elena bashir

Urdu and Linguistics:

A Fraught But Evolving Relationship

1. Introduction

was honored to be invited to give a talk at the Urdu Humanities

Conference held in Madison, Wisconsin on 14 October 2010. However,
when I thought about this, I wondered, How can I present anything at a
conference on Urdu humanities? I would be like a crow among the swans
a linguist among the literary scholars. However, since I am a committed, card-carrying crow, with no pretensions to being a swan yet
admiring their beauty, I took my life in my hands and proceeded. This
estrangement that I have felt between the worlds of Urdu scholarship and
of linguistics is the theme of this paper. I will begin by describing the
disconnect I have perceived between Urdu studies and linguistics, discuss
what I see as some reasons for it, and end with what seems to be a
rapprochement or a new phase of this relationship.
Both Urdu and linguistics are recent terms. Urdu was not in use
as the name of a language until the latter half of the eighteenth century
(Faruqi 2001, 23),1 the language which has become Urdu having
previously been known by a variety of other names. Similarly, for
linguistics, the term linguistic first appeared as a noun in the sense of
the science of languages or philology in 1837, and its plural
linguistics appeared in this sense first in 1855 (Onions 1955, 1148), and did
not come into wider use as name for this discipline until the latter part of
the twentieth century. 2 Therefore, this discussion will necessarily focus on
1
Bailey (1939, 264) cites a couplet written in 1782 in which Urdu is used as
the name of the language.
2
When looking for the relationships between scholars who study language
and the antecedents of Urdu, one must look for references to grammarians and

97

98 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

developments since the middle of the twentieth century. 3

2. Disconnect between Urdu and Linguistics

2.1 In India
Despite the relatively early development of the discipline of modern
linguistics in India, there has been relatively little work in that country
specifically on Urdu. For example, in the journal Indian Linguistics, from
Vol. 1 (1931) through Vol. 26 (1965) there were no articles with the word
Urdu alone in the title. Articles including the term Hindi-Urdu
appeared in Vol. 27 (1966), Vol. 36 (1975), Vol. 39 (1978), Vol. 49 (1988). One
article on Urdu each appeared in Vol. 49 (1988), Vol. 54 (1993), and Vol.
56 (1995). Of these three, two were by a Muslim author and one by a
European. Two early Urdu-language papers by C. M. Naim (1956, 1957)
concerned Urdu phonology, but were not followed by further work in
linguistics. The 30th All-India Conference of Linguists in 2008 (Linguistic
Society of India 2008) included only two papers with Urdu in the title,
Shukla (2008) and Mustafa (2008). Recently, judging by information this
author has been able to find, it seems that work done in India on Urdu
mostly concerns preparation of pedagogical materials such as bilingual
dictionaries and textbooks, or the holding of teacher-training workshops.
Some Ph.D. dissertations have been written but are, unfortunately, available only in the universities where they were produced and not accessible
outside of India (e.g., Hasnain 1985).
Studies of Urdu varieties other than Modern Standard North Indian
Urdu have received attention perhaps disproportionate to their number of
speakers or position in the sociopolitical language hierarchy. Dakkhini 4
(Urdu) has been the focus of a significant number of studies, perhaps
because the difference of this dialect from the North Indian standard distances it from various religio-political issues and provides a scholar with
philologists and the variety of names by which the language now called Urdu
was previously called, e.g. Hindvi, Rekhta, etc. The earliest academic Department
of Linguistics in the U.S. was founded in the mid 1930s at the University of Chicago.
3
Thus much important work on the Urdu language that was done in the early
decades of the twentieth century, which would now fall in the category of linguistic research, will not be discussed here. This includes the numerous important
works of T. Grahame Bailey (e.g., Bailey 1922, 1929, 1931a, 1931b, 1934).
4
Spelled variously Dakkhani, Dakhini, Dakhani, or Dakhni, depending, it seems, on whether the roman representation is taken from the Devanagari
or from the Urdu spelling.

Elena Bashir 99
an area in which he can pursue his strictly linguistic interests. Also, as a
minority variety, it has an inherent attractiveness for many linguists. An
early work on Dakkhini Urdu phonetics is Qadri (1930); Schmidt (1981)
deals with the phonology, morphology and history of Dakkhini and
includes some texts. Khan and Mustafa (1984) deals with finite verbs,
while Mustafa (2000) is a more recent comprehensive, descriptive grammar. Arora (1986) and Arora and Subbarao (1988, 1989) are studies of convergence between Dakkhini and Telugu. Karkhandari, the variety of Urdu
spoken by the Karkhandars of Delhi, has been studied by Narang (1961)
and later by Rauf (1997), whose work is an articulatory phonetic study of
that dialect.
2.2. In Pakistan
In Pakistan too, there is a paucity of linguistic work on Urdu. Scholarship
on Urdu, aside from literary studies, has been largely devoted to the extralinguistic historical, political, and ideological issues associated with it.
Masud Husain Khans study is a summary of research on Urdu up until
1969, in which he says, the main areas which have interested the Urdu
scholars are lexicography, grammar-writing, and textual criticism.
Descriptive analysis is of recent growth (1969, 283). This summary
prominently mentions the efforts of the Linguistic Research Group of
Pakistan organized by Anwar S. Dil, which culminated in his publication
of three books (1963, 1964, 1965). Khan notes in 1969 that there is no chair
or institute of linguistics devoting itself to Urdu language studies; rather,
any linguistic studies of Urdu are attached to Urdu Departments, usually
headed by literary scholars. He says, Under these circumstances they
have difficulty in doing justice to either linguistics or literature (283). Dil
(1969) gives a chronological account of Pakistani personalities and
institutions involved in linguistic studies in Pakistan up to 1969. Tariq
Rahmans 1998 report contains a summary discussion of linguistic work
done in Pakistan up to that point. In it he concludes depressingly,
Pakistan is perhaps the most backward country of South Asia in the field
of linguistics (192). Bashir (2006) treats linguistic work in Pakistan and on
Pakistani languages subsequent to Rahman (1998). New developments,
including the establishment of a Department of Pakistani Languages at
Allama Iqbal Open University and the advances being made in computational linguistics, are discussed. This report stresses the importance of
technology in the current advances, and concludes on a somewhat more
optimistic note than Rahman did in 1998.

