Urdu, Urdlish or Unglish?
By Dr Ahmad Faruqui
Dansville, CA


It seems that a new English word creeps into modern Urdu usage every week. This happens in India and Pakistan, where some 250 million regard Urdu (and Hindi) as their primary language. Interestingly, the people who are indulging in the Anglicization of Urdu are not just those who studied in English medium schools but also those who studied in Urdu medium schools.
The fact that there are foreign words in Urdu is by itself not a cause for concern. Every language including English has some so why should Urdu be an exception. Even its name reflects the origin of the language as a lingua franca during the Delhi Sultanate.
But what is of concern is the increasing rate at which Urdu is being Anglicized. The English words that are creeping into street (and even literary) Urdu are not new or technical words for which there is no equivalent in Urdu. They are common words with well-established Urdu equivalents. Thus, as English words are wantonly introduced into Urdu, they don’t enrich it. Indeed, such a lexical invasion if left unchecked will result in the death of Urdu in this century.
There are of course several English words for which ready Urdu substitutes do not exist and that enrich Urdu by their introduction. Examples include technical words such as doctor, dynamo, machine, hospital and surgeon. Other examples can be found from sports such as cricket that have been imported into the subcontinent.
The problem arises when common English words displace Urdu words. This phenomenon occurs in several classes of words having to do with education (e.g., blackboard, chalk, class, college, lecture, school, test, time and university), cooking (chicken, fish, meat, mutton, restaurant), entertainment (club, film, hero, hotel, movies, TV), interjections (bye, hello, hi, OK, please, thank you) and other uses (bus, car, market, MNA, plane, politics, president, ship, train). These English words are routinely encountered in every day conversation and heard on the radio and TV. They have found their way onto billboards, degree certificates, and menus where they are written incongruously in Urdu script.
Why is this happening? What can be done about it? I decided to pose these questions on Writers Forum, a moderated web-based group run by Munir Pervaiz out of Toronto, Canada, that has a global membership of more than two thousand members including several prominent writers, journalist and professionals. The initial response was that and this infusion of English is a normal part of linguistic development. After all, all languages grow with time and there is little to be gained by taking a pedantic stance on the purity of Urdu.
But then others expressed a concern that such linguistic “development” was happening much faster in Urdu than in other languages. Some asked how could displacement of native word s by foreign words be regarded as development? At issue is the rate of assimilation of English words into Urdu compared to the rate of assimilation of English words into languages such as Arabic, Japanese, Mandarin, Persian and Turkish. And Turkish, while it is now written in the Roman script, has preserved its vocabulary.
In my travels, I often encounter situations where my counterparts in Asia or the Middle East will resort to speaking among themselves in their own language. Rarely do I hear them use any English words in such conversations. It may be that they are studiously avoiding English words to protect the privacy of the conversation. But the same phenomenon is observed when watching foreign films with English subtitles. English words are rarely used in the original dialogue between the characters.
Some will attribute the phenomenon to globalization and to the primacy of America. But then why are the British still continuing to speak their version of English? It may well be that they take pride in the purity of their native language. In fact, in his celebrated work on modern English usage, H. W. Fowler regards Americanisms as foreign words, subject to the usual rules of context-specific and therefore sparing use.
Another argument that is often put forth by those who believe that English enriches Urdu is that Urdu too enriches English. They cite words such as bazaar, caravan, cummerbund, curry, khaki, jungle, juggernaut, kismet, lemon, shikar, sultan and pistachio. But except for spices, all such words have made their way into English because they convey some exotic concept that was discovered in India by the colonizing British. They are rarely going to be used unless a specific cultural and geographical milieu is being invoked. Only in the Middle East does anyone hear of Sultan Bush.
Moreover, most of these words came into English a long time ago, courtesy of writers such as Richard Burton and Rudyard Kipling. The only new words that have made their way into English recently are unfortunately associated with the war on terror, such as jihad, mujahideen and Taliban or the few words that Salman Rushdie has tried, without success, to inject into mainstream English. The balance of trade is squarely in favor of English.
To sum it up, there are two factors at work in the Anglicization of Urdu. One is colonial overhang and the other is globalization. Globalization affects all language in varying degrees and cannot be stopped. Even the French have accepted terms such as Internet and computer. Perhaps a century or two from now, English will have become a global language. But there is no reason to speed up the process in Pakistan.
It is time to cut off the colonial overhang. Insidiously, it leads to laziness in picking words. If Urdu words are not used, they will be forgotten. The adage, “if you don’t use it, you will lose it,” applies to one’s native language as much as to a foreign language. And, more perniciously, it essentially endorses Lord Macaulay’s racist views. Around the year 1835, he had concluded that among the natives, there was not one “who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.”
Thus, it is not surprising that 66 percent of the British population have absolutely no knowledge of any language other than English while those in the continent of Europe often speak two or three languages.
When taken together with Hindi, Urdu is the fourth most populous language in the world. The number of its native speakers is about the same as those for Italian or Turkish. They should take pride in their native language and protect its purity. Ways to do that will be discussed in a future column.

 

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Editor: Akhtar M. Faruqui
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