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Comment by forapurpose | Hacker News Reader

I've watched a couple modern Indian films recently, and the characters switch effortlessly between English and Hindi, sometimes in mid-sentence. More than once I even saw one character ask a question in Hindi and the other quote them in English: for example, (in Hindi:) 'Aren't I the smartest guy in the world?'; (in English:) 'No, you aren't "the smartest guy in the world".'.

I've been wondering: What is the subtext, what are the implications, of using English or of switching languages? There must be some and I'm missing the subtleties.

EDIT: clarification

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Very common among bilingual speakers.

It's called "code switching"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

It's hilarious watching my wife's aunts talk. They grew up in Hyderabad in a Sindhi household but emigrated to UK. They effortlessly switch between Telugu, Hindi, Sindhi, and English in the same conversation.

If you speak and understand Dari (the Afghan regional variant of Farsi), it's not just code switching... There's so many technical things that simply don't have words in Dari. There might be a word for radiator, such as in an automobile, but nobody uses it, they use the english word radiator. Almost anything that deals with technology invented and imported after the year 1900 is derived from either an English, French or Russian word (in the north/Uzbek speaking parts).

Listening to a conversation between two fluent native Dari speakers regarding any moderately complicated business, technical or engineering subject will be about 10% English words.

There are also a lot of words in Iranian Farsi that are derived from French. France was one of the first western european countries to form serious diplomatic and trade relationships with Iran, (a long, long time before Mossadeq and coups, oil companies, etc). One example, in french:

English: Potato. French: pomme de terre

pomme = apple

Farsi: seeb zameenee (literal translation ground apple).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_French_loanwords_in_Pe...

It's the same in Hindi. There are words that most people don't even know the Hindi equivalent for. Even if they do, they use the English version, regardless of their education level. Examples would be "car" and "phone".

Language proliferation in the entire north-west belt from India to Iran is really interesting. Lots of Persian words in every language from Dari to Urdu to Hindi. "Zameenee" is ground in Dari, "Zameen" is ground in Urdu, which is used in every day Hindi as well

The more one studies the history of the Mughal empire, it's obvious how the Persian language of the court influenced things in the region for a long, long time. The relatively brief Sikh empire also made extensive use of Persian.

https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=per...

The characters in Anna Karenina speak French in some parts (at least in my English copy of the book). I don't know why but it clearly meant something for that conversation to be in French. It's there something the story is trying to say when they switch between Hindi and English on that show?

For the Russian aristocracy in the 18th and 19th centuries, French was often their everyday language. Russian was only used to communicate with servants. The sprinkling of French phrases through Tolstoy is meant to evoke this aristocratic world, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the phrases which Tolstoy sets in French are somehow more important than the dialogue he presets in Russian.

AFAIK, in 19th century, esp. after the Napoleonic invasion of Russia it wasn't as hardcore as that. Aristocracy spoke a fair amount of Russian among themselves, but still mixed in a lot of French (and IIRC some accidental Latin).

I could be wrong though.

As far as I know, it was just a matter of style - no deep meaning beyond the fact the speaker was being conformant to the societal norms of the day.

Of course I cannot fit the background into a short comment (and I'm not good enough with history of that period), but the reason for this is that in 18-19th centuries the majority of Russian nobility was very francophilic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francophile#Russia

Of course, switching to a different language - or different style of the same language, like switching to extremely formal speech - has a stylistic meaning, but that's it.

Yeah, this happens whenever people speak more than one language. My experience of it with English and Spanish is that there are some things that are more fluidly expressed in one language or another, or there's a joke that's only possible in one, or there's a joke that's only possible by combining. It just expands your vocab a lot, basically, so you get access to a wider range of nuanced connotations.

Happens to me all the time when speaking to another French/English bilingual person. I think it's just a result of multilingualism, people pick whichever language they're more comfortable using for specific topics. For instance I have a hard time talking about tech in French, despite it being my first language.

It’s a blend of Hindi and English (Hinglish). Here’s a wiki you may find interesting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinglish

> Hinglish, a portmanteau of Hindi and English,[1] is the macaronic hybrid use of English and South Asian languages from across the Indian subcontinent, involving code-switching between these languages whereby they are freely interchanged within a sentence or between sentences.[2] While the name is based on the Hindi language, it does not refer exclusively to Hindi, but "is used in India, with English words blending with Punjabi, and Hindi, and also in British Asian families to enliven standard English".

I have friends who keep switching between three (not counting the made up language only those two understand).

This isn't uncommon among multi lingual people.

Vernacular use has not many such "subtleties", except maybe that some sentences flow better when translated to English.

I have not seen much vernacular use of this "quoting" phenomenon you noticed in sacred games, I think that is mainly to offer a clearer understanding to a multilingual audience.

> I have not seen much vernacular use of this "quoting" phenomenon you noticed in sacred games

To be clear, that phenomenon wasn't common, it was just a powerful example: The second character had just heard the words in Hindi and yet chose to repeat them in English.

Modern Urdu on the Pakistan side of the border is quite similar. The amount of English that is worked into Urdu in a higher budget TV or movie production is increasing. Or watch any of the major Pakistani TV news channels (Geo, etc) for an example.

I saw a few scenes from Waar, which is supposedly a very successful Pakistani film. I however, felt the amount of English being used in that film to be unnaturally high. That is the ending of the film is fully in English. Indian writers are also guilty of this. It makes the entire thing seem artificial and even unprofessional.

Urban population sometimes or often does speak that way, without any reason. Depends on the context sometimes.

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