Bollywood is the informal name given to the popular Mumbai-based
Hindi language film industry in India. The term is sometimes
used incorrectly to refer to the whole of Indian cinema.
The name is a portmanteau of Bombay, the old name of Mumbai,
and Hollywood, the center of the United States film industry.
Though some purists deplore the name, arguing that it
makes the industry look like a poor cousin to Hollywood,
it seems likely to persist and now has its own entry in
the Oxford English Dictionary. Bollywood and the other
major cinematic hubs (Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, and Malayalam)
constitute the broader Indian film industry, whose output
is the largest in the world in terms of number of films
produced and in number of tickets sold. Bollywood is a
strong part of popular culture of not only India and the
rest of the Indian subcontinent, but also of the Middle
East, parts of Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, and among
the South Asian diaspora worldwide.
Bollywood has its largest diasporic audiences in the
UK, Canada, and the U.S., all of which have large Indian
immigrant populations. Bollywood is also commonly referred
to as "Hindi cinema", even though use of poetic Urdu words
is fairly common. There has been a growing presence of
English in dialogues and songs as well. It is not uncommon
to see movies which feature dialogues with English words
and phrases, even whole sentences. A few movies are also
made in two or even three languages (either using subtitles,
or several soundtracks).