Hinglish, Blinglish: How London's ethnic minorities are influencing the English of the capital city

Given the United Kingdom’s imperial past it is unsurprising that British English has incorporated lexemes from the languages of the former colonies, and considering the size and importance of India, the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, it is still less surprising that the languages of the subcontinent – Bengali, Panjabi, Hindi/Urdu etc. – have made a particularly significant contribution to the lexicon of UK English. The process began with the establishment of the British Raj in the Indian subcontinent in 1858 and carried on apace after Britain began to absorb considerable numbers of immigrants from the former colonies in the 1950s. Those immigrants headed for all the major cities in the country but the largest city of all, London, obviously attracted the greatest number of new arrivals. In 2011, in the most recent nationwide censis carried out in Britain, it emerged that an astonishing 37% of the population of London had been born outside the UK. Although the “new Londoners” come from a great number of different countries, residents born in India represent the biggest non-UK-born group in the city. Continuous contact between English (and Cockney) and the languages of the largest ethnic minorities has obviously had a considerable influence on the host language. Lexicographers have identified those terms from the former colonies that have become established as loan words, blends or shifts in the English language, and it is not the aim of this work to go over old and familiar ground. Instead the focus is on the influence of both the Asian and the Caribbean communities on the current slang of young Londoners. Such an endeavour is fraught with difficulties since slang, particularly that of young people, tends to be ephemeral, and we can never be sure whether a new coinage will stick or will quickly be replaced by something else. Two lexicographers specializing in the field, Jonathon Green and Tony Thorne, have produced excellent dictionaries of slang, but both would acknowledge that the demographic situation in London is such that linguistic innovation is extraordinarily rapid and unpredictable. Furthermore, it is not always an easy matter to identify the origin of a slang expression; what looks formally similar to a word in Bengali or Gujarati may not be the result of cross-linguistic influence at all, while a genuine case of language transfer may not be immediately recognizable as such. Folk etymology often appears to be eminently feasible but is nevertheless nothing more than idle speculation. Research of this type necessarily involves investigation of online sources since a study of the slang used by the young can only be conducted via the media favoured by the young. To a certain extent the task is Sisyphean in that where slang is concerned a finding may be rendered obsolete months later by new developments. Occasionally, however, what begins as a slang expression later becomes mainstream, and this work seeks to identify those cases of an innovation that shows signs of having staying power.