SOAS Research Online

Abstract

This paper studies language in Rohit Shetty's blockbuster hit, Chennai Express . The train has been a pervasive symbol of mobility and modernity in Indian culture and film (cf. Aguiar 2011), and has been used as a setting for many film songs. This film contains not just Hindi and English, and their mixing to form Hinglish, but also contains Tamil both in pure and mixed forms. Focus on Hindi and English alone seems to present Hinglish arising out of a diglossic landscape, whereas in fact India should be seen as multilingual, and the mixing more complex and made up of a greater number of agents. This film provides a useful way of exploring this, as it contains three separate linguistic codes, which interplay together. We reconsider the filmic space linguistically, using the methodology proposed by Androutsopoulos (2012b) for the study of screened discourse. We examine the range of linguistic repertoires employed, the ways in which characters are able to switch between them, and we focus in on key scenes where linguistic difference is highlighted.