Dr Alia Amir | Utterance-Analysis, Urdu Appraisal & Usurping Agency | MindTrap#40 | Mufti Abu Layth

[Music] you're doing it you're doing it alright so what do we have tonight just one momento let me just bring up for you a picture of our guest tonight

the esteemed doctor alia amir from sweden people a linguist analyst a linguistic analyst all the way bringing her expertise let me bring on live why is the button freezing all right no there it is

all right first of all i just want to thank you for taking the time out to be with us today to share your thoughts uh your experiences and insights with us and the viewers today so shukran once again thank you for having me all right so let me just i'm just seeing the so people those of you that are not familiar uh with dr alia amir somebody who has specialized in linguistics and languages and especially um conversation analysis and we'll speak a

bit about that what that means for some of you struggling with conversations so [Laughter] so uh doc uh dr alia a bit about yourself your journey to why this field what you know something like linguistics and what it briefly means uh just in your words for the viewers um so i've always been fascinated by languages i i did grow up in a family where there were a

couple of languages being spoken my granddad actually spoke five to six languages um so that was an inspiration from from a very early age but also how how we how we do things we do everything through language words um our emotions our personalities our wishes our desires everything is conveyed through words oh okay just uh uh a thought there i do you feel our thoughts

are in uh are in in language it's both uh in language and body language our thoughts thoughts thoughts how do you mean what do you mean our thoughts in so what i mean what i mean by that is you said everything is done in language you know we do all of these things sorry there's a bit of feedback coming back into the which wasn't there before so everything we're doing it with with

our words right so two people or a group of people they understand each other from from the words that they have exchanged with each other we can't actually see what's going on in my head or in your mind but we we can see if you're happy if you're sad um how you are displaying different kinds of emotions through our social actions including body language and and words so our personalities are portrayed through our words over a period of time

okay you see i'm just i'm a bit intrigued just going back to thoughts and languages uh sorry thoughts and language are we saying that people think in language because the reason i'm asking this because i am inclined to that as well but then uh because i i i am inclined actually to that perspective but that would then mean that the greater the the capacity of language the greater the vocab it would mean the great greater the

thoughts no not necessarily in in in that way but if you read a lot for i mean in the field of child language acquisition for instance if you read a lot to a child starting from the age of two even if he or she can't speak at the age or one he is acquiring those words so it's receptive it's all in there it might get activated at a at a different phase so yes reading has a lot of impact your vocabulary is building even if it's passive

even if it's not being used uh so there are studies which show that if um if parents or child care and caregivers they read a lot to children it has an impact in their educational achievement even at grade nine or ten or in high school as well uh so different fonts for forms of absorbing language but obviously if you start reading plateau to your two-year-old that won't have that kind of effect unless and until those initial blocks have been been established

so vocabulary complex vocabulary has to be built on something so do you not feel that thoughts have a a relationship with with words because if they do then there would be a correlation with the more right the more sorry there's just them right it would the more complex words a person has access to [Music] would have some relationship with the more complex

ideas as well i mean would they not be a a bond between the two well expression yes but thoughts maybe not okay it's not my field but i mean of course if you if you have read a lot you and you can synthesize all that information and express that and then in a you know let's say high vocabulary or in a complex way building bridges between all those different things that you have read or they are in your mind you have been thinking about it or whether you express it in a written form or a spoken form yeah um that that that does have a

have an effect because that's uh i'm pretty sure and you can correct me from that from my understanding of wittgenstein i'm pretty sure that's his kind of angle that that basically our language our limits to our language our limits to our world that the more infinitely vast your language is that reflects the vastness of your world yeah sure i mean we construct our reality through our experiences so even like uh if let's say if a child doesn't

even go to school but he he has access to different uh viewpoints or different he's exposed to different ex life experiences then his thoughts or his reality will be a bit balanced but if let's say um i just watch like one television station which projects a certain angle of a view then there is a possibility that i will internalize those discourses and reproduce them as well i can give you an example of let's say pakistan india conflict okay

pakistani and just for for for the viewers uh who may not be familiar that dr alia part of her expertise in specialism is to do with the indian subcontinent and research into language or especially the kind of linguistics involved applied linguistics in that region is that correct uh english english language history of english language and um english language in south asia but of course it's it's not a divorce with other uh languages and all social cultural i mean i just put that i just put that there just in case

