Hinglish Live: Language mixing across media

by Francesca Orsini, Ravikant

What is Hinglish―sociolect, insurrection or language? Why and how does Hinglish occupy such a prominent place in our daily language? What does it represent and how does it define our notions of self? Hinglish Live asks these and other questions about English and language mixing in contemporary India across a range of media domains―from English teaching to advertising; FM radio to literature; newspapers to cinema; technology to TV programmes. The essays in this volume are interdisciplinary, juxtaposing the personal with the political, the academic with the popular, and are complemented by a selection of images that demonstrate how widespread the use of Hinglish is.

372 pages, Perfect Paperback

Published January 22, 2022

About the author

Francesca Orsini is Reader in the Literatures of North India. She took her undergraduate degree in Hindi at the University of Venice, followed by a long spell in Delhi. Her PhD research at SOAS was on the Hindi public sphere of the 1920s and '30s. She taught at the University of Cambridge for 11 years and joined SOAS in 2006. She teaches undergraduate and postgraduate courses in Hindi literature.

Dr Orsini's main area of research is modern Hindi literature, where she has published on Hindi literary life during the nationalist period; commercial genres such as detective fiction and "social romances"; women writers and women's journals; nineteenth-century commercial publishing in Hindi and Urdu. She has organized several workshops and conferences, including one on Love in South Asia.