100 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

2.3 Outside of South Asia
Paradoxically, but not surprisingly given the issues discussed below in
Section 3, most of the linguistic work on Urdu has been done by scholars
based outside of South Asia.
Some representative studies of Urdu are listed here, in rough chronological order. Donald Becker, at the University of Wisconsin, worked on
Urdu phonology (Becker and Narang 1971), developed a computer font
for Urdu, and published a reverse dictionary of Urdu (1980), an early
application of the newly emerging computer technology to lexicography.
Beckers dictionary has proved an invaluable tool for this author. Azim
(1978) is a Columbia University Ph.D. dissertation on the verb system of
classical Urdu. Tuite, Agha, and Graczyk (1985), an early article on Urdu
semantics and typology, focuses on form and function in verb conjugations. A few of the works of Anjum Saleemi, one of the few Pakistanis,
and perhaps the first, to work in theoretical linguistics, deal with Urdu
(1994a, 1994b, 2004). Most of his work is in the generative framework and
has focused on questions of universal grammar and language acquisition
(e.g., 1992). Miriam Butt, starting with a Ph.D. dissertation on complex
predicates in Urdu (1995), has been working mainly in the Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) syntactic framework since then, drawing her data
from what she specifically calls Urdu. Some of her earlier publications
are Butt and King (1991), Butt and Geuder (2001, 2004), and Butt and
Sadler (2003). More recently she has done computational work on Urdu
(e.g., Bgel et al. 2007; Butt, King and Roth 2007), and collaborated with
the Centre for Urdu Language Processing in Lahore on computational
projects including a 2003 Summer School on Morphology and Syntax of
Urdu for Computational Linguists and development of a machine translation system. Bashir has three contrastive studies of Urdu and other Pakistani languages (1991a, 1991b, 1991c) and two articles on recent language
change in Urdu (1999, 2006). Hussain (1997) is a Northwestern University
Ph.D. dissertation on the phonetic correlates of lexical stress. Hameed
(2004) is a phonological study of Lucknow Urdu, and Ahmad (2007), a
University of Michigan dissertation, is a quantitative sociolinguistic study
of chronological changes in indexicality values of Urdu in Old Delhi.

3. Reasons for This Disconnect

A confluence of historical and cultural currents affecting linguistics on the

one hand and Urdu on the other resulted in the gulf I am addressing in
this paper. The cultural currents affected both the field of linguistics and
of Urdu studies.

Elena Bashir 101

3.1 Cultural Developments
3.1.1 What happened in the field of linguistics?
After the Chomskyian revolution, linguistics fell prey to a sense of restrictiveness, when syntax and formalism came to be valorized above other
aspects of linguistic analysis. This state of affairs and the resulting acrimony within the field obtained in the U.S. from the 1960s until perhaps
1990, and was, unfortunately, responsible for turning some promising
young scholars away from academic linguistics. 5 This, however, did not
happen in Europe. Roman Jakobson, who was simultaneously Slavicist,
philologist, phonologist, folklorist, and literary theorist, addressed the
relationship between poetics and linguistics as follows: Poetics deals
with problems of verbal structure, just as the analysis of painting is concerned with pictorial structure. Since linguistics is the global science of
verbal structure, poetics may be regarded as an integral part of linguistics
(1960, 350). And further:
Insistence on keeping poetics apart from linguistics is warranted only
when the field of linguistics appears to be illicitly restricted [emphasis
mine], for example, when the sentence is viewed by some linguists as the
highest analyzable construction or when the scope of linguistics is
confined to grammar alone or uniquely to nonsemantic questions of
external form or to the inventory of denotative devices with no reference
to free variations.
(ibid., 352)

And also:
If there are some critics who still doubt the competence of linguistics to
embrace the field of poetics, I privately believe that the poetic
incompetence of some bigoted linguists has been mistaken for an
inadequacy of the linguistic science itself. All of us here, however,
definitely realize that a linguist deaf to the poetic function of a language
and a literary scholar indifferent to linguistic problems and unconversant
with linguistic methods are equally flagrant anachronisms.
(ibid., 377)

Jakobson also addresses the issue of excessive normativeness in literary

studies:
Unfortunately the terminological confusion of literary studies with criticism
tempts the student of literature to replace the description of the intrinsic
5
Some aspects of the field-internal conflicts are sometimes called the linguistics wars (Harris 1993).

