Hybridisation in English Newspapers in Bangladesh

Over the decades, Bangladesh has experienced many language contact situations. Based on history, there are many instances of the presence of Urdu, Perso-Arabic, and Hindi (Sanskrit) words within the Bengali language. As a result, when Bangladeshi newspapers use English, there are common Bengali loanwords throughout the articles, derived from the region’s developmental process. The motivation behind this study is to look at hybridisation in Bangladeshi English newspapers and to determine their functions in relation to the socio-cultural and political contexts in which they are found. This study is being conducted as a qualitative textual content analysis. The data were collected from three national dailies namely, The Daily Star, The Independent and The News Today. This study strives to create a corpus of contact expressions based on these newspapers; delineate the types of Bengali and other loan words used in the corpus and reasons for their use; and examine the results in relation to the language ecology. The analysis of data in this study shows that hybridisation is one of the most language contact features found in the English dailies in Bangladesh which contributes to the higher number of loanwords in English and are often used by people in different domains within Bangladesh.