Decoding Bollywood: why Hindi–English code-switching and standard English outrank Indian English

Bollywood films, the highly commercial films by Indian producers for Indian audiences, have always been Hindi-dominant, and despite the increased incorporation of English over time, the speech of urban elite main characters remains Hindi matrix. This is at odds with the code-switching patterns of urban elites in other Indian media, such as chat shows, and spoken conversation, where switching among such speakers is often English dominant. Young urban elites may use English in isolation; their Bollywood equivalents sometimes do so also, but always with standard syntax. In this article we show how for Bollywood films, English without code-switching typically occurs in the speech of anglicised minorities such as Goan Catholics; furthermore, their English is indexed by the morphosyntactic features of Indian English. This contrasts with usage outside film, where Indian English features have been shown to be broadly distributed. This conservatism of Bollywood speech reflects conflicting attitudes towards an endonormative variety of English within India.