102 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

values of a literary work by a subjective, censorious verdict. The label
literary critic applied to an investigator of literature is as erroneous as
grammatical (or lexical) critic would be applied to a linguist. Syntactic
and morphologic research cannot be supplanted by a normative grammar.
(ibid., 352)

Examples of the happy marriage of poetics and linguistics are not hard
to find: Jakobson himself; Watkins work (1995) using historical linguistic
methods to reconstruct and analyze Indo-European poetry; the work of
Paul Friedrich, who is both linguist (1970, 1986) and poet (2010). A recent
article by Michael Wagner and Katherine McCurdy argues, based on
experimental evidence, that:
The restrictions on identical rhymes across languages constitute further
evidence that a better understanding of the linguistic system of a language
can illuminate the study of poetry and vice-versa, as advocated by
Jacobson, 1960, and [...] Kiparsky (1973).
(2010, 174)

3.1.2 What happened in Urdu Studies?

Several factors have contributed to the relative neglect of Urdu by linguists. Extremely important is the structural similarity of Urdu and Hindi:
the syntax of Urdu and Hindi is almost identical. Since modern linguistics
has until recently been dominated by syntax, and the syntax of Hindi and
Urdu is so similar, it has been generally felt that linguistic studies of Hindi
apply to Urdu as well. This is despite significant differences in phonology,
morphology and lexis (cf. Khan 1989). 6 Most scholars working on Urdu or
Hindi title their works using the term Hindi-Urdu to reflect this structural
similarity. Among these, since the field of linguistics got off to a much
earlier start in India than in Pakistan, the vast majority of linguistic studies
are by scholars working with Hindi data or sources.
Some characteristics of Urdu literary culture have also played their
partimportantly, a tendency to prescriptivism. Shamsur Rahman Faruqi
says:
One manifestation of the new Urdu culture was its almost morbid
obsession with correctness in language. Undueand sometimes almost
mindlessemphasis on correct or standard, sanctioned speech in
poetry and prose, and even in everyday converse, is one of the most
interesting and least understood aspects of Urdu culture from the mid-

An extreme example of this can be seen by comparing two dictionaries of

linguistics terminology: one for Hindi almost entirely based on Sanskrit roots
(Nardella 2008) and one for Urdu (Avn 1995) based on Perso-Arabic roots.
6

Elena Bashir 103

eighteenth century onward.7 Persians immense prestige (Persian here
includes Arabic) may account for a part of this emphasis.
[]
[] many of the taboos that originated in the early nineteenth century
are still in place. In theory, and also to a large extent in practice, Urdu
literary idiom remains the most restrictive kind imaginable.
(2001, 152, 15556)

These remarks remind us of Jakobsons comment on excessive normativeness in literary studies. A recent comment from the Internet mailing
list URDULIST (April 22, 2010), illustrates this attitude. Acknowledging that
the Urdu script has been kept vital in Pakistan, the writer of the post
opines that: [] the Urdu that is spoken in Pakistan is now heavily
corrupted by local dialects.... Since most linguists abjure prescriptivism,
this characteristic of Urdu literary culture has made it unattractive to some
linguists.
Urdu is generally associated in most peoples minds with literature,
especially poetry. In this authors experience, wanting to be able to read
and understand Urdu poetry is the second most frequent reason cited by
prospective students for wanting to study Urdu. A quick and dirty
Google search (December 22, 2010) retrieved 1,890,000 hits for Urdu
poetry and 2,630 for Urdu linguistics. According to Salman Khurshid,
Urdu is stereotyped as the mellifluous language of art and literature
while Muslims are charicatured [sic] in Bombay films. [...] So, in free India,
Urdu has never been recognized as a functional language (2006, ix). It is
possible that, internalizing this perception, linguists, who mostly need
prose texts or natural oral discourse for their work may avoid Urdu. An
additional, more recent, cultural factor is the declining social prestige of
Urdu in India. According to Rizwan Ahmad, the status of Urdu in India
has changed, at least in Delhi.
To the first generation Muslims and Hindus born before the Partition of
India in 1947, Urdu indexes education and cultural refinement. To the
second generation born after 1947, Urdu indexes an exclusive Muslim
identity. The indexicality of Urdu, however, undergoes a reconfiguration
again among the third generation Muslims who were born after the early
1980s; to them, Urdu indexes a poor, uneducated, and conservative Muslim
identity. []
[]
Among Old Delhi youth, Urdu indexes backwardness and lack of

7
The writer of the current paper finds this remark immensely intriguing and
hopes that scholars of Urdu take it up as a question for research.

