. Hinglish: code-switching in Indian English, ELT Journal, Volume 65, Issue 4, 1 October 2011, pp 473–480, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccr047
  14. Agnihotri, Ramakant (18 October 2009). Indian English. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 212. ISBN 9780230220393.
  15. Amitava Das, Björn Gambäck Code-Mixing in Social Media Text The Last Language Identification Frontier, TAL Vol 54 – no3/2013
  16. “I am borrowing ya mixing ?” An Analysis of English-Hindi Code Mixing in Facebook Proceedings of The First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Code Switching, pp 116–126, 25 October 2014, Doha, Qatar. 2014 ACL.
  17. Shishir Bhattacharja, 2010 Benglish Verbs: a Case of Code-Mixing in Bengali PACLIC 24 Proceedings
  18. Kundu ; Subhash Chandra, 2012 Automatic detection of English words in Benglish text: A statistical approach 2012 4th International Conference on Intelligent Human Computer Interaction (IHCI)
  19. Hunting Elusive English in Hinglish and Benglish Text: Unfolding Challenges and Remedies, Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC)
  20. Mahal, Baljinder K (2006). The Queens Hinglish: How to Speak Pukka. Collins. ISBN 9780007241125.
  21. Thakur, Saroj; Dutta, Kamlesh; Thakur, Aushima (2007). Davis, Graeme; Bernhardt, Karl (eds.). "Hinglish: Code switching, code mixing and indigenization in multilingual environment". Lingua et Linguistica. Journal of Language and Linguistics. 1 (2): 112–6. ISBN 978-1-84799-129-4.
  22. "Hinglish gets the most laughs, say Mumbai's standup comics".
  23. Vineeta Chand (11 February 2016). "The rise and rise of Hinglish". The Conversation.
  24. Scott Baldauf (23 November 2004). "A Hindi-English jumble, spoken by 350 million". Christian Science Monitor.

Further reading
  • Sailaja, Pingali. Hinglish: code-switching in Indian English. ELT Journal, Oxford Journals (2011) 65 (4): 473-480. doi: 10.1093/elt/ccr047. First published online: 1 August 2011
  • Bhatia, Tej K. 2011. The multilingual mind, optimization theory and Hinglish. In Chutneyfying English: The phenomenon of Hinglish, Rita Kothari and Rupert Snell (eds.) pp. 37–52. New Delhi: Penguin Books India.
  • Bhatia, Tej and William C. Ritchie. 2009. Language Mixing, Universal Grammar and Second Language Acquisition. In: The New Handbook of Second Language Acquisition. William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia (eds.), Chapter 25, pp. 591–622. Bingley, UK: Emeralds Group Publishing Ltd.
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