Hinglish is the macaronic hybrid use of English and Hindi.[1][2][3][4][5] Its name is a portmanteau of the words Hindi and English.[6] In the context of spoken language, it involves code-switching or translanguaging between these languages whereby they are freely interchanged within a sentence or between sentences.[7]
In the context of written language, Hinglish colloquially refers to Romanized Hindi — Hindustani written in English alphabet (that is, using Roman script instead of the traditional Devanagari or Nastaliq), often also mixed with English words or phrases.[8][9]
The word Hinglish was first recorded in 1967.[10] Other colloquial portmanteau words for Hindustani-influenced English include: Hindish (recorded from 1972), Hindlish (1985), Henglish (1993) and Hinlish (2013).[10]
While the term Hinglish is based on the prefix of Hindi, it does not refer exclusively to Modern Standard Hindi, but is used in the Indian subcontinent with other Indo-Aryan languages as well, and also by "British South Asian families to enliven standard English".[7][11] When Hindi–Urdu is viewed as a single spoken language called Hindustani, the portmanteaus Hinglish and Urdish mean the same code-mixed tongue, though the latter term is used in India and Pakistan to precisely refer to a mixture of English with the Urdu sociolect.[12]
Within India, however, other regional forms exist, all denoting a mixing of English with indigenous languages. Bonglish (derived from the slang term Bong 'a Bengali') or Benglish refers to 'a mixture of Bengali and English', Gunglish or Gujlish 'Gujarati + English', Kanglish 'Kannada + English', Manglish 'Malayalam + English', Marlish 'Marathi + English', Tamlish or Tanglish 'Tamil + English' and Urdish 'Urdu + English'. These terms are found in texts on regional variations of Indian English, usually in complaint-tradition discussions of failing standards of language purity.
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