London: English is being spiced up with a sprinkling of some more words from Hindi.

In the latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, there is already a host of Hindi words, including 'Angrez' (English person) and 'badmash' (naughty) while many more are being entered into the Collins Bank of English, which screens words for entry.

The Hindi words likely to find a place in the English dictionary are: achha (OK, or is that so?), aloo (Indian potato), arre (used to express surprise), chuddi (underwear), desi (local, indigenous), filmi (related to Bollywood), very filmi (drama queen or king), gora (white person), jungli (uncultured) and yaar (friendly form of address).

According to a report in 'The Observer' today (April 25, 2004), Arfaan Khan, a linguist based at Reading University, told a major conference at the University of Newcastle this month to expect a "whole new dialect" to emerge.

"This will be an increasing trend," said Jeremy Butterfield, editor-in-chief of the Collins dictionaries.

"If new words are used enough, they will end up in the dictionary, and once they are there they become English words, too. With our increasingly multi-cultural society, in 50 years English will have adopted a mass of words from all the different cultures living on this island."

And those who complain about the loss of the purity of the language are simply misguided, according to experts.

"English is a mongrel language, and always has been," said Bufferfield.