What is India speaking? Exploring the “Hinglish” invasion

Abstract

Language competition models help understand language shift dynamics, and have effectively captured how English has outcompeted various local languages, such as Scottish Gaelic in Scotland, and Mandarin in Singapore. India, with a 125 million English speakers boasts the second largest number of English speakers in the world, after the United States. The 1961-2001 Indian censuses report a sharp increase in Hindi/English Bilinguals, suggesting that English is on the rise in India. To the contrary, we claim supported by field evidence, that these statistics are inaccurate, ignoring an emerging class who do not have full bilingual competence and switch between Hindi and English, communicating via a code popularly known as "Hinglish". Since current language competition models occlude hybrid practices and detailed local ecological factors, they are inappropriate to capture the current language dynamics in India. Expanding predator-prey and sociolinguistic theories, we draw on local Indian ecological factors to develop a novel three-species model of interaction between Monolingual Hindi speakers, Hindi/English Bilinguals and Hinglish speakers, and explore the long time dynamics it predicts. The model also exhibits Turing instability, which is the first pattern formation result in language dynamics. These results challenge traditional assumptions of English encroachment in India. More broadly, the three-species model introduced here is a first step towards modeling the dynamics of hybrid language scenarios in other settings across the world.

Understanding Language Preference for Expression of Opinion and Sentiment: What do Hindi-English Speakers do on Twitter?

“…This makes Hi-En codeswitching, commonly called Hinglish, extremely widespread in India. There is historical attestation, as well as recent studies on the growing use of Hinglish in general conversation, and in entertainment and media (see Parshad et al (2016) and references therein). Several recent studies Barman et al, 2014;Solorio et al, 2014;Sequiera et al, 2015) also provide evidence of Hinglish and other instances of CS on online social media such as Twitter and Facebook.…”

Language Modeling for Code-Mixing: The Role of Linguistic Theory based Synthetic Data

“…1 It is quite commonly observed in speech conversations of multilingual societies across the world. Although, traditionally, CM has been associated with informal or casual speech, there is evidence that in several societies, such as urban India and Mexico, CM has become the default code of communication (Parshad et al, 2016), and it has also pervaded written text, especially in computer-mediated communication and social media (Rijhwani et al, 2017).…”

Word Embeddings for Code-Mixed Language Processing

“…Code-mixing (CM) refers to fluid alternation between two or more languages in a single conversation/sentence (Myers-Scotton, 1993). CM is a common phenomenon observed in almost all multilingual societies (Parshad et al, 2016;Rijhwani et al, 2017). Consequently, in recent times, processing of CM text and speech has been receiving a growing amount of interest and attention from the NLP community (Solorio and Liu, 2008;Li and Fung, 2014;Solorio et al, 2014;Sharma et al, 2016;Rudra et al, 2016).…”