-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...

-The Hindu Gondi is the lingua franca of the Maoist movement today, but All India Radio does not broadcast even a single new bulletin in the language. One winter morning, in Barwani district of Madhya Pradesh, I was watching a group of Adivasi kids peering into their mobile phones. The early morning sun was mellow, and they were so engrossed that they did not notice me drawing near. “We are doing Bultoo...

-The Hindu The public now sees the Internet not just in market terms, but as a social phenomenon that requires public interest regulation. In its aggressive campaign for Free Basics, couched in simplistic developmental language, Facebook underestimated the political sophistication of the Indian public. It must be regretting it now. The social networking service’s reportedly Rs. 100-crore campaign, through double full-page newspaper advertisements, billboards and television, appears simply to have congealed public...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: The national weather agency has adopted a new rulebook, tweaking figures that define rain conditions, cold and heat waves and abandoning what it has conceded were ambiguous and unhelpful terminology such as "could" and "may". A forecasting circular issued by the Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has altered in subtle ways the definitions of cold and heat waves (see chart), introducing uniform cut-offs for locations across the country, and...

-Livemint.com The Met dept has decided to simply replace the word ‘drought’ to describe poor rainfall with ‘deficient year’ and ‘large deficient year’ New Delhi: There will be no more droughts in India. Since it can’t control the weather but can control language, the state forecaster India Meteorological Department (IMD) has decided to simply replace the word “drought” to describe poor rainfall with “deficient year” and “large deficient year”. What appears to be...