What led to the Bambaiya-fication, so to speak, of the city's languages?
I think in some ways this city is the city of can-do. Whenever I travel outside the city in India, someone will say to me, slightly defensively, 'This is not Bombay, you know, things are slower here.' I think the city promotes a culture of trying harder. And this spills over into language as well. We all work towards being understood; there is pride in language, yes, but there is also a spirit of trying to communicate.

This has constructed the patois of Bambaiyya with words from many other tongues, using a metaphor like Devdas (Bengali literature), or rehashing a pronunciation like zimbly (English via Malayalam), adopting a word like pao (Portuguese via Konkani), khallas (Arabic via Marathi)…The great precedent for this of course was Urdu, which developed as a language for the soldiers of Akbar's army to talk to each other.