somebody might because you went straight to the example of the indian uh thing so just so people know that's your area of expertise okay excellent yeah you were saying sorry so if you look at uh indian tv stations and if there is something about pakistan you will see that the news will be framed in a certain way and same is true for pakistan that it will be framed in a certain way because there is a conflict between the two and for both countries uh audiences who might just i mean of course it's not like black and white that pakistani viewers are just watching pakistani television stations and

indians are watching indian television stations but the reality will be built on whatever is being consumed so let's say if nationalistic discourses from one country um or the viewpoint or the perspective from one viewpoint it will build uh in in in that way as well i mean are you trying to say let's say this the concept of nationalism and both countries are trying to embed this uh obviously one country is using urdu the

other is using hindi similar but with nuances varied nuances does this are you saying this may impact the output or no it doesn't impact that not not just but at first i let me just add this that they're more urdu speakers in india than pakistan so both urdu and hindi are used and hindi and urdu is uh considered a different language in in present-day india so there are uh regions like uttar pradesh up where urdu is the main language and there have been there have been policies against using

urdu in certain parts but that's not my like main area of work uh but what i'm saying is that it's not just the medium of language let's say hindi is being used in india and urdu in pakistan it's the discourses as well like the construction of pakistan in in news channels like the construction of enemy construction of enemy in the indian news channels or newspapers as well and how is that being done so it's not just at the word level but it's the discourses of how uh how is this the same thing as uh

freedom fighter versus terrorist selecting your words uh people being martyred being destroyed is this what we're talking about uh yes i mean if you if you let's say um i mean for any news i mean these days we are talking about fake news and facts as well right but if for any conflict you go and take and different newspapers let's say you take from bbc and then cnn a turkish newspaper and then you take one indian you'll see that each kind of news will be constructed in a different way

and that will demonstrate the viewpoints even that one headline can demonstrate what the viewpoints of that newspaper is or how the policies uh and the perspective of an of a national perspective of that country of course it's not uh these are not like binary perspectives and there are variation of perspectives within one country as well but what is the official um perspective about a certain country you're saying so people can and obviously they do they channel select direct certain words and usage of

language to to obviously influence people so like you've got in america right now uh donald trump this whole thing um trying to reach out to populism this whole you know that kind of far right or the right wing crowd out there uh naturally one of his big things is immigration so using certain denigrating words on purpose is this and you've got some research in this area as well haven't you uh yeah i'm i'm try transcribing his debates and as you know that the previous elections debates

are huge as well and i looked at how clinton was uh talking about the the refugees and how donald trump was talking about refugees so the discourses of both donald trump and clinton were different the words were different but the effect was actually similar but trump talked about refugees in a very explicit way and constructed them as something which was inferior uh but clinton used the words very implicitly so it doesn't so i'm not saying if somebody's doing

that deliberately or not that's not the not the aim and i don't actually go and look at the facts like what does clinton's government did or what did trump's government did but just at the word level what is that so what are what are some of these words as an example just to together um um i don't have the transcript but i i remember that one of the in the one of the transcript he says that these people who are coming to the us he doesn't say us these people who are coming here they're holding their mobile phones and they have mobile phones flashing their mobile phones it doesn't really make sense of what

he's doing but if somebody who is um to whom he has already conveyed that these refugees are something different and he has already constructed a a a world of these uh the images the uh the images as in words the discourse is already there so nobody is going to check the facts that it's actually a very small percentage of people who are actually going to the us the big number of refugees actually live in turkey uh um i think in pakistan

in the asian countries so it's a very small number so if you if you actually look at that then it doesn't actually make sense that it's a few hundred thousand people actually who would probably uh go there but the mob but the mobile phone that you mentioned how is that brought into into this uh so he he kind of builds uh the image of those refugees as those who do have possessions to mobile phones okay yeah so it's not he's like [Music] creating an image of people who do who are who are coming there

uh without actually needing um a place to be obviously giving the impression of luxury and just kind of like scrounging off the us but also in um also because he further on goes on and talks about uh security issues so those mobiles are not just luxury items so he does that in a very subtle way he also mentions for instance so this is just a small talk of two to three minutes i'm talking about so imagine if somebody just watches those two minutes and then it's

liked and shared uh and uh recreated uh in different ways and absorbed in different ways because people will be uh understanding those words from their own perception so let's say if somebody who doesn't have a job or who already has read certain headlines about let's say 9 11 or muslims do this and that then it's gonna build up on that already built reality uh um so nobody's gonna check the facts about that so it's the perceived reality basically on that note you'd said earlier as well and i know you've highlighted this about

