English and Marathi in language contact

As a result of India’s colonisation by the British Empire, Marathi, as the state language of Maharashtra, has been in close contact with English for more than two hundred years. The intense language contact between the two languages has led to changes at the lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic levels in both languages, but while the effects of language contact on Indian English have been under scrutiny for decades in the World Englishes paradigm, the reverse direction remains critically understudied. In this contribution, we investigate Marathi speakers’ meta-awareness of English borrowings in Marathi, which are partially codified and thus appear ‘official’ to the public, by presenting the results of a large-scale questionnaire. The results show that English loanwords are considered a practical or necessary addition by many, and, importantly, many participants also believe that English will continue to exert a strong influence on Marathi. However, the findings also illustrate that many participants are against an expansion of Marathi’s lexicon with English borrowings.