General formula to measure Language Adulteration

How to measure Language Adulteration

I had initially provided this simple equation to address and measure the Kannada language adulteration issue. Here's how to measure Language Adulteration, in general.

Kannada, especially in big cities like Bangalore, is hit by language adulteration, as people use too many foreign language words while speaking it, especially by using English words. For example, even though there are simple Kannada words for tiffin, morning, evening, apple, pineapple, meals, rice, etc., people use the English words for those, while speaking in Kannada.

I've also seen people speaking some other languages using English words a lot in their sentences. Sometimes, Hindi words make their way into the sentences too, but not so much in comparison. And I've even seen Hindi speakers use English in between when it's really unnecessary to do so, for simple words like food, dinner, beautiful, etc. It doesn't sound good when there's a word for something in a language, but some word from some other language gets used in its place.

You may say "who cares?", but I say, one should. I was thinking could there be a way to actually measure and quantify the extent of language adulteration, and then, I thought of this simple solution. I made an equation, a simple and obvious one, to measure and quantify one's adulterated language.

How to measure Language Adulteration in a sentence or a conversation

I had initially provided this simple equation to address and measure the Kannada language adulteration issue, in my Kannada blog. Ok, now, here's how :

Language Adulteration (for a person, per sentence)
= (The number of foreign language words uttered by that person in the sentence) / (Total number of words uttered by that person in that sentence)

Language Adulteration Percentage (per sentence) for a person
= [ (The number of foreign language words uttered by that person in the sentence) / (Total number of words uttered by that person in that sentence) ] X 100

The same formula can be used to find the language adulteration for an entire conversation by using the same for a conversation instead of only a sentence.

Then, the formulae become :
Language Adulteration by a person (in a conversation)
= (The number of foreign language words uttered by that person in the conversation) / (Total number of words uttered by that person in that conversation)

Language Adulteration Percentage (per sentence)
= [ (The number of foreign language words uttered by that person in the conversation) / (Total number of words uttered by that person in that conversation) ] X 100

Putting it in a neat manner,

L.A.P = N(f) / N(l) ------(1)
L.A.P % = [N(f) / N(l)] ------(2)

Where, in (1) and (2),
L.A.P. is the Language Adulteration by a Person (either in a sentence, or in a conversation),
N(f) is the number of foreign language words uttered by that person (either in a sentence, or in a conversation),
N(l) is the total number of words uttered in the language spoken by that person (either in a sentence, or in a conversation).

So, if you're geeky enough, enjoy measuring the words from your friends or family when they speak. ;-) If you're too geeky, you can even go ahead and measure several instances of language adulteration percentages and then take a mean average, for a better analysis. Would it be mean to do so? I don't know!

However, in practice, it won't be easy to count the number of words and number of foreign language words one speaks and note them down!

Images in this post are only representative. Image from Pixabay.