language and it like constructing reality through the language that is deployed um are we actually creating a reality with our words do you think that we are actually creating a reality through our words yeah or are we simply describing the reality we are uh we are constructing a reality and that's built through our viewpoint so so the reality and the reality is the reality we take

granted for so it's it's not the reality but it's my reality that i am projecting through my words um and you are projecting the reality with your words so just to be clear because by that what you don't mean is uh you're not trying to say like so for example i've got a class here because i've said that i've created it it's not that uh that's not that's not what you're saying obviously no is it true no no

this is nothing less than blood should i say as a vampire no it's it's cherry a cherry aid okay okay but yeah so that's not what you mean by saying that they create the reality by obviously if i said i've got a drink in my hand regardless of whether i say that or not people would know i've got a drink in my hand so what is it you mean when you say we create our reality so we create our point of view or perspectives in our heads through all that we see through all that we hear so all that we

read and our or our own thinking as well so we are like taking things from uh our upbringing our um interaction with different things and then whatever we have we have a viewpoints for different things we might not have for uh many things right but we might have a viewpoint about countries about cultures so those bias those are basically segmented viewpoints normally people think that we generalize things but think about racist attitudes uh with uh like different within

different muslim groups for instance okay uh um so let's say an arabic speaker or arab from arabian peninsula in continent might have um a certain way of thinking about another group and same might be true for the desi community they might have a certain view about another group so those uh those are uh those viewpoints are transferred um between our in like in our communities through interacting through listening to our conversations whether it's our parents our

grandparents uncle aunts friends whatever so the things we transfer within like these different communities we do live in small bubbles within communities we do of course go out of our communities as well within this muslims fair as well but we do have a certain way of looking at things i mean uh think about black muslims for instance we do have like even if we have visions or not visions but image about prophet muhammad peace be upon him like how he looked for instance or how people looked during his times how they lived

sure those are the things like if i have like let's say read about muslim history in the urdu books uh let's say the words that are used in urdu they they they create a certain angle and let's say if i've studied that in arabic then that creates a different kind of world the kind of so the kind of baggage that language brings with the with with its words you're saying that obviously that would impact um i suppose in that sense like we're seeing today the whole

um language almost being reconstructed with things for in light of feminine rights for example or or even people may say gender so the pronoun for example people saying oh using he or often when they would say but nowadays people are reluctant to say that and they will refer to sometimes i've noticed plural uh like they will say well themselves as opposed to like if

i'm say well you know if a person was to reflect uh on his words but they would either say his or her like bring in both or say their words make it plural all of a sudden whereas really that's not the grammatical thing to do gen i mean historically you wouldn't make it plural but this is more a politically correct thing nowadays is this uh i haven't made up my mind about that to be honest yet but i mean our i mean um the patriarchy is really seeped into our languages whichever language it is

there are discourses of um um like women can they are like of course let's say if a baby is born and you say it's a baby it's a boy right that sentence alone means that a boy is more is better than a girl and that might be done in different ways in different languages why would that sentence mean that a boy is better than a girl no if it's if it is um set in a in a

happy uh internation where like if somebody says look it's a boy and then if somebody comes and says oh lurky okay or whatever but you say even even two words it it it does uh make a lot of difference not to the baby who's born but to the people uh that it's a happy news or it's not a happy news i mean i suppose i'm i'm just struggling i don't know if that sentence in itself even said with exuberant joy would show that a boy is better than a girl but unless you contrast it by saying something unless the person said

thank god it's not a girl then you could understand then of course yeah maybe a wrong example but you know like in a in a car in a car in a certain context if um if when a boy is born and people show that kind of uh jubilant and they said it in a dull way if it was a girl and they said like oh it's a good so the the intonation of the language okay okay that is of course doing and that is of course doing things um okay that's uh

that i mean people trying to reclaim language in light of uh gender rights um i mean is this um is this something that you obviously you're you're noticing it now but and it's becoming policy i mean everybody's noticing is becoming kind of policy what are your thoughts on this

um i think our language has been um it has been for a long time um been a medium where um perspective of one gender has been widely uh expressed um whether it's let's say uh translations of quran for instance okay or for instance i think most of the written word and other books as well so it's not i think just the gendered language but also uh the writers or because then women

