Social, economic, and demographic factors drive the emergence of Hinglish code-mixing on social media

The advent of globalization and adaptation to multiple cultures has produced a fusion of Hindi and English, known as Hinglish. Code-mixing—using multiple languages within a single utterance—has become prominent among Hindi-speaking citizens online and offline. While prior work examined linguistic traits of Hinglish, key questions remain: How did Hinglish evolve, what factors drive its evolution, and does English fusion impact all Hindi words uniformly? Using Twitter data, the authors provide empirical and statistical evidence showing that Hinglish adoption depends on socio-economic and demographic factors. They formulate dynamic models to explore drivers of growth, forecast Hinglish’s future adoption, and estimate user propensity to change linguistic preferences. Findings show the Hinglish population evolved steadily between 2014 and 2022 (annualized growth 1.2%), with Hinglish usage on Twitter increasing 2% annually. The impact of Hinglish is not uniform across word groups and alters contextual meanings differently. Though focused on India’s Hinglish community, the framework can generalize to other code-mixed pairs like Spanish–English or Chinese–English.

Ayan Sengupta, Soham Das, Md. Shad Akhtar, Tanmoy Chakraborty