Language of nobody, language of everyone: Hinglish as lingua franca in a new rising community of India.

Abstract

In the multilingual scenario of India, the choice of a link language has been a point of significant controversy since Independence. Alternated language policies not only haven't been successful in finding a decisive resolution of the language question, but have also left room for the controversy between Hindi and English in their role of lingua franca.

In this work we will outline the development of English-Hindi bilingualism question, that, starting from post-Independence linguistic policies, has brought nowadays to a language continuum in which Hindi purism on one side, and the phenomenon widely known as Hinglish on the other, can be considered the extremes. Hinglish is a particularly interesting linguistic variety because, despite the long presence of English in India, English pressure on Hindi grew enormously in the last twenty years, thanks, also, to the economic development of India and its opening to a globalized World.

Our focus, then, will be directed towards the sociolinguistic factors involved in the use of Hinglish, and towards the possible processes that make this variety so peculiar as compared to other well examined cases such as, for example, Indian English. Since its presence is remarkably evident in the language of digital media and film industry, we will analyse the main patterns of this linguistic variety through authentic material such as movie lines, magazine articles, and advertisements, in order to delineate the characteristics of a potential Hinglish speakers community.