Texting Hindi in English

My 55 year old cook Leela sent me an SMS this afternoon--"Bhaiya dustbin bag lekar aao"--which translates into "Sir please get more dustbin bags"

Why you ask is this interesting.  Well, its because she's using the the Latin alphabet to communicate a Hindi sentence to me, and in a way that uniquely mixes the languages. Leela doesn't speak or otherwise know how to communicate in English. But she, or someone in her family, has figured out a workaround for use on a basic feature phone, a workaround that works quite well!

There are millions of Indians, of all classes, that can do this i.e. swing between the scripts and sounds of Hindi and English on their phones. A big Indian phenomena, a product of the Englification of Indian dialects and languages and the rapid ubiquity of feature phones. This phenomena is in part explained by the explosion of 'Hinglish' in urban and semi-urban India, across a good 400+ million people. Hinglish is a bastardised version of Hindi (and English) in which words from each language are sprinkled into a uniquely colorful and now well-understood version of the other. I've also heard that many such Hinglish speakers and typers (if there's a word like that) don't even know that they've mixed English words into their Hindi! In short, there is a coming together of the two languages in ways that would make language purists blush.

But as for people like Leela, I wonder what drove her to learning how to transmute between languages? What motivates an elderly woman from a Hindi and Marathi speaking traditional background to develop this capability? Could it be because she needs to stay relevant with the people around her? Did she learn it unwittingly because English-named businesses have to by law in India also display their phonetically-matched Hindi equivalent name? Is it because she regularly sees Hinglish sprinkled all over ads and billboards? Or did she learn to do it because its just too cumbersome to text a Hindi message to someone in a Devanagri font?

Beats me. I've also heard that there are phones now now that can on the fly convert text to voice across languages. Meaning, she didn't even type the text to me! She spoke it in Hindi and the telco sent it to me in converted English text. Go figure.