He’s serious. Your typical native Anglo Californian (like me, for example) is completely mono-lingual. Californians of recent Mexican descent are likely to be bi-lingual, when talking amongst themselves.
I don’t think anybody’s thinking you’re a jerk.
I think you admitted to being a bit less worldly than some other folks. Which is real easy for anyone to be if they’ve lived near the middle of the US for most of their life.
I don’t see why it has to be cute or funny that I live in a place where everyone speaks the same language. I’m not saying that it’s cute or funny for people to live in a place where people speak multiple languages. This is how it is where I live, that is how it is where they live. So why am I the odd one out?
indian, who presumably is an Indian who lives and grew up in India, says that the “code switching” is new to him/her. So why on earth would it be precious or un-worldly of it to be new to me?
I for one don’t blame you at all for not being aware of the phenomenon. There must be plenty of things that you take for granted which would take me completely by surprise, and I’m sure you’d find that surprising. I think that’s what is happening here. I’m sure the incredulity is not meant as a slight.
In other words, he’s surprised that everyone else is so surprised that you were surprised.
Precisely 
You know what? Never mind.
Nobody thinks you’re a jerk - expressing surprise at something isn’t the same as condemning it - though I can see why you might feel that way and become defensive. But really, nobody’s criticising you. And it’s good that you want to learn more.
I’ll just note that Anaamika took pains to point out that she hearts you and wasn’t calling you out or anything. Keep enjoying Bollywood. God knows I’m not going to.
Well, actually, I was surprised that ZipperJJ was surprised that everyone else was so surprised, but hey, it’s not like we SDMB janta are pedants at heart 
While I’m no fan of movies in general and Bollywood in particular, they have been coming up with some surprisingly good stuff of late, most of which never makes it to the west because it isn’t ,yknow, ‘Bollywood’. If you’re into edgy, darker fare, you could try some of Anurag Kashyap’s stuff - DevD and Gulaal come to mind.
This happens in Chinese as well.
My wife is from Taiwan (I’m from California, but spent 7 years in Taiwan) and when she talks to her sister, they go back and forth between Mandarin and Taiwanese.
I sometimes ask her why she doesn’t just stick to Mandarin (or Taiwanese) and she says that its so natural to switch back and forth that she doesn’t even notice she is doing it.
(Its not that I want to eavesdrop, I just like to practice my listening skills and my Taiwanese is not good at all.)
It’s xenomania… the opposite of xenophobia.
It’s the preference of people to use a foreign language in their communication to show an elevated status due to their advanced education compared to people who can only speak their native language.
Not really. I am monolingual, pretty much, not fluent in anything other than english but can understand another language fairly decently. And my reaction was the same. I think it’s just urban snobbery.
Not denying that people do that ever though, just don’t think it applies here.
For one thing, I had trouble finding a definition for Xenomania that wasn’t about the british band, which leads me to believe it is not a widely accepted term. For another, the definition I did find was
Which does not accurately(or at all) describe what the OP has referred to. Code-switching, which Mike H linked to, is a much better technical description.
Me neither, but in some contexts - written, especially - Commonwealth English could be a useful term. For example, how often has it happened on here that an American has asked about a British term and Aussies and Irish chime in and give the same answer as the Brits?
And it’s a better term than international English, because, as others have pointed out, that doesn’t include countries like the Philippines, where English is one of the official languages but it’s based on American English, and it’s not part of the Commonwealth.
I do always like seeing and hearing people do that language-switching. My Philippino relations do it all the time. Other people I know do it, like German, Spanish and Swedish friends on Facebook (or, less often, in real life), but I know a little of their languages (or a lot, with German) so I can usually work out what they’re saying anyway. With Tagalog, it’s exotic words interspersed with English. So I can see how Hinglish would stand out more than Spanglish.
It also stands out because so often whole sentences will be in different languages, not just different words or phrases, presumably because this is bi/tri/etc lingualism rather than a creole where the needed words and phrases conform to a common grammar.
About half the people I know are at least bilingual. I now suspect the company I used to work for liked to collect languages–every now and then, a call would go out over the intercom, “anyone here speak Hindi?” Or Serbian, or Korean, or Russian, or Japanese… French and Chinese were givens. There was even a contingent of Esperanto speakers. Oddly, the one language they had trouble finding was Turkish.
I rather like a multi-language environment. I grew up in the 'burbs, in smaller Southern Ontario towns, and didn’t really hit the multilingual stuff until adulthood in the Big City. We were exposed to French, of course, but it didn’t take because there were few speakers in the area. What a difference to today! In the past fifty years, with everything from official bilingualism to wave after wave of immigration, the Greater Toronto Area has become very multilingual.
The common language is still English, though. I wonder whether the next generation will start using more than one language on a daily basis, or whether people will converge towards English? ISTR reading that many places in the States were this multilingual in the early 20th century, but then English won out. How is this developing in India?
And it’s possible to pick up this kind of code-switching in adulthood. I was doing it between English, Esperanto, and even a little bit of French when I was in Montréal. I remember being at Juste Pour Rire, the comedy/art/theatre street festival, and excitedly calling some friends outside Toronto, and having them interrupt me because I was chattering in a mix of the three languages.
Short answer - English is unlikely to completely replace local Indian languages in the next century, although it’ll likely be spoken by many more people.
Long answer -
For most of middle class India(roughly 300 million people), English is the de facto national language. It’s used as the teaching medium in schools, is the mode of conducting business in almost all offices, and is generally viewed as aspirational, as it allows people to hop on to the globalisation bandwagon. English-medium schooling is sought after by lower income groups(the other 800 million) as well. So in that sense, things are moving towards English becoming more widespread.
However, to offset this trend, for a large fraction(60-70%) of even those people who speak and write English, it is not a natural first language. So while they can (usually) make a decent stab at communicating in it, they don’t think in English and thus prefer to converse in the language they’re most familiar with. And of course English speakers and non-English speakers are not insulated from each other even in the richest households, so even the snobbiest of the rich will be bilingual to communicate with non-English speaking India, although their local language may be somewhat stilted.
To add to this, there has been a resurgence in interest in local languages of late among the middle class and the rich, as a result of younger Indian generations being more confident in their identity and position in the world. For instance, the number of Bollywood movies that even snobs acknowledge as equivalent to the best English movies, is increasing every year. Another striking example is the rock scene in India. Twenty years ago, it was completely dominated by bands doing cover versions of western bands and their few originals would be in English. Today there are a number of bands that do metal and rock originals in local languages and are very popular.
All in all, multilingualism for the win
Given that we’re in GQ, I’m just going to say: factually incorrect.
English is a native language for most educated Indians. The key here is that most Indians have more than one “native” language.