bring a different perspective that could also be adding to the way we look at things uh but i'm not too sure what uh like what exactly out of curiosity what are your thoughts i know this is uh it's just just to spring this on you what are your thoughts on the pronoun he and him for god huh um in english language um i think it should be okay yeah but it does i mean uh for god it should be neutral

in urdu i think it's more neutral and other south asian languages yeah you're right you can't really tell can you in arabic in arabic it is the masculine pronoun it's not here the feminine pronoun but you're right in in order to it's just you know up or uh you know you can't really i suppose maybe in so if i think about god in urdu so i i i think it's pretty neutral but in english it wouldn't be an appropriate pronoun and so it it

[Laughter] but maybe there should be there should be another pronoun because we're talking about uh about a superhuman sorry not a superhuman but not a human being right so maybe there should be another pronoun created if he is more masculine and she is more feminine i'm not too sure about it yeah i mean it doesn't uh obviously to me it doesn't uh bother me i i think it's fine but

hmm i i don't know whether it bothers certain people i mean does it bother uh certain people in light of the feminist kind of thing to say but why is god you know himself why not god herself for example i don't know if have you come across these kind of things in linguistics or not no not for god okay so fair enough okay hold on thank thank god [Laughter] that would be another crazy level of debate what do you think of bringing in these pronouns that they're saying for gender neutral like gee or uh

have you heard of this you must have heard of this debate and discussion but um yeah i i'll skip that topic all right so people uh may not know this that uh as i was mentioning that you analyze conversations this is what you do as a profession as an expertise one you know what is it apart from just analyzing uh conversations and breaking um you know utterances into sections and saying well

is aren't conversations just something very you know it's just something all human beings do so what um what is the effective purpose of something like that isn't it just something that comes natural to to all human beings you mean conversation analysis why why do that yeah because i mean what is the end game of trying to just analyze conversations um or do people to be are conversations more difficult than people assume [Laughter] no it's uh i would actually say if there are like young people

thinking about taking a new profession or starting university that actually there should be more linguists and conversation analysts we're really in need of people who speak other languages besides english as well because most of the studies that have been so far been done they are the data is mostly from english or scandinavian languages there are very few people who can do urdu conversation analysis or punjabi and other languages i think there are hardly two uh or three people in the world who do that wow okay yeah so it's a very um

scientific forensic and i also say it's a very islamic or muslim kind of field of study because it's based on evidence okay and by evidence um if i say that okay mufti's laughter is doing this so i must show that in your interaction that you did that i can't say that mufti might be thinking that or mufti is looking that way because he so i'm not going to judge anything no inferences basically no entrances yeah

so basically whatever you display uh and even tiniest of things like you are uh putting a hand on your chin and then doing this all of that we we put this in a in a sequence okay so we do it it is called sequential analysis but let me start from the beginning so our data is basically uh video recordings okay so a video film any kind of natural interaction social interaction it can be a doctor patient interaction it can be

um uh uh interaction in a cockpit between a pilot and um a traffic controller it can be um a courtroom hearing it can be a doc sorry a police and a police investigation as well and my speciality or my specialization is classroom interaction so i basically film classroom lessons english lessons in in swedish context uh so after we we we get these weeks so we we we we don't uh video record like one off um occasion we call them incidences so we

we collect several hours so for instance for my phd i video filmed uh for about uh 50 or i know 40 hours of uh of classroom lessons and i had cameras um from different angles so i don't miss anything going on between the classroom participants so it's a very detail um and we um but we don't transcribe all the 40 or 50 or whatever the number of the hours is we go through the data a rough um look at the data and whatever jumps out

of that data of interest we try to look at it throughout the whole data so and then we collect a collect we create a collection so when i was doing my phd i was actually um employed for a project where i was looking at um human computer interaction so how pupils were learning english um in a computer lab uh while sitting in front of the camera sorry in front of her computer and they were sitting in groups or two students or three students in front of the camera but when we started looking at the data

we found other things of interest um so we collected them makeup made a collection of them and then we uh transcribed them forensically and we looked at the patterns of all those incidences and we found out that there were similar patterns and the phenomena that i found i named it language policing okay yeah it's a way of it's a way of switching the conv the medium or the language of conversation so let's say multilingual or bilingual

