ВОСТОКОВЕДЕНИЕ. 2014. № 1 ФИЛОЛОГИЯ L.V. Khokhlova CHANGING CONTOURS OF MOTHER TONGUE-ENGLISH BILINGUALISM IN INDIA The type of bilingualism and multilingualism of the urban intellectual elites in India is absolutely different from the bilingualism of the intellectual elite formed by previous generations. <...> In spite of the permanent increase in the number of people identifying themselves as ‘native speakers’ of various Indian languages and in spite of the role of the offi cial propaganda claiming to provide support to mother tongues and especially to Hindi, the role of mother tongues as tools of expressing intellectual demands of the speakers and of preserving cultural traditions of the society is rapidly decreasing. <...> Key words: mother tongue, types of bilingualism and multilingualism in India, code switching, code mixing, self identifi cation, speech repertoire of Hindi speaking educated elite, language attitudes of urban elite, language movements. <...> Ключевые слова: родной язык, билингвизм и полилингвизм в Индии, переключение кодов, смешение кодов, самоидентификация, речевой репертуар хиндиязычной элиты. <...> I. The concept of ‘mother tongue’ as applied to Indian reality The concept of ‘mother tongue’ is very complicated as applied to Indian reality. <...> The 2001 Census of India defi nes ‘mother tongue’ as ‘the language in which someone’s mother was talking to a person in his/ her childhood’. <...> In case the mother of the child had died, the enumerator should fi nd out the language being spoken in the household. <...> The census offi cials are supposed to record faithfully and correctly what the citizen says, even in case they disagree with him in identifying the language he 3 speaks. <...> If the enumerator doubts that the details concerning a person’s mother tongue are not reported honestly, he may later refer this matter to his Supervisor for further scrutiny1. <...> There are several situations when Census enumerators may not get correct answers concerning persons’ mother tongues: 1) Uneducated people often use queer names for their mother tongue: caste names, names of clans, professions, religious sects, villages, regions or provinces, names of animals and birds etc. <...> Indian linguists have studied many of such <...>