The reason I picked this example is that it brings out the arbitrary nature of prescriptivist rules. Received Pronunciation, the prestige variety of English in Britain, advocates the use of ‘an’ before ‘historic’—as does BBC according to the Urban Dictionary link—contrary to the prescriptively correct choice in North America. 

A historical (lol) and material analysis of words like ‘historical’ and ‘hotel’ would show that they were both adapted from French, where the glottal fricative [h] is rarely pronounced. When initially used in  English, words like ‘historic’ and ‘hotel’ were pronounced without the word-initial ‘h’, and ‘an’ was the indefinite determiner usually used before them. For this reason, the ‘an historic’ variant is considered prescriptively correct in Received Pronunciation. 

However, The Grammarist, Grammar Girl, and Bill Walsh examples—all North American prescriptivist pop grammar experts online—completely reject the use of ‘an historic’ as either unacceptable or un-American (read: not Standard American English). The AP Stylebook, a language usage guide, also recommends ‘a historic’ over ‘an historic’. 

Someone who buys into standard language ideology would find it easy to justify why someone may think ‘a historical’ is ‘more correct’ on the basis that the word-initial ‘h’ in ‘historical’ is now pronounced in prestige dialects of American English. ‘An historical’ might then be considered ‘uneducated’ speech, or an ‘unnecessary affectation’ as Grammarist puts it or ‘odd accent’ as Grammar Girl does. 

However, a linguist knows that either use is *just fine*. Different varieties—or speakers within a variety—might pronounce ‘historic’ either with a word-initial ‘h’ or without, and use the appropriate determiner accordingly. Even in the case of someone saying ‘/æn hɪstɑɹɪk/’, there’s no way it can be mistaken for any other string of words in the English language. In other words, ‘a historic’ and ‘an historic’ are both intelligible and can be understood by speakers of English regardless of the determiner or pronunciation used.

Bill Walsh’s post lists a lot of ‘authorities’ advocating for the use of ‘a historic’ over ‘an historic’, while BBC and the London Times Stylebook prefer ‘an historic’. While institutions and people whose language variety is considered powerful love to dictate how language should be used, most speakers of English would freely use either variant. I personally would not flinch if an h-dropping person said ‘an historic’ instead of ‘a historic’, which is what I say. Interestingly enough, the use of ‘an historical’ would eliminate any potential ambiguity between the adjective ‘ahistorical’ and the determiner-adjective sequence ‘a historical’.

Yet, given that there are over 350 million Hinglish speakers in India itself, Amul Butter advertisements have no shortage of an audience, regardless of whether every speaker knows the incident/theme that each advertisements alludes to. Getting’ and liking the latest Amul Butter ad—including the cultural references and the Hinglish puns that transcend many syntactic and phonological barriers—is seen as a sign of having cultural capital. Such microdiscursive Amul ads have been around for over 50 years now, and it is universally expected in Hinglophone India that anything majorly newsworthy would warrant its own crosslinguistic pun-heavy Amul advertisement.

More Amul advertisements here:

This was a street-smart guy and a bit of a conman, but he was a trickster with a sense of humour and his heart in the right place. His attitude was born of learning to survive in a breathless, ruthless city. But the tapori rarely messed seriously with the law; he was too smart for that. Like Aamir, Anil Kapoor grew up in Mumbai, but in a chawl, so here's a guy who knows what taporis are all about.

Shah Rukh Khan has never got it quite right (perhaps because he grew up in Delhi, do you think?) even if he sang Apun bola tu meri Laila in Josh, and did a wonderful Goan version in Kabhi Haan Kabhi Naa...”

/ʌpʊn/ is considered prescriptively incorrect in Standard Hindi, and is mostly used in very informal settings. When its use exemplifies covert prestige and in-group membership, it may only be used when talking to another perceived member of the speech community. Even those who use /ʌpʊn/ with out-group members will use /mɛ̃/ in extremely formal (i.e. school, work) or written contexts. There’s no overt prestige associated with using it, even in contexts where the ability to code-switch between Hindi and Marathi is seen as prestigious. 

The use of /ʌpʊn/ is most commonly viewed as covertly prestigious by speakers of Mumbai Street Hindi (‘ʈʌpoɾi’ speak). One of the notable attributes of ‘ʈʌpoɾi’ speak is how it’s considered prestigious to intersperse the national Hindi with more local Marathi slang to linguistically signal one’s unique Bambaiyya identity. The /ʌpʊn/ variant of ‘ʈʌpoɾi’ speak is often associated with young, urban, working class men—especially those that have a lot of social capital via connections to the Mumbai underworld/gangs (or want to appear like they do, perhaps). 

