Urdu sociolinguistics

The Urdu language has been at the forefront of political and cultural debates in India since the second half of the nineteenth century. Some of the main issues fiercely debated have been the official status of Urdu with regard to Hindi. Other issues such as the origin of Urdu and its relationship with Hindi and other Indian languages have also been hotly debated. Another critical issues has been the teaching of Urdu in educational institutions in states such as UP, Bihar, Delhi, MP, etc. in Independent India. On the level of the structure of the language, there have been issues of script for writing Urdu namely the Perso-Arabic, Devanagari, or Roman. Another issues has been the loanwords from Persian and Arabic. Urdu constitutes a gold-mine for linguistic research.

I started working on different aspects of Urdu since my M.Phil. degree. Here are some of my work on Urdu linguistics, largely sociolinguistic aspects of it.

  1. 2018. My name is Khan… from the epiglottis: changing linguistic norms in Bollywood songs.  Journal of South Asian Popular Culture. 16:1, 51-69 (Taylor & Francis).\

  2. 2016. Expatriate Languages in Kuwait: Tension between Public and Private Domains. Journal of Arabian Studies. Vol. 6 (1) pp 29-52. (Taylor & Francis/Routledge).

  3. 2016. Teaching linguistic diversity through linguistic landscaping. Journal of Language and Language Teaching. Vol. 5 (1) pp. 1-7, Azimpremji University, India.

  4. 2015.Polyphony of Urdu in postcolonial North India. The journal of Modern Asian Studies, (Cambridge University Press). Vol. 49.3. pp. 678-710.

  5. 2012. Hindi is perfect, Urdu is messy: the discourse of delegitimation of Urdu in India. In Mark Sebba et al. Orthography as Social Action: Scripts, Spelling, Identity and Power. pp 103-133. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

  6. 2011. Urdu in Devanagari: Changing orthographic practices and Muslim identity in Delhi. Language in Society, 40.3.pp 259-284. (Cambridge University Press).

  7. 2010.How do I know you are not a CBI agent?: Examining the identity of researcher in sociolinguistic fieldwork. In Imtiaz Hasnain & Shreesh Chaudhary Problematizing language studies: Cultural, theoretical, and applied perspectives. pp. 426-435. Delhi: Aakar Books, 2010.

  8.  2008. Scripting a new identity: the battle for Devanagari in nineteenth century India. Journal of Pragmatics. 40.7. pp 1163-1183. (Elsevier Press)

  9. 2008.  Unpacking indexicality: Urdu in India. In Amy Brown and Josh Iorio: Texas Linguistic Forum. Austin: University of Texas. 2008.pp 1-9. Web. 7 Feb 2011. http://studentorgs.utexas.edu/salsa/proceedings/2008.html.