Wednesday 21 October 2009

Kahte hain ki that rupees are the biggest: On complementiser doubling in Hindi-English codeswitching

Codeswitching--switching between languages--is a prominent feature of language in multilingual India.

Sometimes the switch between languages occurs in-between sentences, as in example I (examples I-V adapted from Hock & Joseph[1]:360-1):
(I)

Kahte

haiṁ

ki

ājkal

bahut

logoṁ

ko

yah

saying

are

that

nowadays

many

people

to

this

nahīṁ

pasand

hai

ki

rāj

nārāin

pāgal

not

pleasing

is

that

Raj

Narain

crazy

ke samān

aikṭ kar

rahā

hai.

like

act

AUX

is.

But he seems like the same old Raj Narain to me.


"They're saying that these days many people don't like it that Raj Narain is acting like a fool. But he seems like the same old Raj Narain to me."

But codeswitching can also occur in the middle of a sentence, at the boundary between two clauses, as in example II:
(II)

Kahte

haiṁ

ki

ājkal

bahut

logoṁ

ko

yah

saying

are

that

nowadays

many

people

to

this

nahīṁ

pasand

hai

ki

Raj

Narain

is

not

pleasing

is

that

acting

like

a fool...


"They're saying that these days many people don't like it that Raj Narain is acting like a fool..."

We even find examples of a switch from Hindi to English back to Hindi in a single sentence (again, the switches occur at the clause boundaries), as in example III:
(III)

Kahte

haiṁ

ki

nowadays

many

people

don’t

saying

are

that

like

it

ki

rāj

nārāin

pāgal

that

Raj

Narain

crazy

ke samān

aikṭ kar

rahā

hai...

like

act

AUX

is...


"They're saying that these days many people don't like it that Raj Narain is acting like a fool..."
Codeswitching in the middle of a clause is much rarer, and codeswitches in the middle of a syntactic constituent, as in example IV, are nearly ungrammatical (as indicated by the '??!' marking):
(IV)??!

Kahte

haiṁ

ki

ājkal

bahut

people

don't

like...

saying

are

that

nowadays

many


??! "They're saying that these days many people don't like..."
Interestingly, however, codeswitching can occur both immediately before and immediately after the clause boundary, so that, for instance, the Hindi complementiser (or subordinator) ki "that" may stand alone in the midst of English words, as in example V (...don't like it ki Raj Narain is...):
(V)

Kahte

haiṁ

ki

nowadays

many

people

don’t

saying

are

that

like

it

ki

Raj

Narain

is

that

acting

like

a fool.


"They're saying that these days many people don't like it that Raj Narain is acting like a fool..."
What is even more interesting is that it appears to be possible to "double" the complementiser at the point of the codeswitch, so that the complementiser appears once in English (that) and then immediately following in Hindi (ki/ke), as in example VI. This example is taken from the song "Sabse Bada Rupaiya" from the 2005 Hindi film Bluffmaster, starring as male lead Abhishek Bachchan (son of Amitabh Bachchan, the world's most famous actor; and grandson of 'Shadowist' [छायावाद] poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan)--see the video below:
(VI)

Na

bībī,

na

baccā,

na

bāp

baṛā,

na

māiyā,

Not

wife,

not

child,

not

father

big,

not

mother,

the

whole

thing

is

that

ke,

bhāiyā,



that,

brother,


sabse

baṛā

rupayā.

than-all

big

money.


“It’s not your wife, your child, your father, or your mother that’s important—the whole thing is that (that), brother, money’s greater than everything.”


This song is actually a remake of a song from the 1976 Mehmood film "Sabse Bada Rupaiya"; the lyrics of the 1976 version are slightly different, but the line the whole thing is that ke, bhāiyā, sabse baṛā rupayā also occurs there:


[There's some other interesting codeswitches in the old version too.]

The complementiser of Hindi is usually ki /ki/, and the ke /kē/ found in the lyrics cited above seems to be the Urdu form. (This complementiser was actually originally borrowed from Persian ke /ke/; Hindi/Urdu lack the short /e/ vowel found in Persian, and chose to nativise it in different ways: Hindi preserved the vowel length at the expense of the vowel quality [=/ki/], Urdu preserved the vowel quality at the expense of the vowel length [=/kē/].)

In any case, this doubling of the complementiser at the point of the codeswitch (...that ke...) is rather intriguing, though I must admit I'm not exactly sure what it tells us about the syntactic structure of Hindi/Urdu clauses...

For more Hindi-English codeswitching, again from Bluffmaster, here's another video, the Hiphop/Bollywood-fusion song "Right Here, Right Now"--with Abhishek himself as male vocalist.

[you may have to click to close the ads which might appear between 10-15 seconds in to see the subtitles]

There's no complementiser-doubling here, but there are a number of interesting "translations" from Hindi into "hiphop English", e.g. the actress Priyanka Chopra becomes "Piggy Chops" (vaguely reminiscent of rapper names like "Snoop Dogg"). Also is the line "hiphop fakers" or "hiphop fakirs"? (fakir = a Sufi mystic who performs feats of magic)

References:
[1]Hock, Hans Henrich & Brian D. Joseph. 2009. Language history, language change, and language relationship. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2nd edn.

5 comments:

  1. The two meta-rules of Universal Codeswitching Grammar: you can only code-switch at a constituent boundary, and only when the constituents appear in the same order in both languages. Thus you cannot codeswitch from French to English between a noun and its following adjective, because in English the adjective would have to precede the noun.

    Borrowings, either standard or ad hoc, in the speech of bilinguals can confuse the issue, though; they look like codeswitching (especially if the borrowed word becomes indeclinable or otherwise oddball in the borrowing language) but really aren't.

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  2. Thanks for making these assumptions explicit. (I would call ad hoc borrowings code-mixing though).

    Have you come across other examples of "doubling" at the point of the codeswitch?

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  3. Fascinating post, thanks. I was thrown a little bit by seeing कहते transliterated as "kahte". I normally see it as "kehte" which is as it sounds. Google suggests that the "incorrect" but more phonetic transliteration is the more common, too.

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  4. @maxqnz: Thanks. कहते transcribed as "kahte" is standard Indological practice. "Kehte" is really a "बॉलीवुड लिपि" transcription. [I always like to try to pronounce romanised Bollywood titles according to the Indological standard, e.g. the movie "U Me Aur Hum" as if it represented उ मे और हुम (this habit for some reason doesn't seem to amuse my wife as much as it does me...)] A more phonetic version of कहते would really be something like /kεtē/, and अच्छा would be something like /ɑtʃtʃha/ -- which is why I preferred the Indological transliteration to a phonetic transcription.

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  5. No argument from me about which is more correct, I just remarked that it is not so commonly seen. Please let your wife know that I am VERY MUCH a kindred spirit on the "U Me Aur Hum"= उ मे और हुम thing. Actually, it's probably more the other way around that annoys me.

    I guess I was guilty of using the word phonetic in the loose layperson's sense of the word because, although I SHOULD learn IPA, I have Gurmukhi and Nastaliq (in that order) on my to do list before IPA.

    On a technical aside, why do I appear to be unable to copy and/or paste in these comment boxes?

    ReplyDelete