A study of pejoration in Hindi

This study is a descriptive analysis of semantic pejoration in Hindi that seeks to examine how selected lexical items shift diachronically from the status of a neutral or descriptive meaning to a negative one. While pejoration as a category has been widely discussed in the literature of semantic change, systematic analysis in Hindi remains limited. The study adopts a qualitative descriptive methodology by analyzing a curated dataset of lexical items from the Hindi lexicon that exhibit pejoration. These are then analyzed diachronically across historical and contemporary dictionaries, literary texts, and contemporary media discourse in order to look for their original meaning(s) alongside their contemporary pejorative sense(s) so as to identify and trace the trajectory of the semantic shift. The central findings indicate that pejoration in Hindi is not limited exclusively to caste-based and gender-based terms and that it follows identifiable and recurrent mechanisms; such as affective intensification, semantic narrowing, taboo association, and status contamination. These linguistic processes interact with socio-psychological factors; such as moral evaluation, group-based categorization, and repeated negative contextualization, altogether contributing to the stabilization of derogatory meanings across domains. The results indicate that pejoration in Hindi operates as a structured and socially motivated process rather than as random lexical degradation. This reflects how systematic semantic change is embedded within broader social hierarchies and cultural values that are encoded over time.