104 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

educationa language that does not going along with [sic] the modern
identity of the youth.
(2007, xxiii, 105)

3.2 Political-historical factors

Paradoxically, Urdu has been regarded as a language of outsiders both in
India and in Pakistan.
3.2.1 In India
First, let us consider India. Barbara Metcalf quotes the following line from
an unpublished poem of Rshd Banrs: Agar Urd pe b ilm hai
bhar se n k, to pir Hindstn kis k vaan hai, ham nah)samj
(If Urdu is accused of being an outsider, then I dont understand, whose
homeland is India?) (2006, 63). This characterization of Urdu as a
language of outsiders is related to the widely held idea that Urdu is
(exclusively) the language of Muslims. Lelyveld notes: In post-independence India, Urdu is associated with Muslim identity, and further, It
[Urdu] is not only almost universally identified as a language for a
regionally unspecified Muslim population, it is also the would-be, official,
non-regional language of a foreign country, Pakistan (1993, 682). Jinnahs
insistence that Urdu was the language of Muslims and that Urdu and only
Urdu be the national language of Pakistan reinforced this development.
Ahmad shows that the association of Urdu with Muslims was strengthened after 1947 and the adoption of Urdu as the national language of
Pakistan. As noted earlier, according to him, the generation of people
born and raised before 1947 did not make this exclusive association of
Urdu with Muslims (2007, xxiii).
3.2.2 In Pakistan
In Pakistan, Urdu was initially and for a long time seen by the majority of
the people as a language of outsiders, the Urdu-speaking muhjirs
(refugees, immigrants) who were perceived as (actually) Indians. It was
the language identified with the ethnic group of North-Indian Muslims
who dominated Pakistani political life for the first two decades after 1947.
Ayres points out that
[...] Pakistans emergence into the world of nation-states took place against
an assumption of cultural and linguistic national consciousness which
located this new nations historical narrative primarily in lands which
remained in India. This historical narrative privileged the literary traditions
of the Urdu language as the exemplar and indeed repository of Muslim
consciousness.
(2009, 18889)

Elena Bashir 105

The resultant privileging of Urdu by the state led to violent opposition to
it by various ethnic groups, especially in Bengal and Sindh.
Linguistics in Pakistan is at a rudimentary stage of development
compared to India. There are several reasons for this. From Pakistans
inception, the one nation, one language model was accepted. Ayres
quotes Jinnahs insistence on Urdu as the national language from a 1948
speech on National Consolidation in Dhaka:
[...] But let me make it very clear to you that the State Language of Pakistan
is going to be Urdu and no other language. Any one who tries to mislead
you is really the enemy of Pakistan. Without one State Language, no Nation
can remain tied up solidly together and function. Look at the history of
other countries. Therefore, so far as the State Language is concerned,
Pakistans language shall be Urdu.
(Qtd. in ibid., 42)

Thus, at a time when consolidation of a national identity with Urdu as its

government-supported medium of expression was preoccupying the
government and many intellectuals, the study of linguistics was initially
perceived as potentially encouraging centrifugal tendencies.
Now, however, with the passage of over sixty years, Urdu has gained
considerable traction in Pakistan. It is used almost universally in one form
or another as a link language, and has achieved the status of a successfully functioning lingua franca and national language. Since it is the
medium of education in the entire country except Sindh, school-going
children do learn it. As Urdu gains currency, there appears to be a
softening of attitudes and a pulling back from the one nation, one
language idea. An article by Jonaid Iqbal in the Dawn newspaper on 26
May 2010 reported that at a seminar on The Role of Pakistani Languages
in Nation Building, 8 National Language Authority Chairman Iftikhar Arif
said that the Father of the Nation was quoted out of context when he said
no nation could achieve unity without a national language. Iftikhar Arif
said the Quaid, in his speech during his visit to Dhaka in March 1948
emphasizing Urdu as the national language, had said the provinces had
the full right to determine the language of their provinces, but people
tend to forget this prominent part of the Quaids speech.9 Even more
8
Note the wording of the seminar theme: Pakistani languages [plural] rather
than national language. The Dawn article also reports that they [members of
the intelligentsia] also asked the government to take practical steps for protection
and development of 39 major languages of the country.
9
The further context referred to by Iftikhar Arif begins:

106 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

recently, Dawn reported on 26 January 2011 that a private bill, Constitution
(Amendment) Bill 2011 had been introduced in the National Assembly
proposing to replace Article 251 of the Constitution, which specifies only
Urdu as the national language, with a new article designating eight languages (Balochi, Panjabi, Pushto, Shina/Balti, Sindhi, Saraiki and Urdu) as
national languages. Regardless of whether this bill ultimately is adopted
or not, the very fact that it has been proposed marks a major shift.

4. Recent Linguistic Scholarship on Urdu in Pakistan

Since 1947, the availability of training in linguistics has been severely

lacking in Pakistan. Until 2009 there had been no department of linguistics
in Pakistan. 10 Linguistic work on Urdu in Pakistan has been mostly motiWhether Bengali shall be the official language of this Province is for the elected
representatives of the people of this Province to decide. I have no doubt this question
shall be decided solely in accordance with the wishes of the inhabitants of this
Province at the appropriate time.
Let me tell you in the clearest language that there is no truth that your normal life is
going to be touched or disturbed so far as your Bengali language is concerned. But
ultimately it is for you, the people of this Province, to decide what shall be the
language of your Province. But let me make it very clear to you [...].
(Jinnah 1989, 183)

J.R. Firth showed an early interest in Urdu and linguistics in India and Pakistan.
In a 1957 address to the Philological Society on Applications of General Linguistics, describing a visit to India and Pakistan, he said:
10

