Core Urdu Vocabulary for Chines Business Community in Pakistan , A Corpus-based Perspective

Abstract

With the dawn of 21st century, the world has grown into a global village and the need for inter-communal interactions has also increased many times. Urdu language is said to be one the third biggest language of the world along with Chines and English and its speakers are constantly on the rise. With the emergence of the CPEC (China Pakistan Economic Corridor), Urdu has assumed ever increasing importance due to the geo-political and geo-economic condition of the south Asian region. The undertaken study is a systematic attempt in this regard to work out a list of most frequent words of the Urdu language for the Chinese business community in Pakistan. Schmitt (2000) asserts that that learning a non-native vocabulary is a continual process as the core vocabulary should encompass the ever changing linguistic needs of the time. The name of the Urdu corpus for the undertaken research is urTenTen that has been compiled from internet data. The corpus belongs to TenTen corpus family that is corpora of the web with more than ten billion words. The corpus has been tagged according to Unified Parts of Speech (POS) Standard in Indian Languages. In order to process data, “sketch Engine” has been used. List of frequent words for the Chines Business Community has been retrieved from urTenTen corpus with the help of sketch engine. The retrieved list of core Urdu vocabulary is supposed to be useful for the Chines business who are supposed to interact with the Urdu speakers of the region.