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Bilingualism, in the most general sense is the practice of alternately using two languages and thus, a bilingual speech community is characterized as having the potential of employing two distinct linguistic codes, and a member of a bilingual speech community has a dual linguistic competence. Bilingualism of the pluralistic society shows remarkable differences in its nature, form and function, when compared with such phenomenon in the monolingual society. Thus, code-switching is an integral constituent of speech interaction in a pluralistic society. When the functional role of the second language is complementary to the mother tongue (i.e., where members of a speech community habitually employ one, rather than other, language in a restricted but well-defined socio-ecological environments), it creates a community-type of bilingualism. This produces and maintains a speech community with stable type of bilinguals with partical competence.

Languages of different families have coexisted in India for several millennia. The constant contact between these languages across time has given a feature of resemblence unaccountable from the point of common origin and function of alternative uses of two distinct codes without any extra load to the channel of communication process. The underlying resemblance between languages of different families due to the constant contact phenomenon manifests itself in the functional power of translatability and, as Gumperz & Wilson point out, "speakers can, therefore, switch from one code to another with a minimum of additional learning". Furthermore, alternate use of distinct codes functionally becomes more or less like the socially conditioned use of synonymous structure. It is for this reason that as we do not find any mutual non-intelligibility among adjacent dialects, non-comprehensibility is also not attested among the linguistic codes regularly employed as a part of the verbal repertoire. Non-intelligibility becomes pronounced in direct proportion to the geographical or social between the two dialects or social speech styles.

What is often lost sight of is the fact that the contact or convergence phenomenon is an outcome of a wider phenomenon of socio-cultural assimilation based on the attitude of tolerance, functional behaviour and an urge to live together. As the functional behaviour of members of a speech community is realized on different axes and strata, viz., kernel family life, localized social life (village level), non-localised social life (state/nation), so the contact phenomenon is realized in different form and magnitude and with different functions. However, main difference in the form and function of the contact or convergence phenomenon depends on the qualitative difference in the intrinsic property of the strata. Thus, an Indian speech community uses a local dialect in the intra - kin group, a dominant regional dialect for the local public life, a regional (link) language in the non-localised public activities and a non-local, cross regional (link) language when the domain gets widened to the nationwide network of communication. It is also to be stressed that there is a continuous chain from the moss illiterate variety of local village dialect to the highly specialized role of English as an associate language, with the reciprocal intelligibility between hierarchically ordered adjacent areas. Frequent code-switching, apart from its social meaning, can be viewed as playing vital function in the direction of intelligibility condition.

In the pre-independence period English served as a language of knowledge, medium of administrative network of the colonial set-up and a status symbol for the ruling elite which has the locus of power across regional languages, but it was Hindi which served as lingua franca throughout the country for the trade, commerce and mass-entertainment. But as the use of Hindi in the non-Hindi area was generally restricted to the non-elite class in the non-specialized domain of pan-Indian contexts, it was often looked down by the elite as prestigiously low and depreciatory in the social set up of language behaviour. It was called either as 'bazaru Hindi' or based on the contact place was named as 'kalkattia' or 'Bambia' Hindi. This variety of Hindi showed all the characteristics of a contact language, i.e., overall simplification, reduction of structures, admixture of two languages, vocabulary restricted to limited usage, etc. In this vital usage, Hindi had restricted domain of operation but unlike English its users were unlimited in number.

In the post-independence period, Hindi qualifies as a language having multi-dimensional domains of use. Apart from being a language of wider communication, it functions as the primary official language of the Union Government of India and of seven states. It is slowly gaining ground as a medium of instruction in higher education. (As per Census report, 1961, Hindi and Urdu together claim to have one third (i.e., 32) of the entire population as native speakers; as contact language it covers more than one fourth (26.8) of the entire bilingual population.) Now that it has to discharge various functions in different roles in the multilingual setting of Indian speech community, the contact phenomenon is bringing new linguistic features and orientation. It is for this reason that Article 351 of the Indian Constitution envisages the planned development of Hindi in association with other Indian languages for pan-Indian use so that it should ultimately result in an expression of the composite culture of India.

In fact, a language problem is always a real problem in respect of the hard reality of social behaviour, cultural patterns educational set-up. All these problems are further related to the very mental make-up of a community and to the social roles of a speech community which it has to discharge in a real inter-personal communication net-work. In this context the present volume planned by Central Institute of Indian Languages, Mysore is a welcome practical step to explore, in a limited way, the extent and dimension of the phenomenon of contact or convergence. The study is based on the creative writings in Hindi by sensitive minds whose mother tongue is Kannada, Telugu, Malayalam or Tamil, that is the four dominant languages of the Dravidian stock. The analyses reveal the transfer of elements from Dravidian language families into Hindi due to language contact. This is not merely a result of 'interference phenomenon' as linguists try to suggest but is also a phenomenon of elaboration and recodification. A salient feature of this study is that the interference phenomenon has been studied on both socio-cultural and linguistic planes. Looking at the problem of bilingualism as a behavioural pattern of mutually modifying and enriching linguistic practices in form and function will reactivate out study of Hindi in a contact situation in real perspective.