India has taken up American linguistics, including large doses of phonemics, in the hope of carrying out new linguistic surveys with a view to the
enrichment of the national language from dialect sources, and to promote
some convergence at any rate in vocabulary of the principal languages. They
have worked on technical terminology in the sciences and on nomenclature
and phraseology for the administrative and defence services. My impression
is that they still have a long way to go even in the preliminary exploratory
and learning period. And phonemics, like patriotism, is not enough. In
Pakistan, the language problems are not so vast or so intricate, and they are
not yet committed to any extensive programme of linguistic research. But at a
recent Conference in Karachi which I attended, along with American
representatives, a special Committee composed of two Vice-Chancellors, two
senior educationists and three Pakistani linguists, decided to recommend the
gradual establishment of at least two University departments of general
linguistics, and strongly urged the training of suitable young scholars abroad.
(In Palmer 1968, 133)

Elena Bashir 107

vated and shaped by two factors: that Urdu is the national language and
link language for the country, and that there is a desire to improve English-language teaching. Classes in applied linguistics have most often
been taught in the contexts of English as a Second Language (ESL) or
sociolinguistics, usually as elective courses in departments of English. In
the absence of academic training in general or theoretical linguistics,
scholars who wanted to study and write about Urdu were, in the opinion
of Tariq Rahman, perforce limited to comparative or sociolinguistic
research. The prolific work of Tariq Rahman himself on issues of language and power, politics and education (see e.g., 2002, 2010) constitutes
a major component of this work. Numerous works on establishing the
pedigree of Urdu are cited by Rahman, who considers that, One major
theme of people writing in [this] tradition is discovering the origin, the
family, and the roots of a language. In the case of Urdu, this is an obsession (1998, 185). Many such works are ideologically and politically motivated; they are too numerous to list.
4.1 Encouraging Signs
Recently in Pakistan there is a new recognition of the lack of linguistic
scholarship in the country. A 2009 article by Rauf Parekh in Dawn
honoring Abul-Lai iddq laments this fact. Parekh points out Pakistans
backwardness in this field compared to India and criticizes certain
scholars, who, preferring literary criticism, talk about linguistics with
scorn and derision. Parekhs perception is very similar to the feeling that
has prompted me to write this paper. A recent Jag newspaper article by
Kishvar Nhd (2010) leads me to think that perhaps this recognition is
becoming more widespread. With the advent and increasing availability
of the Internet, research materials are more available to students and
researchers. This has led to a growing interest in linguistics among students. I often see email questions from students to international mailing
lists asking for guidance on linguistics-related thesis topics.
Until recently there had been no department of linguistics in any
Pakistani university. However, a recent initiative by Dr. Navd-e Rat,
Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at Quaid-i-Azam University,
Islamabad, to establish a Department of Linguistics is highly encouraging.
Classes began in February 2010 in the M.Sc. Linguistics program. Chances
of its success are brighter now than they have been for previous such
attempts, and I look forward to learning how this effort progresses.
4.2 Computational Linguistics
For the past nine years or so, a new wave of studies in Urdu linguistics

108 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

has been gaining momentum. It is important and historically interesting
that the information technology sector, specifically computer science,
rather than any humanities-related department, is leading the way in these
new developments. This sharp turn in the trajectory of linguistic studies of
Urdu has been brought about by the worldwide information technology
revolution and the keenly felt needs to make Urdu usable as a language
of electronic communication, and to localize essential forms of software.
This is another of the perhaps unanticipated consequences of establishing
Urdu as the state-sponsored language of a nation-state. Hussain (1997),
Lodhi (2004), and Rizvi (2007), for example, are three important recent
Ph.D. dissertations on Urdu. Hussain is an instrumental investigation of
the effects of stress on the phonetic properties of Urdu vowels and consonants, and the theoretical implications of these phonetic changes. Lodhi
is a computationally oriented work aimed at developing an Urdu character pattern recognition system which can classify patterns even under
non-optimal conditions. Rizvi proposes an algorithm for parsing Urdu
sentences based on closed-word-classes (2007, vi). Humayoun, Hammarstrm and Ranta (2007) presents work on software for Urdu grammar.
Several institutional initiatives in Pakistan are directed toward these
objectives. The National Language Authority (Muqtadira Qaum Zabn) in
Islamabad has published a series of dictionaries of various professional
terminologies (e.g., Sabzwr 1995) and several bi- or multi-lingual UrduLanguage X dictionaries (e.g., Khaak 1987). It is working on a Nastalq
font for Urdu and other Pakistani languages and on machine translation
projects. It has plans to create a corpus of Urdu, including both contemporary and historical texts, referred to as the Urdu Database and Urdu
Databank.
The Centre for Research on Urdu Language Processing (CRULP) was
established in July 2001 at the National University of Computer and
Emerging Sciences in Lahore to conduct research and development in
three areas, including speech processing, computational linguistics and
script processing. Their speech processing lab worked on developing an
Urdu speech interface for computers, which, crucially for the field of
linguistics, involves basic research in phonetics, phonology, and speech
systems, as well as other more practically oriented topics. The language
processing and computational linguistics sections worked on producing
language applications for Urdu, including a machine translation system,
Urdu grammar and spell checkers, and Urdu lexicon development. An
online Urdu dictionary has been produced, which in addition to word
meanings includes essential grammatical information, and historical
examples of usage. Recently, Urdu localization of the SeaMonkey Internet

