Hinglish: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hindi- English Bilingualism in Contemporary India 27–28 May 2015, SOAS, University of London Programme Wednesday 27 May 2015 Room B104 (Brunei Gallery) 09.30 Panel 1: Linguistics & Multilingualism Devyani Sharma (Queen Mary, University of London), Form and Function in Mixed Codes Friederike Lüpke (SOAS, University of London), Layers of multilingualism and ideas of language: A view from West Africa 10.45 Tea/coffee 11.15 Panel 2: Films & Serials Rachel Dwyer & Helen Ashton (SOAS, University of London), ‘Don’t deboard the Bollytrain’: Trains, Hinglish and Accented English in Bollywood films Akshaya Kumar (University of Edinburgh), Code-mixing in Bhojpuri Media Ammara Maqsood (Oxford University), Code switching and intimacy in Pakistani television: a focus on Zindagi gulzar hai 13.15 Lunch break Please note, lunch is only provided for speakers; attendees should make their own arrangements 14.15 Panel 3: Technology & Language Mixing Ravikant (SARAI/CSDS), Hinglish for Indic Language Computing (c.2000–14) Shriram Venkataram (University College London), Tanglish: The language of the Tamil Trolls on Social Media Nishant Shah (The Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore), Thrice Invisible: Politics of dismissal through vocabulary on the queer Indian web 16.00 Tea/coffee 16.30 Panel 4: Political speech on- and off-stage Francesca Orsini (SOAS, University of London), Hindi political rhetoric: any mixing? Anastasia Piliavksy (University of Cambridge), Declamation, dialogue and code-switching in north Indian political speech 17.45 Close Hinglish: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hindi- English Bilingualism in Contemporary India 27–28 May 2015, SOAS, University of London Thursday 28 May 2015 Room L67, SOAS Main Building 09.30 Panel 5: Advertisements Santosh Desai (CEO, Futurebrands India Ltd.), One Whisky and One Masala Dosa: The Many Meanings of Hinglish in Advertising Vineet Kumar (Dr. BR Ambedkar College, University of Delhi), Hinglish 'Back to Back': Without the Ad-break Paromita Vohra (Independent film-maker, Mumbai), Falling in and out of Love with Hinglish: Advertising and the Domestication of Hinglish 11.15 Tea/coffee 11.45 Panel 6: Religion & New Media Xenia Zeiler (University of Helsinki), Indian Video Games and Religion: Normative Language Uses of English, Hindi, and Hinglish Chinmay Sharma (SOAS, University of London), Language and Gods: Mixing Hindi and English in Mahabharata novelisations 13.00 Lunch break Please note, lunch is only provided for speakers; attendees should make their own arrangements 14.00 Final roundtable discussion 16.00 Close Hinglish: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hindi- English Bilingualism in Contemporary India 27–28 May 2015, SOAS, University of London Abstracts One Whisky and One Masala Dosa: The Many Meanings of Hinglish in Advertising Santosh Desai, CEO, Futurebrands India Ltd. This presentation will explore how the use of Hinglish has changed over the years in advertising in India. It will identify some key patterns of use and will examine these in the context of the evolution of the Industry. It will examine how advertising is responding to the forces that shape it and will attempt to understand the role that Hinglish is playing in this process. ‘Don’t deboard the Bollytrain’: Trains, Hinglish and Accented English in Bollywood films Rachel Dwyer and Helen Ashton, SOAS, University of London This paper studies the use of Hinglish and English in Hindi cinema in the last twenty years, from Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), focusing on films which are set on trains in India and overseas. The train has been a pervasive symbol of mobility and modernity in Indian culture and film (cf. Aguilar 2011), and has been used as a setting for many film songs. We reconsider the filmic space linguistically, using the methodology proposed by Androutsopoulos (2012) for the study of screened discourse. We examine the range of linguistic repertoires employed in these films, the ways in which characters are able to switch between them, and we focus in on key scenes where linguistic difference is highlighted. Code-mixing in Bhojpuri Media Akshaya Kumar, University of Edinburgh The contemporary Bhojpuri media emerged out of the 'cassette culture' of the late 1980s. While performative practices of the region remained one of its main resources, with much wider net of distribution and the possibility of disembodied performance began the practice of mixing 'foreign' melodic patterns and references, via the competitive enterprise of Bhojouri stardom. Later, with the coming of VCDs, the mixing of musical and lyrical variety could also append the mixing of visual motifs largely borrowed from Hindi song and dance