Speakers of Mumbai Hindi outside of the aforementioned social demographics are unlikely to find the use of /ʌpʊn/ prestigious, and probably do not use it in their speech at all. In almost any context of Bambaiyya Hindi, /ʌpʊn/ would be considered impolite if used by a woman or non-man, no matter their socioeconomic class. In the two Bollywood songs I’ve linked to show instances of /ʌpʊn/ exemplifying covert prestige, each protagonist is supposed to represent a lower middle class, street-smart, rogueish man in Mumbai. The connection made between ‘ʈʌpoɾi’ speak like /ʌpʊn/ and the speech of urban working class ‘bad boys’—especially when they’re talking to other in-group members—is so common that it’s a popular Bollywood trope now, like the Business Line article I posted shows. However, in day-to-day speech too, /ʌpʊn/ still goes on to successfully reflect a certain working-class, masculine, informal, and distinctly Bambaiyya identity—to speakers of Bambaiyya Hindi, Standard Hindi, and other varieties of Hindi alike.

(The title says "I'm a ʈʌpoɾi" in ʈʌpoɾi Hindi, the Standard Hindi version would be "mɛ̃ ʈʌpoɾi hũ")

 In the article that exemplifies Lakoff’s dominance model, a study examining the use of uptalk across different social groups is misrepresented to show how “American men have started to talk like WOMEN”, as the headline exemplifies. While the study shows that uptalk was used by all the speakers regardless of class, ethnicity, gender etc, Daily Mail wishes to further the association between uptalk and “insecure, shallow Valley girls”, and mock the ‘uniquely American’ problem of men starting to talk like ‘dumb, powerless, hesitant’ women.  The article uses the study’s findings to misconclude that men’s apparent tendency to talk like a group less structurally powerful than their own could “damage their career potential”, even though the research that the article presents clearly debunks associations between uptalk and insecurity. Here, a specific, studied linguistic feature, uptalk, is being used to validate Daily Mail’s vague patriarchal generalities rooted in maintaining a status quo where men stay more powerful than women. The tabloid tries to further the notion that women speak with less certainty and that their speech is ‘shallow’ and ‘undesirable’, to the extent of ruining men’s careers when they co-opt the “way women speak”. Daily Mail’s claim that “lower pitched voices are linked to dominant behaviour, because deep voices are related to high testosterone levels” outrightly demonstrates their belief that high testosterone levels  can be correlated with “dominant behaviour” (whatever that means), even though the research they quote says nothing of the sort.

In the article that exemplifies Tannen’s difference model, the apparently higher amount of the protein 'Foxp2' in women’s brains is used to justify their apparent tendency to talk more. Of course, Daily Mail is trying to validate the scientifically-unbacked but patriarchally-desired generalisation that women talk more than men by misrepresenting flawed scientific studies, and overestimating the extent to which linguistic conclusions can be drawn from purely biologically determined models of speech (and from research on mice and 10 toddlers). The difference model is demonstrated in this article by showing the how Daily Mail manipulates almost baseless research to justify a different treatment of the genders by society so that women can be continued to be mocked for ‘talking more’, regardless of whether they actually do. Here, Daily Mail alleges that women speak more than men based on the premise that male rats, the ‘chattier’ sex when it comes to rats, have more Foxp2 in their brain. Women, the ‘chattier’ sex when it comes to humans, also have more Foxp2 in their brain, the study shows. The ‘women’ in question, of course, are limited to the female half of the ten toddlers whose Foxp2 levels were investigated. Despite the given researcher warning about “drawing big conclusions from a study of such a small number of children”, Daily Mail is adamant on confirming that women do in fact talk more. Unsurprisingly, the article ignores its own claim that female children “produce their first words and sentences earlier, have larger vocabularies and use a greater variety of sentence types than boys of the same age” when generalising that “women talk more than men” based on a study conducted on ten 3-5 year old children. Not to mention that the study done on the toddlers itself was based on data on rats, that notably cannot talk...

 

(AAE is also r-less in many contexts, but the stressed syllabic ‘r’ like in ‘first’ is less likely to drop, if at all. In Australian English it always drops in this context. This r-fullness, unlike other features mentioned here, is applicable to most varieties of AmE, rather than particular to AAE.)

