Code‐mixing, style repertoire and language variation: English in Hindi poetic creativity

Abstract

In studies on code-mixing considerable attention has been paid to certain genres of writing in prose. However, there is a paucity of studies on how code-mixing and the resulting code variation may be exploited in various types of poetic creativity. This paper examines the Hindi poetry of the last three decades to determine the effects-aesthetic and other-of such language and dialect mixing in which English is one partner. This programmatic study focusses on the following: style repertoire in the context of Hindi literature; functions of code-mixed varieties in Hindi literary works in general; analysis of illustrative texts with mixing from English in poetic works by Madan Vatsyayan, Muktibodh, and others; and finally, the implications for sociolinguistics of such investigations from linguistic and stylistic perspectives.

English in Hong Kong Cantopop: language choice, code‐switching and genre

“…Auer 1984; 1998; Gumperz 1982; Li Wei 1994; 2005; Myers‐Scotton 1993). Nonetheless, written code‐switching has existed for many centuries, as evidenced by its occurrence in ancient texts (Aslanov 2000; Watt 1997), and some researchers have paid attention to code‐switching in written data or planned discourse such as poetry and novels (Kachru 1989; Callahan 2002; 2004), advertising (Bhatia and Ritchie 2004; Martin 2002) and pop song lyrics (e.g. Bentahila and Davis 2002; Kachru 2006; Lee 2004; 2006; Moody 2006; Sarker and Winer 2006).…”

Nigerian English in informal email messages

“…The former implies an alternative use of two or more languages in a speech event (Hymes 1974), involving a mixture of words, phrases and sentences across sentence boundaries, while code-mixing includes the embedding of various linguistic units such as affixes, words or phrases (Bokamba 1989;Kachru 1989). In the corpus, examples of code-switching are evident only in emails written by the adults to one another or to the elderly.…”

English in non‐English‐language films

“…Several studies deal with code-switching specifically in the domain of art: Timm (1978) discusses code-switching in Tolstoy's War and Peace, Vaid (1980) writes o n code-mixing in Indian films, Haarmann (1986) examines the use of foreign languages in Japanese television commercials, and Kachru (1989) analyses the use of English in Hindi poetry. Timm and Vaid use novel and film, respectively, as though they contained spontaneous rather than artificially created conversation and examine this discourse in terms of already established concerns about code-switching (e.g.…”