A multi-case study on the attitudes toward code mixing of English in Hindi-medium television programmes in the Singaporean Hindi community.

• Main Author: Kaur, Tarandip.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Linguistics::Sociolinguistics::Code switching
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/54972
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Television is a salient medium, through which code mixing practices can either be advocated or negatively perpetuated, and in that way possibly affect language maintenance in societies. In Singapore, the code mix variety, Hinglish, has been affectionately received amongst the younger generation of Hindi speakers and this is likely in part due to the high amount of exposure to television programmes that incorporate Hinglish into their dialogue. Through this paper’s qualitative analysis of 8 participant’s responses to clips from telelvision programmes that feature varying types of Hindi/ English code mixing, it was found that there exists a high level of acceptability for Hinglish. Code mixing was viewed positively (although only for informal domains) for its relative ease and convenience in conversation, allowing participants to make full use of their linguistic repertoire to best achieve communicative aims, in line with the current concept of ‘languaging’. Deciphering attitudes toward language alternation as depicted on Hindi-medium television, revealed some pertinent views on attitudes toward language maintenance and language purity in Singapore. While language purists may view code mixing as a threat to Hindi, it remains inevitable that speakers will mix features of different codes so as to enhance their communicative efficiency.