Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Hinglish

New varieties of English seem to be cropping up all over the place, as we've seen with multi-ethnic youth dialects (do a search in the toolbar above to find all the mentions of it), so it's no surprise to find that Britain's growing Asian population is having an impact on English. In particular, it's the Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi-speaking Indians and Pakistanis who are shaping a new cross-fertilised variety called Hinglish (a blend of Hindi and English).

As this article points out, "more people speak English in south Asia than in Britain and North America combined" so it's no surprise that local languages start to inflect the main, unifying language. Have a look at the examples given in the article, especially the shocking definition of ganja.

More about Indian English can be found here:
Guardian Education article
Times article
MacMillan Dictionaries article

...and another article from the BBC website

Useful for:
ENA5 - Language Varieties
(This topic focusses on English spoken in the British Isles, but you might be able to make a convincing case for Hinglish being spoken here if you can point to examples from your own transcripts and experience.)

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