Sometimes I am amazed by the versatility of Hindi and other South Asian languages in the expansion of globalization and the reign of English as ruling lingua franca here in the 21st Century. So far I've noticed that Hindi/Urdu, along with Panjabi, Gujarati, and Tamil, are almost ambidextrous when it comes to incorporation of English speech and writing into their languages, which leads to exploration of some interesting aspects of the broad desi mentality.
First, we start with speech. In my time studying Hindi/Urdu and other desi languages, I've been around a lot of desi people who use English words and phrases in context with their native tongue without any kind of hesitation. I remember wondering why a lot of desis used this mixed language, this khichri bhasha, when it dawned on me that the British Raj had a great hand in it with their widespread reign and the unification of a bunch of desis who didn't speak the same local languages under the banner of English. It could be argued that this basis of English was one of the great reasons why India wasn't split up into numerous localities after Partition from Pakistan and Independence in 1947, but I won't touch that, other than the fact that the only way desis from all over communicate today both professionally and casually is mainly through English, despite the push in Nehru's India for Hindi as the dominant national language (opposed virulently by a strong South Indian sentiment for Tamil and Telugu). But with this British hand on India's past, English is used readily and incorporated into local languages without a second thought, though maybe NRIs do it more than stay-at-desh desis because English has more of a pervasive presence. This mish-mash of Hindi and English is often called Hinglish and has gotten popular in advertisements ( think of Pepsi's Hindi slogan of Yeh Dil Maange More! or the back-and-forth Hinglish of films like In Which Annie Gives It Those Ones or Love Aaj Kal). I myself use Hinglish all the time, using Hindi phrases and words most of the time and English words when I'm not familiar with how to translate an idea quickly or when I don't know the Hindi/Urdu word for something. It's catchy, quirky, a blend of the familiar world of English returned with the zany Hindi colloquialisms, a taste of elegant British tea with a spoonful of chai masala thrown in. Bole to, it's ek dum unique and zabardast, the khichri bhasha of the British Raj badshah and the jhakaas Bombay-wallah tapori. Hinglish Zindabad! But Hindi's versatility doesn't just lie there. Something I've noticed that I've never seen mentioned deserves a note here. People always talk about Hinglish and its effect on speech, but what about Hindi's adjustment to the Roman script itself? Traditionally, Hindi is written with the Devanagari script, which I learned while I was in middle school, Urdu is written with an adapted version of Arabic script in a poetic style called Nastaliq, Panjabi is written in Gurmukhi (or Shahmukhi, in Pakistan), Gujarati is written with the Gujarati script, etc. Yet because a lot of desis use English when writing to eachother, they often transliterate the words of their native tongue into Roman script, and now it's led to desis writing to eachother in Roman script, especially in e-mails or on posted comments on YouTube. Why is this? I think it's because, since computers and the Internet have ushered most desis into the English-dominated world, to type in Hindi fonts requires an extra effort, an extra discipline to something is otherwise fun and easy to do (since the letters of the fonts are all scrambled anyway when they are put onto computer keys and it could take an hour or so to write a simple note to a friend). The same would go for other desi languages, which have mostly incorporated the Roman script to write their words and phrases ( except maybe Tamil, which I've noticed is generally kept in its native script whenever I see it). Understand, too, that desis have a history of pragmatic thought which comes through in their collective cultures, and the attitude when it comes to this kind of situation is that of "kuchh bhi chalega", or "anything goes." That is, as long as the Romanized transliterations of their languages helps them to convey the idea they want to convey to the reader, it'll do. It's the old attitude that Pavan K. Verma describes in his book Being Indian through the single word jugaad, which, though a difficult word to translate exactly, is a way of getting through a situation using whatever means is available. It can be used to talk about the car mechanic who fixes his malfunctioning car's leaking radiator with the crude improvisation of chewing gum if he doesn't have the right compound to fix it with or it can be used to talk about the desi man abroad who, sitting at the computer and unable to get the fonts to work, resorts to transliteration. In any matter, this adaptation of Hindi and other desi languages through Roman script may be the next necessary step to communication in the 21st Century.