um environment somebody says to another person speak german speak french or another language and how does that policing effect and uh affect at the trajectory after afterwards um and so one of my findings was that when you initiate language policing the trajectory uh becomes a bit long and it takes a bit of time for the teacher to go back to the business of the classroom so let's see if a teacher was teaching uh i was having a grammar lesson

but somebody started are you speaking english prata ingalls or whatever uh somebody says so it took them a bit of time and turns uh and they had to go back to what they were actually doing so it was counterproductive uh for teaching english in in this context right okay how is you see we did as part of our psychology degree um we covered uh we we covered discursive uh discourse analysis within uh as as an extension of discursive psychology

how is that different too because in discourse analysis you have to uh you have to kind of write out the you have to provide transcripts for the dialogue you then speak about an interpretative repertoire that people are ex you know taking these words from the power positions that are being deployed by certain words um just so you're looking at you know what these people are how is that different from uh this applied language or is it the same thing no conversation analysis and discourse analysis are are different though they might look

uh similar uh in discourse analysis uh i think discourse analysis is more suitable for texts or policy documents if you're studying uh and you you you you can mark discourses and you can see how how that is being uh built uh i did that for my master's thesis and the title of the thesis was chronicles of the english language in pakistan okay i looked at the colonial discourses so i looked at how the discourses colonial discourses during the british indian period and what were the discourses during the present day pakistan

and i found they were similar but that was on the text level i'll i'll come back to that again because i do want to talk a bit about that but conversation analysis yeah you can study all sorts of verbal communication as well as uh social media communication as well because we look at things in sequences how are things being initiated and how they how they are paired uh what's the difference between one utterance and and how far does the second utterance comes

we even measure the pauses so we use actually softwares to uh measure the pauses okay so if i'm studying let's say when i was transcribing donald trump it took me about a few weeks when i was measuring pauses imagine listening to donald trump several times [Laughter] quite a bit of a fun job you've got there

but we have just like people in the national sciences have lab we actually have data sessions um very frequent data sessions so we take our um recorded data to those sessions and we look at it together and then we analyze them so it's a very robust kind of analysis built together with many people sure i get that so you said that uh analyzing the discourse this okay this sound analyzing the discourse from

the british raj in in india and analyzing the discourse now you found similarities what what what are the similar discourses in india pakistan today and that were from the british raj what what the colonial period yeah so the colonial period um so the present day uh so i only looked at the present day pakistan's policy um and the british indian period was um uh it's um so let's say pakistan and india came into being

on in 1947 right um and at that point the policy or the official language of pakistan was declared english language it still is okay english is the official language of pakistan but urdu is the national language of pakistan and but before that so we have to look at a bit of socio cultural history as well of this region uh south asia we're talking about 1.8 billion people right a quarter of a quarter of

the world that live in this dense area [Music] and this is also from a linguistic point of view it's considered a very problem some people consider it a very problematic area uh and some people call it a tower of babel as well but it's a very um rich area in terms of languages it's not it's not i mean there are no monolingual countries as such but can you guess how many languages are spoken in pakistan

pakistan how many languages i don't know i would have thought maybe uh you see it depends how you're uh nobody google please no it depends how you're kind of grouping them but i would have thought maybe there's about languages is that uh hello oh you're back no yeah hello oh sorry we kind of yeah i'm yeah sorry i don't know what happened okay um have your viewer guessed the language

uh no i can't see them guessing but i i had assumed are there about 10 74 74 but are these distinct languages or dialects no no these are distinct languages so if you if you want to double check you can go to ethnologue uh there are like 10 um troubled languages dying like two dying languages as well but 74 languages we're talking about 74 languages wow yeah in india there are

even more uh languages than pakistan i think 461 or so wow i know i had heard in india they were i i thought maybe over 200 languages but india is incredibly vast uh okay pakistan i'm quite surprised has about 70 languages 74 yes wow okay so in this in this context when when pakistan came into being that's why it was a bit difficult to like decide which language would be the the official language of pakistan but i think it as we have already talked

about social construction we haven't really talked about politics when it comes to choosing one language for a country okay so most of these uh language policies one nation one country is usually problematic especially for a country where there are 74 languages uh and if if we look at the like the historical background um 200 years of uh the british um not the british raj but 100 years of british raj and 100 years of british east india company so we are talking about before 1947 200 years

