Skimming through the pages of the People’s section of my
customary online newspaper The Times of India, this morning I came
across a rather interesting article. This article, titled “NRI bachelors over Desi dulhas” (desi, meaning Indian and dulhas, meaning grooms), immediately
caught my attention not only because it demonstrated a cultural norm of
marriage in my country, but also because it used a fair amount of Hindi words
in a newspaper that is supposed to be one of the most read English newspapers
in the country. More interestingly, the use of Hindi in this article did not
involve the actual Hindi symbols, but involved the phonetics of the Hindi
language in English alphabets. This article basically talks about how Indian
parents are looking for NRI (Non-Resident Indian) grooms for their daughters
because they don’t want to risk marrying their daughters off to men living in
India because of India’s unpredictable economy.
This phenomenon of code switching, defined as switching
between two or more languages, has been around in India for a while. The use of
English in the country greatly increased just before India gained independence
from Britain. In the above-mentioned article, code switching can be seen in
many instances, including the title of the article. The concept of code
switching comes so easily to Indian people as myself, because we are brought up
learning Hindi at home or with friends and using English at school. In fact,
most of the Indian schools have English as their first language and Hindi as
their second. This ease of code switching among the readers lets the writer of
the article use both English and Hindi at the same, thereby maneuvering
linguistic diversity in the article. As mentioned earlier, the use of English
alphabets for Hindi phonetics is also an example of linguistic diversity. This
may also be called societal bilingualism since the two languages are being used
for the people in the Indian society. It confirms the people’s national
identity as Indian people can relate to both languages. Sociolinguists, people
who study language as affected by social relations, will support that this
technique is useful since it fulfills both the linguistic desires of the Indian
community, English as well as Hindi.
In addition, this article falls under the category of public
media since it is an online newspaper article accessible to all the people
around the world, although it is mainly aimed towards the Indian public and
towards people of other nationalities who comprehend the Hindi language. The
author has used a mixture of formal and informal language, using facts and
figures as evidence (E.g. "The demand for NRI grooms, which fell
by over 20% after the 2008 global financial crisis, is rising again.")
and using people’s personal opinions about the issue (E.g. "Because our daughter's
our only child, we initially wanted her settle down with a groom based in
Delhi”) in
order to build a connection between the author and the audience in order to attract
the audience’s attention. Also, if you roll the cursor over some of the direct
links, it takes you to an advertisement page, completely unrelated to the
marriage issue in India. This may be argued to be contradictory to this article
being public media as opposed to private commercial media since the advertisers
of the product shown in the links are trying to get the attention of the people
to buy the product.
In conclusion, bilingualism has been around in India as well
as all over the world for a very long time. People working in the media are
starting to understand the importance of it and starting to use strategies to
attract more audience.
Very True. Actually first I thought your article is about NRI grooms. I would like to comment only on the bilingualism in India. India is one of the very few countries in the world where English and/or a regional language is used for official purposes. Our Indian constitution itself is worded in English language while our National language is Hindi. Efforts are being made at all levels to educate people on learning Hindi words for the English references. You will find notice boards in Govt as well as Pvt offices displaying "Todays Hindi word". We are domiciled in Goa which is a state on the west coast of India. Struggle to achieve statehood for Goa continued for over 20 years. But Goa could not have become a state unless it had its own official regional language. After a lot of political struggles Konkani became the official language of Goa in February 1987 and immediately thereafter, Goa was declared a separate state on 30th May, 1987. The only issue was Konkani was declared official language with script in Devanagari. In Goa second largest population by religion is Christians who pressed more for Konkani to be official language but did not know devanagari, the vernacular script. So English script was parallely permitted to be used to write in Konkani.
ReplyDeleteAs far as rest of India is concerned, using Hindi or regional words in spoken or written English is more of a habit or fashion. Personally I think English or any other local, regional or national language should not get diluted because these languages have come into being with years and years of research and hard work by eminent scholars.
Thanks for detailed and very informative comment dad!
DeleteThanks for detailed and very informative comment dad!
Delete