Dominant Language, Urbanization and Lexical Depletion of Native Language: A Corpus Linguistics Study

India is home to hundreds of languages. Each Indian language is unique and an identity marker for individuals, communities, and their culture. The English language, though not native to India, has a significant presence in this vast country. One hundred and ninety years of British colonial rule over India had established English as the ‘dominant language’ in the country long ago. Rapid urbanization; and the consequent proliferation of telecommunication networks have further increased its dominance over Indian languages in the last few decades. The heavy code-mixing of English words in the Indian languages is reducing the richness of the vocabulary of the Indian languages by replacing their words with English words, thereby initiating ‘lexical depletion’ based language change in the native languages. This paper is an empirical study to map the code-mixing of English words in the Hindi language and its impact on the Hindi language, as observed in Greater Noida, a town that has seen rapid urbanization since 1991. This paper attempts to explain the implications of code-mixing on the Hindi lexicon by analysing a corpus of spoken language data using corpus-linguistics and computational linguistics methodologies.