but english came much more earlier to the subcontinent so english had been there when british east india company came to the continent almost the same time or even earlier than when it went to the north north america okay that's interesting okay yeah so we're talking about um at least 15th century they were already a group of people who were who who could speak english but a small group of people in the subcontinent and now if we go a

bit uh earlier than these 200 years of british rule in the subcontinent we had persian as the official court language for 800 years okay yeah that's true yeah yeah that's true and before this persian period we had sanskrit uh and that's the period when the modern uh south asian languages started so i won't go to the ancient languages because that's not really okay but when um the persian period is a really an interesting

period to understand in the south asian continents perspective because if english is going through a similar phase as persian wars going at that point now when the british came they actually displaced the persistent language and english became the language of the official language but it took them about 100 years the first the first hundred years they were orientalists who actually developed dictionaries for local languages they learned arabic persian sanskrit hindustani

which is the common name for both urdu and hindi so just to be for people to understand just to be making sure they follow so what you're saying is that persian in the past was really and by official language you mean the language the kind of like legal language and the language of the courts which maybe the aristocrats spoke officially but it was not the language of the people on the ground uh i yeah so

language of the code but language of literature uh language official language was persian uh and in certain regions of south asia there were always multiple languages so for instance in kashmir a per person in the uh in that context is a really an ideal area to study because it wasn't as is as is perceived by many people that persian was the language of muslims but it was actually adapted by the local non-muslim groups as well so mahabharata vedas the

hindu religious books were translated into um persian and sanskrit became a smaller language sorry in kashmir in kashmir yes okay but i don't get it were they speaking farsi were they speaking persian at the time it was always actually a multilingual so different spaces different languages but persian was the language of uh literature um in that in that area but they it was being used like like now you see english being used in

the south asian context in certain spaces right you have constitution judiciary there are english writers both from india pakistan bangladesh and other places as well so a medium of expression of a certain class but it was widespread much wider than because because it's the kind of lingua franca so it's seen as the language it is the language of the internet it is the language of uh cinema it is the language of currency and and so people want to be kind of associated with it so even you know people who are not educated

would want to speak some words in english because of that global so you're saying that was the same thing with farsi back then um but lingua franca was hindustani but in kashmir it was urdu more persian native language urdu and hindi basically are on a continuum more towards persian and hindi more towards sanskrit are you saying urdu is more than a couple of hundred years old then in that case is that what yes it is it is is it okay it is it is but if we go back to the history a little

bit about the history of urdu as well um i think it's uh popularly known that the word urdu actually is a turkish word turkic language word it's used in current day present-day turkey as well um for the army they called it urdu i think if i'm pronouncing it correctly but this word urdu did not come to the south asian region through present-day turkey but central asia the turkic people so not to mix it up with turkey but the where the people come from central asia yeah central asia so

basically it started with uh mahmoud khaznavi uh i think it was the year 999 approximately 999 999 [Laughter] but these were um but they did not use turkish they used persian instead and they ruled it for about 157 years and after them actually came the

the ohur turkix so another uh group of uh turks and then was navis sorry rory's and then the mobiles and by the time the moguls came uh the first the emperor akbar he he used a prototype of um [Music] like the turkic language called chakatai uh it has different names it's an extinct language it's not spoken now um but it's it's the there are several turkic languages

that originated from that language like the practic language is the is the origin of many uh south asian languages okay do you feel the pr the prakrit language is um a i mean would you put it on a level with sanskrit or pre-sanskrit are you putting it um i'm actually not too sure about that but i think there might have been overlapping periods okay like urdu and hindi at some point yeah overlapped too uh but um

like um the script is different of urdu right and if you think about punjabi language it actually has three different scripts okay it's a different script in um in indian punjab and it's a different script in pakistani punjab i mean pakistani punjabi is just written in urdu or is it not is it yes arabic but there are a few more i think alphabets

you don't get the classical urdu poets for example saying that oh this is they called it or you know so so what what is that about then because at what point has so it has it it was called hindi at times as well yeah i see it the more like in the british east india companies time that's when urdu i think got its uh final name

and some people actually like there are popular controversies as well that urdu actually developed in fort william which was the um the first um but they did develop dictionaries and if you if you look at the old dictionaries of urdu you will find a lot of sanskrit words as well but you don't find them now so it has developed into a different language and i do see a difference between urdu that spoken in india and urdu that's spoken in present-day pakistan as well

