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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 953

Part of Session 105: Language and Superdiversity (Other abstracts in this session)

The creative linguistic chaos in a global city

Authors: Bhatt, Rakesh Mohan
Submitted by: Bhatt, Rakesh Mohan (University of Illinois, United States of America)

The city of Gurgaon, 30 kms south of India’s capital, New Delhi, has emerged in the past two decades as one of India’s most important financial centers. From a small farming village, it has transformed into a global city, host to a number of multinational companies like General Electric, Coca Cola, American Airlines, Nokia, Motorola, Bain & Company, Bank of America, IBM, etc.  As the major outsourcing hub of India, the city has attracted large-scale migrations from within India of people speaking different languages, but all proficient in English to varying degrees.

As speakers of different languages inhabit this multilingual space, two rather surprising linguistic consequences emerge: (i) erasure of ethnic mother tongues in favor of the dominant local code, Hindi—a result of strong cultural nationalism of the local indigenous community in response to wide-spread migration into the city, and (ii) a pattern of creative inter-mixing of English—the language of economic globalization, and Hindi—the local dominant code.  In this paper, I will focus on the second consequence: the form and function of language mixing in the linguistic landscape of the city, showing intermingling of languages at various linguistic levels.  The data come from 51 advertising signage that appeared on outdoor billboards in the city, collected in the summer of 2010.  The data in (i) below is a typical examplar of the kind of language mixing analyzed in this paper: Line 1 shows the exact reproduction of the advertisement; Line 2 shows the transcription; Line 3 is a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss; and, Line 4 gives the translation of the sign.  

 

(i) Signage—outdoor advertising in Grurgaon

 

English          spIknaa             saIKMo

English           speakna         seekheN

English          speak-to         learn-Subjunctive

‘Learn (how) to speak English’

At the surface level, the signage follows the syntactic order of Hindi, uses two languages (English and Hindi) and two scripts (Roman and Devanagari), inviting the local Hindi speaking population to lean how to speak English.  Within these descriptive facts are embedded a range of indexical functions: the use of the word ‘English’ in Roman script not only assumes an “encounter” (Blommaert & Backus 2011)—indexical knowledge of language—of the target audience with the language, but also positions the reader vis-à-vis the economic capital of its acquisition and use. The word ‘English’, as the topic (Theme) of the Hindi sentence, when written in the Roman script makes its salient, foregrounding the anticipation of profits of its distinction in the context of the message.  The mixing in the second word—an English word written in Devanagari script suffixed with a Hindi infinitival ‘na’—exemplifies creative display of two languages in one script: forms of bilingual “language display” that are beginning to emerge in super-diverse sociolinguistic environment of India indexing informal modes of language acquisition that yield such novel patterns of language and literacy practices as shown in (i) above.

This paper uses similar bilingual data to offer an empirical argument to view multilingual repertoires as indexical resources mobilized to navigate super-diverse complexes of contemporary sociolinguistic contexts.