Jure Cuhalev

I’ve stumbled upon a Bollywood movie – Fashion, directed by Madhur Bhandarkar with Priyanka Chopra, a lead role as Meghna Mathur. It’s set in a glamorous Mumbai and tells a story of aspiring fashion model’s road to sucess and downfall. It didn’t really impress me overall, but I did notice something interesting.

While the original audio was in Hindi (at least I think it was not Urdu), the dialog was half English. All the dialogs freely mixed both languages on the fly. This little difference made me curious and I started looking around for reasons.

Searching led me to Bolly-what forums, where someone asked exactly that. One of the posters explained it as:

As for English, it mainly has to do with it being hip, and coo.  But of course, it is also hip becuase films MAKE it hip.  Fashion is defined by music and movies, and that means bollywood.  Scripts are usually written in English and then later translated into the “vernacular.”  Many actors can’t speak Hindi (or any Indian language for that matter.)   You can see this issue played with in Om Shanti Om…compare the dialog of the first half with that of the second.  Good clean urdu in the first half, dripping with english in the second.

If you want to get a feel for this, take a quick look at this interview with Kangana Ranaut one of the actress from the movie (she plays Shonali Gujral). In the first 30 seconds of this clip, they go through different languages a couple of times and it seems that this is the way they’re already speaking in certain Indian circles:

While the whole idea of mixing English into some other language is nothing new and I’ve heard most European language speakers do it to some degree, it’s really interesting to observe a culture that already made it acceptable in their media to freely mix it.

Does this mean that local languages are loosing to the new lingua de franca, or is that just a minor twist on local culture?

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