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Mat socho you know all about Hinglish -GS Mudur
-The Telegraph

New Delhi: Researchers have detected what they say are snapshots of an imminent invasion of northern India by Hinglish that is set to shrink populations of monolingual Hindi and bilingual Hindi-and-English speakers.

A study that examined dialogue on the Hindi reality television show Bigg Boss and everyday language practices has suggested that speakers of Hinglish, the hybridised version of Hindi peppered with English vocabulary, could out number speakers fluent in either one or both languages.

The study by a team of mathematicians, linguists, and psychologists has suggested that a small number of Hinglish speakers could serve as seeds that will draw more and more monolingual and bilingual people towards Hinglish.

"The mathematical model we've derived predicts that the Hinglish-speaking population will balloon while the proportions of people who're able to speak fluent Hindi and fluent English will shrink," Rana Parshad, an assistant professor of mathematics at Clarkson University in the US who led the study, told The Telegraph. "The three language communities will coexist, but Hinglish speakers have already triggered the invasion."

The latest census figures from 2001, albeit outdated, indicate India has over 422 million Hindi speakers who make up the country's largest native language community. But Hinglish is widely spoken across the country - in rural households and urban malls, in educational institutions and conversations in Bollywood and television productions. For many young people, Hinglish is their native language.

"We don't realise it, but the rapid language switching that occurs in a sentence of Hinglish can make it unintelligible to monolingual Hindi or English speakers," Nitu Kumari, a mathematician at the Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi (Himachal Pradesh), who helped formulate and analyse the model, told this newspaper.

"We routinely hear some one say: Main aaj office mein bahut busy thi, unexpected kaam aa gaya, isliye ghar late pahunchi," she said. "It is like an emerging new language."

The researchers, who analysed two seasons of Bigg Boss where all contestants are expected to speak Hindi and interviews with 24 people who claimed they were fluent in Hindi, found patterns of language-use and language-switching that predicts a shift towards Hinglish.

Not a single contestant observed by the researchers in Bigg Boss was able to speak monolingual Hindi - every contestant borrowed English words, from a minimum of 22 English words by one contestant to a maximum of 748 words by another contestant.

The interviews with 24 people chosen from a range of socio-economic backgrounds - from a rural farmer to a university student - showed that on average 18 per cent of the speech was English, implying that even self-professed Hindi speakers are actually Hinglish speakers.

"The Hinglish-speaking community appears to be a growing population, but it just doesn't get counted," said Vineeta Chand, a lecturer and specialist in sociolinguistics at Essex University in the UK who has earlier studied English usage in India. "If India is interested in understanding emerging language practices and mixed codes (languages) such as Hinglish, it needs to count such people," Chand said.

The study, published this week in the research journal Physica A, is the first to mathematically model the emergence of Hinglish and proposes what the researchers call a three-species predator model to describe the dynamics of the three communities of speakers.

The predator model is widespread in nature - for example, an owl feeding on a rodent that eats insects. The scientists have proposed Hinglish as the top predator as bilingual speakers and monolingual speakers switch towards Hinglish, but Hinglish speakers don't move the other way. "It's much easier for a monolingual to learn English words and intersperse them in Hindi than to learn the entire language and become a true bilingual," said Parshad.

"We're trying to use mathematics to predict how the three populations - monolingual Hindi speakers, bilingual Hindi-and-English speakers, and Hinglish speakers - will change over time," said Kumari, the collaborator from IIT, Mandi.

"The most surprising result to me was that claimed bilinguals even when instructed to speak Hindi used nearly one in five words from English," Parshad said. But that changed when the researchers observed rural folk who were largely able to speak fluent Hindi, without borrowing words from English.

"We think rural areas provide a sort of refuge from predation," Parshad said. "But this could change in future as more and more rural people move to cities and as the influence of cities percolates into rural areas."

Suman Bhowmick, a PhD scholar at Clarkson University, contributed to the mathematical modelling in the study while Neha Sinha, a post-doctoral researcher in psychology at Rutgers University in the US, helped with model formulation, interviews and analysis.

Sections of linguistics have long been interested in how certain languages - such as English - dominate, and cause the decline of others. English has already out-competed Scottish-Gaelic in Scotland, Welsh in Wales, and Mandarin in Singapore.

"We're now trying to explore how English is influencing Indian languages," said

Atanu Saha, assistant professor of linguistics at Jadavpur University, Calcutta, who was not associated with the Hinglish study but is collaborating with Chand and Parshad to study whether Bengali-speakers also use English words during everyday talk.

Scientists say a key limitation of the Hinglish study is its limited observations - only two seasons of a TV show and 24 conversations. The findings need to be corroborated through a much larger data set, perhaps an analysis of conversations of thousands of people across longer time spans. One option would be to mine data from public domain conversations on social media platforms.