but so let's say i don't know 400 years ago five oh in the time of the mughals if you go to the time of the mughals the official language was farsi now that's the language of literature it's the language of courts of uh of the things you've mentioned but are you stating that people on the ground were speaking something very similar to urdu is this what you yes hindustani okay the curry bally kind of thing yes but not caribouli at that time it had developed into a different form after curry poli as

well uh but persian was not the everyday medium or lingua franca as we as we as we say um okay all right okay i'm i'm i mean because i'm very fascinated by by that by urdu and and i've always been intrigued how it kind of emerges and spreads um because on one hand you do get the old poetry of uh amir and people and some a lot of it is quite understandable like when we if you read it it's mentioned in the songs and

things it's quite but then people will say well urdu is really only a couple of hundred years old that's it before that people never really spoke to so people do compare it with the origin of english language as well anglo-saxon in the normandy the combination of two groups so it i i would say that it is a bigger effect the central asian uh that came to this region through afghanistan so at one point actually this whole region uh north west of iran to the the india today and

central asia to macron was actually one big empire the the vasnaris so i mean it's it's kind of like the european union you know with different languages and we are talking about this period when when in britain it was the battle of hastings i think 1000 66 66 10 16. yeah so it's almost the same time as that the only difference uh in the south in asian languages is that not all languages have been developed as a written language except urdu but other smaller languages to

punjabi as well to some extent even though in the present-day pakistan punjabi is the biggest language in terms of the number of speakers but it's not kept or maintained or transferred to future generations as it is in in in india and punjab okay so that's a that's a difference you feel it's a dying language uh it's a dying language so i can give you one evidence that it's not taught as a school subject

in pakistani punjab as a written language so that's that's one proof so it's not being transferred so people born after the 70s because in 1979 it was the pakistani president he wanted to change and he called islamization and of the whole country and he he did give people a notice that everything will be in urdu but people actually revolted against that and many of them actually were from the punjab region uh so it was in the newspapers that they

don't want uh the schools to be uh urdu medium uh because there is a stigma attached to languages and they are in hierarchies so that's what is seen as like of an upper class system uh in punjab in punjabi context yes urdu is considered more polite punjabi as a more rude or accrued language because parents might not speak that outside with with the with them with their children and after the 70s it's my personal observation that people

do not speak with their with their children in punjabi in the urban settings in the rural setting that's still being uh spoken so that's why i do not see the statistics of language speakers from pakistan as um as correct because for instance pakistani statistics are and many researchers also quote those statistics that only seven percent of pakistani speak urdu how much seven seven seven percent yes and that

which is um absolutely not true people are voluntarily switching to urdu and there is also a switch from a certain class of people to use english as uh with their children um and that brings me back to the question you asked the the findings of my master's thesis so i saw that english is definitely at the at the top most hierarchy of languages in the pakistan context and then we have urdu and then

punjabi in the punjabi context but punjabi is actually a dying language in the pakistani context and um um so the in the british indian period in 1835 and there was a person called lord mcauley lord thomas babington mcauley so in 1835 he proposed to the um the to the british raj he had a proposal called minute on indian education which is a very notorious um piece of document so i studied that i looked at the discourses he says he calls the local asian

languages rude languages the exact exact words are actually rude languages and he says that all the languages of the east cannot produce what the european languages produce and did he understand things like urdu he could understand the languages no no but i mean that was he he says that uh in the european languages and english language is the language of science and technology so he he even mentions sanskrit

arabic and persian as languages who cannot be used as a vehicle or a medium to teach science and technology actually for the first time when i read it all languages of science and technology i mean they have been lingua franca's of the world they have been languages that have dealt with uh the development of well all languages if they are developed they can be used for any of course of course like for instance urdu borrows a lot from english language there's not a tradition for instance for creating words like i don't know if there's a word for refrigerator maybe fridge but like computer so we

we have a tradition of borrowing words which is fine but if it is used for teaching chemistry or biology or physics or whatever it it it does have the capacity to use that but let me quote what my colleague says he said a little hocus pocus about kushagras and the modes of absorption into the deity so he's talking about um sanskrit and arabic and persian as um in inferior languages but he also says a class of people indian and blood and color but english in taste and in opinions

in morals and in intellect so he's talking about uh switching to english because that's the language which which um is the is the right language to be used and there are people who actually study language imperialism um and they if you study uh mccall is minute or if you study other documents from the colonial period you will definitely find those colonial racist discourses in them and also subjugating and othering the local languages creating a hierarchy as such and i found that

