Mixers lyricing in Hinglish: blending and fusion in Indian pop culture

Abstract

Nativization of English in the Outer and Expanding Circles manifests itself in mixing of English items in artistic expressions of various kinds, including fiction, poetry, and performances. Popular songs present many instances of Hindi-English mixing in India, ranging from alternate verses in the two languages to the two languages mixed at the level of words, phrases, idioms, etc. In East Asian languages, such as Japanese and Korean, English is mixed to achieve specific purposes, e.g.

Globalization of African American Vernacular English in popular culture

“…Pennycook 2003;Moody and Matsumoto 2003;Stanlaw 2004;Kachru 2006;Lee 2006b). Although George's (1998) study is not strictly linguistically oriented, it offers useful discussions about the use of English in hip hop in other parts of the world.…”

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

“…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).…”

“…Most recently, there has been a rapid growth of interest in code‐switching in pop music around the world. Most studies have discussed data which involve English in an Asian context (Kachru 2006; Lee 2004; 2006; Moody 2006; Moody and Matsumoto 2003; Pennycook 2003; Stanlaw 2004), but there are also works on other language pairs (Bentahila and Davis 2002; Davis and Bentahila 2006; 2008) or other contexts (Omoniyi 2006; Sarker et al 2005; Sarker and Winer 2006). These studies shed light on the two issues mentioned above.…”

“…Such symbolism of languages manifested in Korean pop may not be evident in pop music in other areas. In Hindi film music, for instance, the mixing of English and Hindi instils humour and playfulness, but the two languages do not seem to invoke specific values or images of their own (Kachru 2006). Kachru (2006: 224) contends that “[u]nlike a ‘high’ code needed only for the serious purposes of identity construction […], it ( i.e.…”

Hybrid Englishes: An exploratory survey

“…Today, ‘English is liberally interspersed with regional languages, especially Hindi’ (Vishwamohan : 197), and the mixed variety known as ‘Hinglish’ has been termed the ‘fastest‐growing language in the country,’ a ‘jumble [which] is hip,’ ‘the language of the street and the college campus’ (Baldauf : n.p.). Kachru () investigated the mixing of Hindi and English in pop songs (Mehrotra : 14), and Baldauf (: n.p.) observes: ‘all the multinational corporations now speak Hinglish in their ads.’ Song lyrics, media and commercials seem to be the natural setting of Hinglish, but it is also strongly found simply in informal discourse, especially among young speakers, and is characterized by a momentum of playfulness.…”