routines. Bhojpuri cinema emerged via this history, as a narrative extension of this audiovisual imaginary still taking shape. But at the same time, as it sought exhibition within the existing infrastructure of the Hindi film economy, it also distinguished itself in terms of language. The older enchantment with Urdu of Hindi cinema was making way for Hinglish when Bhojpuri cinema built its enterprise on rural Bhojpuri. In this landscape, Hindi was also the language of the state establishment just as English had been for a long time in Hindi cinema. The binary that emerged within Bhojpuri cinema narratively, though, was around the gendered articulations—the female protagonists' English-speaking urbanity was to be tamed by the Bhojpuri-speaking rural male protagonist. In certain memorable encounters, such as in Sasura Bada Paisawala (2004), the male star rebukes the female protagonist in English so as to remind her of the shared cultural values. In later instances of Bhojpuri music, this confrontational staging made way towards a more playful mixing, even as the binary between provincial Bhojpuri masculinity and urban English femininity was largely retained. This also meant that markers of a 'performative modernity' (mobile, jeans, lipstick etc.) were often singled out as identifications of the feminine element that was simultaneously desired and needed taming. As I will establish in the presentation, then, the relationship between Bhojpuri and English within Bhojpuri media is deeply overdetermined. The bulk of code-mixing in Bhojpuri media, however, remains around the sexual motif. Various metaphors (cooker, meter, simcard, remote, control, heat etc.) enable Bhojpuri Hinglish: Social and Cultural Dimensions of Hindi- English Bilingualism in Contemporary India 27–28 May 2015, SOAS, University of London lyrics to make a lateral reference to the sexual act. As the mainstay of code-mixing, this tendency is by no means limited to 'English/foreign' objects but often deploys them to good effect (e.g. 'Laden has entered my skirt' or 'I will lift your skirt with a remote'). This paper seeks to explore this vast body of material to investigate some of its key tendencies around code-mixing. Hinglish 'Back to Back': Without the Ad-break Vineet Kumar, Dr. BR Ambedkar College, University of Delhi Advertisements are like oxygen for commercial radio channels, but their such periodic and almost ubiquitous announcements as ‘back to back chaar gaane’, ‘aadhe ghante lagatar bina kisi ad-break ke’, and ‘main hun khurafati Nitin, kahin jaiyega mat meri jan, yeh hai Red FM, char gaane chipak ke’ attempt to give the listeners a sense of advertisement-free, uninterrupted programming utopia. It is however obvious that commercial advertising has moved beyond its classically identifiable formats into surrogate formats, thus blurring the boundaries of earstwhile neat categories of the ‘presenter’, ‘sponsor’, ‘commodity’, ‘consumption’ and ‘content’. Just as the government advertisements ‘issued in the public interest’, political campaigns for the parties, civic informations and those in individual interests have become indinstinguishable from one another in their current avatar. ‘Hinglish’ is very much a part of the general and deliberate creative ‘confusion’ in the radio ad world. Inspired by a certain urban sociology that seeks to speak to the ‘elite class’ clientele in a ‘natural’, spontaneous lingo, it is also unecumbered by the received emphasis on linguistic purity. Characteristically, instances of code-mixing and switching go beyond English and Hindi and very mcuh into Punjabi, Bhojpuri and even pseudo- Sanskrit (eg. ‘promotionam’) domains. The paper will explore all these varieties to understand the origin, usage, deployment and process of mixing in the radio advertising registers in Delhi. Layers of multilingualism and ideas of language: A view from West Africa Friederike Lüpke, SOAS, University of London Many multilingual settings world-wide are characterised by different layers of multilingualism. Precolonial settings in small-scale multilingual societies (in aboriginal Australia and indigenous settings in the Americas, in Melanesia and large parts of Africa) have been altered through an added polyglossic dimension operating at the level of the nation state and beyond. In the little known small-scale multilingual setting across the globe, social practices such as linguistic exogamy, child fostering and other exchange mechanism as well as ritual language use create diverse societies in which languages are conceptualised very differently from settings where languages are associated with particular domains and ranked in hierarchical fashion. In this talk, I take the West African setting I am most familiar with to illustrate these two layers of multilingualism and what the different