A paper based on US research gathered from Big Boss shows that Queens English is no more top of the food-chain and Hindi is now a rural sanctuary (Guess they mean all the hundreds of dialects from Mewari to Bundeli in North India ) . But the main take-away is that Hinglish is the new King, Queen and everything else in North Indian urban centres ! I have always viscerally hated purity in languages , and cared a damn about diction or grammar ;-) I have always been a mongrel of cultures and dialects and loved it . The model presented by Parshad, Chand, Sinha and Kumari treats the Hinglish speakers as a separate class with certain advantages. According to the team, the Hinglish class has a certain fitness advantage over the bilingual and the English monolingual classes. Due to its prestige as well as its accessibility compared to English, Hinglish attracts migrating populations that are increasingly exposed to English but do not have the resources to actually master. “Regardless of whether monolingual English is seen equally or more prestigious than Hinglish, this is their [monolingual Hindi speakers] only shift-based option, to include minimal English, as they do not command extensive enough English to converge to monolingual English,” the researchers claim. At the same time, the actual English/Hindi bilinguals will not shift to Hindi when interacting with monolingual speakers because of the prestige associated with the English language. These two hypotheses put Hinglish at the top of the language food-chain: monolingual Hindi speakers who are exposed to English, as well as bilingual speakers will tend toward Hinglish as a common and prestigious medium. However, the model excludes 80 % of the Indian population remaining in the rural areas. The model assumes the advantages for Hinglish in exclusively urban setting, where Hindi monolinguals and English/Hindi bilinguals are in a constant mix. The rural populations on the other had remain in a sort of “refuge” where the prestige dynamic does not provide incentive to switch neither to English nor to Hinglish. The model accounts for the recent growth in the Hinglish speaking population and it may provide some more accurate predictions for future language dynamics in India. Original research article: Rana D. Parshad, Vineea Chand, Neha Sinha and Nitu Kumari What is India speaking: The “Hinglish” invasion, arXiv:1406.4824v1 [cs.CL] 12 Jun 2014 technology.org/2014/06/25/hinglish-new-competitor-indias-language-race/
Posted on: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 02:51:43 +0000
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