Hinglish I Speak

I have friends who have learnt Hindi either because they are truely, madly and deeply in love with India (I am not exaggerating) or at some point in their lives they want to truely, madly and deeply fall in love with India as they have heard so much about my country (apart from snake charmers, poverty and traffic jams). So pretty often when I meet them, they want to converse in Hindi in order to improve their spoken ability and I always welcome that, smilingly. The conversation begins. And it so happens that they are, of course, struggling with their vocabulary (as it happnes with me in German) and genuinely trying hard to form a correct sentence and poor me is too struggling to speak pure Hindi !! So when I speak a sentence in Hindi that tends to have couple of English words and those words definitely have Hindi words for it, my friends are quick to ask, 'Is there no Hindi word for.....?' And then I think hard, very hard and when I can't recollect, I say 'I will look into the dictionary.' Which, of course, I do.

I don't remember if I ever spoke to anybody in pure Hindi. It has always been Hinglish. I have always spoken with my friends, who either live in India or outside and who can speak Hindi and English both, either in English or Hinglish. It has been only in the past couple of years since I started to live abroad and my non-Indian friends questioned me repeatedly that I started to really think about Hinglish.....just why?

English has just seemed to crept into our lives. Lately, I have read some Hindi newpapers that report in Hinglish. Due to the invention of new technology almost every year there seem to be many new english words we have incorporated into Hindi language. Like, computer, ipad, iphone, laptop etc. We don't seem to translate them into Hindi, maybe because it is convinient to use them because English is a global language. But I found out that the Chinese translate every new english word, say, computer, iphone etc.into mandarin.

Another reason might be, or rather I think it is that in India we tend to think lowly of a person who can not speak English or can but chooses to speak pure Hindi. A friend of mine, who speaks good Hindi, recently visited India for the first time and was looking forward to speak Hindi. The people she met or befriended spoke to her either in Hinglish or English. And there were some she met who insisted on speaking in English even though they could speak Hindi pretty well AND were pleasantly surprised to know that my friend spoke good Hindi. They would often say,'You can talk to us in English....we can speak English.' But my friend was not looking forward to speak in English BUT Hindi and hence she was a bit disappointed. Why speaking in pure Hindi make us feel uneducated? Why does it make us feel old-fashioned? Why is that when we don't know certain or many Hindi words or their meanings it feels alright ('I don't know, so what') but it is not the same with English.

I don't know if the same thing happens with other indian languages. Like, do Bengalis speak Benglish or do Marathis speak Maralish or do Gujaratis speak Gujlish.

मुझे पता नहीं कि हम english words हिंदी में क्यों use करते हैं. पर, of course, मैं शुध हिंदी बोलना सीखना चाहती हूँ because तुम्हें पता है कि हिंदी is my mother tongue.