Hinglish only works when nobody put it on.

There is a hoarding on the way to the airport for a housing project. The headline says “Luxury living, ab aapke shehar mein.” Underneath, in English, the flats start at a crore. Somewhere a brief said the audience was young and aspirational, and somebody added two Hindi words to a line that was already finished.

That is what Hinglish looks like when it is a costume. The mix itself is fine. It is how most of urban India talks. The trouble is who chose the words, and at what stage.

Why it works when it works

Hindi and English do different jobs in an Indian sentence, and everyone who speaks both knows it. English carries the category: the product, the price, the specification, the office. Hindi carries the feeling: the craving, the complaint, the relationship, the joke. “Kuch meetha ho jaaye” works because nobody at an Indian dinner table has ever said “shall we have something sweet”. The Hindi is the thing people actually say, and the chocolate attached itself to it.

“Yeh dil maange more” is the other kind. Nobody said it before the ad, in either language, and the country still says it decades later. A line like that is invented once by someone who hears both languages from the inside. Nobody arrives at it by adding Hindi to an English brief at the end.

Four signs of a costume

• The Hindi can be deleted. “Premium interiors, ab aapke budget mein” says exactly what “Premium interiors within your budget” says. The Hindi words are there to signal warmth without doing any work. In a real Hinglish line, the Hindi carries the meaning and the English helps.
• The Hindi came from a dictionary. “Humari seva, aapka vishwas.” Nobody says vishwas across a counter. They say trust, or bharosa, or nothing, because the trust is in the tone. A word that arrives from a thesaurus rather than a conversation is a sherwani worn to the office.
• The brand only talks like this on reels. The website, the invoices and the founder's LinkedIn are all in formal English, and the Instagram captions say “bro, yeh toh banta hai”. That is a voice borrowed for one platform, and readers can hear the seams.
• It is trying to be young. Some words date whoever wrote them: bindaas, jhakaas, vibe. If a word is in your caption only because a twenty-two-year-old would use it, and nobody at your company is twenty-two, it reads like an uncle asking the DJ to play something for the young people.

Who gets to use it

The honest test is the same one as for any brand voice: does anybody at your company talk like this, and does your customer? A tiffin service in Satellite whose owner takes orders on WhatsApp in Hinglish should write its captions in Hinglish, because that is already the voice the customers reply to. A chartered accountant who speaks to clients in careful English and posts reels in Hinglish is in costume, and the clients who know them can tell.

In Gujarat there is a second question. The mix at home in Ahmedabad is Gujarati and English, and Hindi often arrives by way of an agency in another city. We have written about choosing between Gujarati and English, and the same rule holds for the mix: borrow words from the conversations your customers actually have, in the city they have them in.

Delete the Hindi words. If the line still makes sense, they were decoration.

Three tests before it goes out

1. The delete test. Take out every Hindi word. If the sentence survives, the Hindi was ornament. Either put it back to work or leave it out.
2. The counter test. Say the line aloud to an imaginary customer standing in front of you. If you would switch to plain English or plain Hindi halfway through, the line is not yours.
3. The spelling test. Pick one way of writing each word and keep it: nahi or nahin, shehar or sheher, kya or kyaa. Roman Hindi has no dictionary, so your customers' WhatsApp messages are the dictionary. Spell it the way they type it, every time.

Where it belongs

Hinglish belongs where the reader expects a conversation: an Instagram caption, a WhatsApp broadcast, a hoarding, a radio spot, the line on the packaging that is not the ingredients. It does not belong where the reader expects a document: the invoice, the terms, the proposal, the About page of a firm that sells to Bengaluru. A reader who has switched from browsing to deciding wants the plain version, in whichever language they decide in.

And one base language per piece: one carries the grammar, the other supplies the words. A caption that swaps between sentences sounds like two people wrote it, and usually two people did: one who wrote the English, and one who was asked to make it Hinglish afterwards.

So this week, open your last ten captions and run the delete test. Count the lines where the Hindi could go without anything being lost. That number is how much of your Hinglish is a costume. The fix is cheaper than it sounds: write the line in whichever language you would actually say it in, and stop there.