Costas
¥
English όμως ή Hinglish? (BBC)
India, unlike its rival Asian giant China, has no truly national language of its own. Hindi, the official language of central government, is an artificial and largely unspoken 20th Century construct. Even the colloquial Hindustani of Bollywood films is spoken by only 40% of the population, concentrated in the "cow belt" of northern India. The rest of the subcontinent speaks hundreds of regional vernaculars. Amid this Babel, English remains the country's only lingua franca.
(...)
What makes Hinglish especially quaint is its love of the continuous tense and the way it dispenses with articles like "the" and "a". My own favourite examples are "head is paining" (headache) and "mother serious" (mother is very ill) - both handy excuses for leaving work early.
"The new Indian elite is a very diverse, first generation elite, and they don't have that old snobbery about the Queen's English," says novelist Namita Devidayal. "One finds a growing ease in recreating the language to suit one's culture, which is a very hodge-podge culture, and one that's also comfortable in its own dysfunctionality."
Hinglish, for all its occasional breakdowns of communication, is an authentically Indian hybrid.
India, unlike its rival Asian giant China, has no truly national language of its own. Hindi, the official language of central government, is an artificial and largely unspoken 20th Century construct. Even the colloquial Hindustani of Bollywood films is spoken by only 40% of the population, concentrated in the "cow belt" of northern India. The rest of the subcontinent speaks hundreds of regional vernaculars. Amid this Babel, English remains the country's only lingua franca.
(...)
What makes Hinglish especially quaint is its love of the continuous tense and the way it dispenses with articles like "the" and "a". My own favourite examples are "head is paining" (headache) and "mother serious" (mother is very ill) - both handy excuses for leaving work early.
"The new Indian elite is a very diverse, first generation elite, and they don't have that old snobbery about the Queen's English," says novelist Namita Devidayal. "One finds a growing ease in recreating the language to suit one's culture, which is a very hodge-podge culture, and one that's also comfortable in its own dysfunctionality."
Hinglish, for all its occasional breakdowns of communication, is an authentically Indian hybrid.