Elena Bashir 109

application suite, and work on a Microsoft Vista Urdu Language Interface
Pack was announced. Their most recent project is the Dareecha project,
which aims to provide Information and Communication Technology (ICT)
access and local language content generation capability in rural schools.
The goal is for school children to be able to start with accessing the Internet at the beginning of the training program, and eventually reach a level
by the end of the program where they are producing their own content
and making it available on the Internet. All training in the Dareecha
program will be conducted for Urdu-localized software. The CRULP
research group has recently moved to the University of Engineering and
Technology (UET) in Lahore, as the Centre for Language Engineering, AlKhwarizmi Institute of Computer Science, under the leadership of Sarmad
Hussain.
The Computer Science Department at Peshawar University has produced work on computational problems in both Urdu and Pashto. In 2008
a Society for Natural Language Processing was established, which is now
headquartered at the Centre for Language Engineering, UET, Lahore. Its
main objectives are to coordinate the multiple efforts at computational
linguistics going on in Pakistan.
Work on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software for Nastalq
script is under way in several places in Pakistan including: the University
of Engineering and Technology in Lahore; the Computer Science
Department at NED [Nadirshaw Edulji Dinshaw] University of Engineering
& Technology in Karachi (Sattar et al. 2008); the Ghulam Ishaq Khan
(GIK) Institute of Engineering Sciences and Technology in Topi, Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa (Husain and Amin, 2002); and the College of Signals,
National University of Science & Technology (NUST), Rawalpindi (Rehman 2010). Working at SUNY Buffalo in the U.S., Mukhtar, Setlur and
Govindaraju (2009) discuss and include a bibliography of previous work
on Nastalq OCR, mentioning in particular the need for a corpus of
handwritten Urdu.

5. New Developments in Urdu in Pakistan

The transplantation of Urdu from its native soil in India to that of Pakistan
has given rise to rapid linguistic change and multiple new situations that
are fertile ground for research, particularly in the areas of language
contact and historical linguistics. Some scholars have expressed a tinge of
regret at the passing of an old order. For example, Metcalf quotes M. U.
Memon from a 2001 article in The News as saying:
No matter how one tries to squash the initiatives to promote it, [Urdu] will

110 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

grow if only because our [Pakistani] national life requires it. So there is no
danger of Urdu disappearing. But what kind of Urdu would that be? Not
the language that will make the subtleties of the poetry of a Mir and Ghalib
accessible or result in a renaissance of Urdu literature. It will be a functional language.
(2006, 66)

On the other hand, Intir usain, writing in Akhbr-e Urd in 1998, in an

article later republished in the Annual of Urdu Studies (2000) and further
cited in Yaqin (2006), finds cause for optimism. In Yaqins words, he feels
that, the cultural tradition of Urdu lies in its shifting regional locations.
According to him, this language cannot be associated with one region and
one culture because it is by nature hybrid and adaptable to new regions
(119). After this general statement, usain goes on to discuss the inevitability of language change and mixing, and points out the fallacy of linguistic purity. A language, if it is to remain living, cannot be bound by
nostalgic memories of a premodern past, agrees Yaqin.
5.1 Social Effects of Lingua Franca Usage
One potential area of research that immediately suggests itself concerns
the effects of the development and use of a lingua francaboth on society
and on the languages concerned. The following general observations are
relevant to these questions, particularly with reference to the lingua franca
function of Urdu in Pakistan. It is possible that a diglossic situation may
develop, in which one language is used for high functions (i.e., in
formal interactions such as official discourse, schools, and written communication), and the other language is used for so-called low functions
(informal, domestic, quotidian, mainly oral interactions). As a result the
high language is often held to be more logical and aesthetic, and
associated with literary heritage; it is the one that is acquired through
formal education. The resulting use of a high variety as the medium of
instruction, especially if it is used as the sole medium throughout a childs
educational career, may have severe consequences for pupils social,
cognitive, and academic development. One need only read the studies on
the value of mother-tongue education to see the implications of this. For
example, Prew (2011) presents data on the relative success of South
African schools where education is carried out in the mother tongue in
the initial stages.
Another consequence is language shift, the situation in which people
give up their original mother tongues in favor of the lingua franca, especially if it is a higher-prestige language. This can result in the loss of
linguistic diversity. Mufwene, discussing globalization, language shift and

Elena Bashir 111

language loss, argues:
Thus, while English has shaken the position of French and other colonial
European languages in these former exploitation colonies, it is far from
endangering the indigenous ones. English is not really the killer language
that non-global approaches to language endangerment have painted it to
be, certainly not in relation to the indigenous languages of former exploitation colonies.
(2008, 251)
And further,
If anything endangers the ethnic vernaculars, it is not the global languages used at the top echelon of the multinational companies, rather it is
the urban vernaculars and regional lingua francas [...] that do.
(ibid., 25556)

5.2 Language Change

Urdus position as national language and use as lingua franca in Pakistan has resulted in rapid and massive changes, both in Urdu and in the
other languages with which it is in contact.
5.2.1 Changes in Urdu in Pakistan
It is well known that the structures of local vernacular languages influence speakers productions in a lingua franca. Phenomena of this kind are
often discussed under the rubrics of transfer or substratum effects. A
classic example of these phenomena is the case of Urdu in Kupwar (India),
which has changed under the influence of Kannada and Marathi in
features discussed in Gumperz and Wilson (1971). Urdu in Pakistan is
changing rapidly, in grammar, phonology, and lexis, to the extent that
many people now consider Pakistani Urdu as a new variety. This was
noted as early as 1966 by Ahar, who observed differences between
Indian and Pakistani Urdu and argued that absorption of words from the
indigenous languages of Pakistan was a natural process and would,
sooner or later, result in all Pakistanis taking ownership of Urdu. A set of
articles written in connection with the fiftieth anniversary of Pakistans
creation (Durrani 1997) discusses these same points, emphasizing the
revitalizing aspects of language change. Given the existence of new
diasporic varieties, perhaps Urdu itself will need to be studied as a
pluricentric language, in addition to its participation in the Hindi-Urdu
continuum. A few of these changes have been noted and studied, but
mostly these phenomena remain as yet unquantified and unanalyzed.
One example of such change is the reanalysis of the ergative marker