AAE LEXICON from 'Fancy'

Through her use of features of African American English exclusively in her ‘rap’ music, Azalea shows that she is willing to profit from culture that Black people have created--without interrogating or even acknowledging her privileged position as a conventionally attractive white woman in hip-hop. Azalea herself might think that her popularity is a testament to how multiracial and global the hip-hop community is getting, and yet the way that she shows that hip-hop is apparently moving away from its Black roots is by performatively using AAE as a part of her linguistic repertoire. In other words, although Iggy Azalea’s entire raison d’être is telling the world that “foreign white girls can do hip-hop too”, she is clearly unable to do so without her rap persona intricately performing Blackness through speech and appearance. In Azalea’s case, it is almost obvious that the way she wishes to mark her wannabe ‘Blackness’ is through her language. She unapologetically uses AAE beyond how any other Australian rapper who just happens to rap with an American accent (as many do) might care or know to use. It's worth asking if Azalea would have her entire shtick of being able to 'make it' in hip hop despite being white, female, and Australian if it wasn't for her performance of Blackness (she wouldn't).

Based on my experiences growing up in India (and based on some quick Google searches on Hindi-English code-switching), Hindi would be the more popular language in the kinship, emotions, and even entertainment domains while English would be dominant in the education, employment, technicality domains. English is associated with Westernisation, social mobility, educational privilege, and internationalism in India, and it definitely carries a higher prestige than Hindi and regional dialects in most urban situations. (Although it is not always prestigious in politics, law, religion etc). The use of Hindi syntax with English lexical items in ‘Pichle saat dino mein’ then makes sense, given the categorisation of either language based on the domains they are dominant in in South Asia. After all this metaphorical code switching---i.e. use of languages as a sociolinguistic resource when one is familiar with their social meanings in a given context---might be the most prevalent kind of code-switching in South Asia (although situational code-switching for school/work-home situations is very common too).

In the given video, the singer frequently uses sandwiched English-Hindi phrases like ‘meri laundry ka ek bill’ (my laundry bill), ‘meri denim ki jacket’ (my denim jacket), ‘present mili ek ghadi’ (a ‘present-received watch’ = a watch given to me as a present) to talk about more materialistic items associated with urban life, just like a young person in Mumbai or New Delhi might. Similarly, words that are influences of technology or other cultures like ‘paper’, ‘party’, ‘phone number’, ‘sunglasses’, ‘packet’ etc., that may not have a very commonly used Hindi equivalent, are bound to be remain in English in everyday speech (albeit phoneticised according to Hinglish rules). The style-shifting element of such code-switching is particularly evident in the use of the English words like ‘ring’, ‘heart’, ‘king’---it’s highly unlikely that the singer chooses to use English here because of a lexical gap because the Hindi equivalents of all three of those words are commonly accepted and used all over Hindi-speaking India, and yet a young urban Indian speaker might style-shift to English there just to show their modernity, educational background, affinity towards multiculturalism etc. South Asian youth are frequently mocked by linguistically pure ‘elders’ in the society for our code-switched speech to such an extent that code-switched Hinglish like in ‘Pichle saat dino mein’ is now our characteristic way of speaking. If the song used no English words throughout, it couldn’t possibly have sounded like something written by an aspiring Indian rock band. Conversely, if the song didn’t almost entirely switch to Hindi in the paragraph, it might have seemed odd to intrusively insert English words into the emotional, almost soliloquous expression of the singer’s revelations about ‘true love’. Like many other emotionally-motivated topics, love falls under the domain of expressive, traditional Hindi rather than technical, international English. 

It should be mentioned that Bollywood Hinglish is already one of the major linguistic ‘codes’ that bring South Asia, its diaspora, and people who wish to connect with South Asian culture together---the idea is that regardless of the extent of one’s familiarity with Hindi, it’s not hard to follow a Bollywood movie because of the 1) expressive body language 2) sound effects 3) constant English use! However, ‘Pichle saat dino mein’ does use more Hinglish code-switching than the typical Bollywood movie, and more importantly, does so in ways that would parallel the code-switching of urban South Asian youth. 

Additionally, it’s important to note that not all songs on the Rock On!! soundtrack employ code-switching as extensively as ‘Pichle saat dino mein’ does---some are completely in Hindi, and that makes the alternation between English and Hindi in this song even more interesting. There must be a reason for ‘Pichle saat dino mein’ to explicitly incorporate the native Hinglish speech of much of India’s youth into this song, but not as much into other songs on the movie soundtrack. This may perhaps because in the movie this song was the band’s initial claim to fame and needed to sound more like the Western rock it is inspired by. Or, it might be because the songwriters needed the song to sound like rock in a way that a young aspiring rock band from Hinglish India might actually create it---in expertly code-switched Hinglish rather than purely in one of the two languages. In my opinion, ‘Pichle saat dino mein’ makes a great case for the view that Hinglish, rather than colonial English and Hindu-nationalist (connoting) Hindi, is the lingua franca of young, urban South Asia.