Urdu in anglicized world: A corpus based study

Abstract

This paper aims to find out the variation in Urdu language due to language contact. It studies the use of English vocabulary in Urdu written language. The nature of the research is quantitative as well as qualitative as it examines the grammatical and domain-wise categories of English words used in Urdu and tries to determine the social factors that are the cause of this increase. It counts and calculates the frequency and the percentages of English words to examine the diachronic changes in the language. The researchers have taken the corpus of 30,000 words in total which includes15000 words of Urdu magazine published from 1995 to 1997 and the similar corpus of year 2011. The corpus is minutely observed by the researchers and English words are extracted and tested from English to Urdu dictionaries in order to see whether or not English vocabulary is increasing due to (non)availability of their Urdu substitutes. The results reveal that Urdu language is now absorbing English words more than a decade ago. The results also brought forth an interesting fact that the magazines that are promoters of Urdu language are conscious to restrain the use of English. However, English words frequently used by Urdu users are showing up in the written language and are used at the expense of their Urdu correlates. Key words: Code-mixing, code-switching, variation in Urdu.