112 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

ne to indicate agency and even future intention. An instance of this
change is shown here as (1). 11 In this example, an exchange between
speakers A and B, in which A is trying to persuade B to go for coffee with
him. The reply mai n nah) jn (I wont go) is used as a forceful
indication of speaker Bs (agentive) unwillingness to go.
(1) A: mai tumh kf
pilt ba zabardast I
you(DAT) coffee
drink(CS) very wonderfulal
u
come.on
get.up
Ill take you for coffeereally great (coffee), come on, get up.
B: main
nah jg
I
not
will.go
I wont go.
A: d
gan m tumhr daftar bg t
nah
two hours in
your
office run.away TOP not
jg
will.go
Your office isnt going to run away in a couple of hours.
B: mai = n nah jn
I=ERG
not
go(INF)
[I told you] I dont want to/wont go.

(Bashir 1999, 17;

qtd. from Pakistan Television [PTV] drama
Tanhiy (Loneliness), by asna Mun)

This change has been long noted and much discussed in the literature 12
and has by now become emblematic of Pakistani Urdu as a separate variety.
A second noticeable change in progress is that the category of grammatical gender is weakening. There is increasing uncertainty about gender
assignment resulting from differences between inherited grammatical
gender patterns in Urdu and the languages with which it is interacting in
Pakistan. 13 Some of these languages do not have grammatical gender
Abbreviations for linguistic terms used here are: CS-causative; DAT-dative;
marker. Retroflex consonants are
indicated with an underdot; long vowels with a macron above and nasalized
vowels by a following the vowel, according to the AUS style sheet. As far as
possible, these representations are transcriptions, not transliterations.
12
See Bashir (1999, 1215) regarding discussions of this feature.
13
S.A. and M.A. Khan (2009) describes a computational approach to the problem of gender assignment in Urdu.
11

ERG-ergative; FUT-future; INF-infinitive; TOP-topic

Elena Bashir 113

(e.g., Balochi or Khowar), and in some, gender patterns operate differently than they do in Urdu (e.g., Pashto). Bashir discusses and illustrates
how gender assignment patterns differ in Urdu and Pashto (1991a, 2333,
24755). This results in a tendency to assign many nouns a default masculine singular gender, and may lead to the eventual loss of the category.
This is what happened historically in Iranian languages such as Persian,
and in other Indo-Aryan languages such as Khowar or Bengali. Changes
in gender assignment of some words over the last 115 years can be
observed by comparing lexical entries in an older dictionary, such as
Platts dictionary from 1884, with entries in the newer Kitabistans 20thCentury Standard Dictionary, Urdu into English (Qureshi 1971). For
example, fikr (thought, worry) is feminine in Platts but masculine in
Qureshi; similarly, qaum (people, nation) is given as feminine or masculine in Platts, but as masculine in the 20th-Century Standard Dictionary.
Phonological changes are also noticeable, some quite general and
some associated with different regions. Voiced aspirates are losing aspiration across the spectrum of Urdu speakers; for example, it is common to
hear the word Brt (India) pronounced as Bahrat, with a sequence
of /b/, short vowel, consonantal /h/, replacing the voiced aspirate /b/.
Other, less generalized changes include the low tone developing on long
vowels (especially ) in the Urdu of many Panjabi speakers, or the unique
sentence intonation patterns of Urdu speakers whose first language is
Pashto. It may be that, rather than a singular Pakistani Urdu, multiple
Pakistani Urdus are being born.
5.2.2 Changes in Other Languages
The influences of Urdu on local languages in Pakistan are also numerous
and pervasive. These contact-induced effects can be studied from the
points of view of traditional historical linguistics, or areal linguistics. Many
of these changes are lexical, but some involve changes in the grammar,
for example the increasing use of specifically progressive forms in Balochi
(Bashir 2008, 7778) and Brahui (Bashir 2010, 1). Bashir (2007) is a study
on contact-induced changes in Khowar lexicon, phonology and syntax.
The phenomena of code switching and code mixing are familiar mostly
from discussion of the Urdu-English situation, but they also occur
between Urdu and Panjabi, for example, and seem to be ubiquitous in
South Asia. The Urdu-English case is fairly well studied, but one wonders
how this phenomenon is manifested in a multilingual situation like
Quetta. These facts of language change can lead to a rich development of
dialect studies, both within Pakistan and in various diasporic
communities. Similarly, the divergence of Pakistani Urdu(s) from Indian

114 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

Urdu, and of Urdu from Hindi 14 are rich areas for study. Local varieties of
Urdu spoken in various diasporic communities can shed light on how
speakers construct multiple identities in an increasingly interconnected
world.

