Artistic Re-creation of Grassroots English: Ideologies and Structures in English Vinglish

Abstract

This paper investigates the representation of grassroots English in a recent (2012), successful Bollywood movie, English Vinglish. The plot focusses upon Shashi, a young Indian mother who speaks hardly any English, a fact which is hugely embarrassing to herself and her family. During a stay in New York City she secretly takes beginners' English lessons with other international, instrumentally motivated learners. After a section which outlines some background, the paper's first main part analyzes language attitudes and ideologies held by the characters in this movie, presenting a short Critical Discourse Analysis of scenes from the movie, meant to disclose hidden linguistic value judgements. The second part adopts a linguistically descriptive perspective, presenting an analysis and interpretation of the basic syntactic patterns employed by Shashi and her classmates. These reduced but communicatively sufficient structures are characteristic of early adult learners' usage, and are shown to reflect internal development and to be similar to what has recently been termed "grassroots spread" of English. They are shown to display structural similarities with pidgins, patterns found in early language acquisition, and widespread nonstandard structures found in World Englishes.