Home ยป Multilingualism ยป Urban Speech in India

Urban Speech in India

If you live in a city in India, you probably have at least some facility in at least two languages. As Salman Rushdie once observed: “If you listen to the urban speech patterns there you’ll find it’s quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language, go through a second language and end in a third. It’s the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages. You are always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.” This is part of a complete episode.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

“Hitten” Every Green Light

A native Texan says his Canadian wife teases him about his use of hitten for a past participle, as in You have hitten every green light instead of You have hit every green light. Charles Mackay’s 1888 work, A Dictionary of Lowland Scotch, does...