6. Desiderata and New Directions for Study

The information technology revolution has given new life to the study
of linguistics in Pakistan. However, the people driving this new research
are generally more computer scientists than linguists. Hence, there is still
a gulf, albeit of a new kind, between computationally-oriented Urdu
studies and other fields within linguistics. What is now needed is to
develop a cadre of general linguists in Pakistan whose skills are at the
same level of sophistication as those of the computer scientists. After that,
the next step, it seems to me, will be to begin to develop those aspects of
linguistics which can bridge the gap between the humanities, including
both linguistics and literary studies, and the sciences. Several areas of
investigation suggest themselves.
Important sociolinguistic questions beg for attention. What are the
social effects of the use of a dominant, non-native language in different
communities? To what extent is Urdu becoming native? To what extent
is language shift taking place in different linguistic communities? The
situation with Panjabi is well known, where in Punjab, language shift is
taking place at an increasing rate in the urban centers. Urdu is being
increasingly adopted, largely as a result of Panjabi-speaking families
speaking Urdu with their children to give them a head start in school.
This does not happen with Pashto speakers, for several reasons, including
linguistic structural factors. This is an area that demands study, since
accelerating language shift is leading to a reduction of linguistic diversity
within the country.
Corpus development is an area which both demands computational
skills and tools and can be applied to the kinds of questions scholars of
literature often ask. For instance: What are the characteristics (lexical,
grammatical, rhetorical) of writer Xs style? How has the use of construction Y varied over time? How has the meaning of word Z changed
over time? Efforts in corpus building have been made for Urduthe
EMILLE Project in England (McEnery et al. 2000; Hardie 2003; 2005); in
India (Dash 2004); in Lahore (Ijaz and Husain 2007) and in Islamabad with
14
Iqtidar Khan (1999) is a study of Hindi and Urdu differences at that time. A
study on subsequent developments would add historical depth to these questions.

Elena Bashir 115

the National Language Authoritys Urdu Database project. The existence
of good corporaboth oral and writtenwill open the doors to all kinds
of corpus-based research, with applications in several fields like literary
study, historical linguistics, and education. A glance at the journal Literary
and Linguistic Computing (e.g., Baker et al. 2004) will give an idea of the
possibilities.
Discourse analysis is another area in which literary scholars have a
deep interest. This is the study of language as it is used to communicate
between people. It usually involves structural units larger than the sentence, and can include topics like textual cohesiveness (e.g., anaphora),
rhetorical strategies, information structure, and figurative language. Existing
research in these areas ranges from studies of pronominal anaphora
(Khan, M.A. et al. 2007) to research on prosodic structure (e.g., Damron
2004) to studies of comparative Urdu and English rhetorical structure on
the lines of Kachru (1988), a study of comparative rhetoric for Hindi and
English. Akram (2008) is a comparative study of speech acts in Urdu and
English.
A plethora of second language acquisition studies involve Urdu as the
L1 and some other language, usually English, as the L2. Those on Urdu as
the L2 are far fewer. Bashir (1991a, 1991b, and 1991c) are pedagogically
oriented studies directed to teachers of Urdu as a second language in
Pakistan.
These changes in the function, status and relationships of Urduin
India, in Pakistan, and in other diasporic communitiesforce us to reexamine the notions of first language, mother tongue and native
speaker. Recent interrogation of the notions of mother tongue and
native speaker has grown largely out of the study of World Englishes,
often in the context of ESL teaching (e.g., Rampton 1990), but the result of
this new thinking is highly relevant to theorizing the position of languages
such as Hindi in India and Urdu in Pakistan. 15 With regard to the Pakistani
situation, are those children who grow up in households where the
parents speak Panjabi among themselves but Urdu to the children, and
the children speak Urdu in school and among themselves but (sometimes) Panjabi with their parents, native speakers of Urdu? What is their
mother tongue? Their first language? Their second language? Given that
the notion of native speaker carries overtones of ownership over a
language and authority over other speakers as arbiters of usage, 16 these
LaDousa (2010) is a discussion of the concept of mother tongue in the
context of the schools in Banaras.
16
Mufwene (1998) argues that proficient speakers, whether native or not, are
15

116 The Annual of Urdu Studies, No. 26

questions have a particular urgency in a state where issues of language
and power are so historically fraught, and where the essentializing of
identities is a persistent tendency. As Annamalai succinctly noted, In a
multilingual country nativity of language is a variable construct shifting
with political perceptions (1998, 154). The linguistic situation in Pakistan is
in such rapid flux that it is difficult to decide the answers to such questions, and one wonders whether and to what extent such notions are
even relevant for India and Pakistan? Ansaldo argues that in
[M]ultilingual contexts in which different languages are negotiated on a
daily basis, and where language contact and contact languages are
ubiquitous [] the alignment between language and identity is complex,
continuously shifting and not easily captured in terms of mother tongue or
nativeness. In this sense, multilingual ecologies question the notion of
mother tongue and its implicit and explicit role in our current theories of
language.
(2010, 615)

Overall, the emerging consensus seems to be that a simplistic binary distinction between native speakers and non-native speakers needs to be
replaced with multiple and fuzzier categories which reflect the complex
and changing realities of multilingual societies.
It is possible that the complex new realities of Urdu will pique the
interest of linguists, and the analytical tools linguistics can offer will attract
scholars of Urdu literature.

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