the the documents of present-day pakistan they do do not talk um they do not have the racist tones as the colonial documents or discourses had but they were also creating a discourse about english language as the most f language for science and mathematics uh so for instance the constitution of pakistan it says that english is the official language and urdu is the national language okay and until the provisions are made

this will be so english became the de facto official language so you will find many documents only in english the official official documents of the government for instance uh judiciary armed forces they all have their documents in english um and then it also talks about uh arabic okay islamic art and religion um but the other languages the biggest language of pakistan punjabi and other languages they are the regional languages so it has a similar kind of hierarchy as the colonial uh

hierarchies for the languages though not as racist but neo-colonial same kind of structures and as you as you move towards other uh the further documents like not just the educational policies so they also say that if we use more english the science and mathematics will have progress in the country but is that that is because if if i if i understand it correctly that you see if pakistan or these countries were to shift let's say the official language to be

commodore that would require rewriting the entire law uh into urdu and i mean nobody would understand even the terminology present-day pakistani urban people will definitely not and i i mean it's very problematic i think urdu can never actually become yeah because i i feel that some languages are you see they that they are uh self-generating like they

uh like arabic arabic now has an ability to generate its own words it will it has root words it generates if there's uh um something that that needs to be done it will really you know relate back to traditional words like let's say you take the word i don't know like a a mobile mobile phone now they would have a word uh joel now what this this comes from the word to move around like like as in mobile so whereas what it will do is it will always just borrow words from

people so it will just borrow the word mobile from the english language so this now isn't what the problem with that is if to native pakista pakistan speakers they have to learn that word from blank like because unless they speak english they wouldn't know what it meant whereas an arabic person even if he didn't know what a nakal was he could understand it means something of movement because he understands the the the root structure of the word so uh if they were to replace let's say

the law with urdu there to turn the entire legal system into urdu they wouldn't have the voca like they would have to borrow arabic words and farsi words for everything yeah but uh the i mean linguistically speaking that's not i mean urdu is not jazz and uh the politics and different groups uh urdu is considered still a language uh the first language of a minority um the first language of this of um those who migrated from the present-day india and migrate to karachi

but also i mean at some point in the beginning of my career i did think okay english was an imperial language it's not a lang but now i uh when i look at it a bit more uh from the beginning of the history of the english language in the south asian continent and also that according to some researchers english has become the language of islam as well if you think about it in terms of a lingua franca and also all this muslim literature muslim podcasts and muslim across the atlantic ocean you can see that english is being used by

different um muslim groups as well so there's a lot of literature in that sense sure i mean but you would but you would feel that let's say a certain language like i do love i love the poetry in order when i do speak with all my which that could um i do feel it it is defect i would think assume that it is defective because it doesn't have uh in itself like all it does is just borrows words so fine because that's that's considered the brilliant quality of of of the of this

region that it adapts like it did for persian so it the persian language for instance um brought different concepts but what uh the indian persian so indian persian is considered a different form of persian from the other persians right okay the southeast religion what we did to the indian version was we brought in all the concepts of the local different local languages like sikhism hinduism and muslims and punjabi and marathi and bengali and all those languages so all those concepts also came into into these languages so i don't actually

think urdu has urdu doesn't have the that possibility but the thing is now that pakistani english or south asian englishes are also established also on that note of urdu i feel that uh one of the problems is urdu uh so in languages you have um you'll have uh like uh abjett kind of languages and you'll have uh abugidas or uh uh our boogie des i'm i'm not sure if i'm pronouncing it right but you'll have languages that

are written with their vowels and you have languages where vowels are not written now this uh so for example hindi i uh i can read hindi i i studied hindi how to read it and even though i'm weak at it but it has it would be an uh an abugida script so it would have its uh vowels within it just like english now arabic doesn't have that it's an abjed script but and neither does urdu or farsi but you see arabic what's different with arabic

is you see all words are on set structures so if you are an arabic speaker you know so for example a word like uh there's a there's a pattern like like let's say modernis you would know that this is how that pattern works just like in english uh people would be familiar with how to stress syllables like you stress them at a certain point now in urdu you see they don't people don't know patterns

and they don't know so when you write a word i i would find it difficult to believe that most people would actually know how to pronounce it like they might just read it but they can't read it correctly because they don't know where the vowels are because people don't write it at all yes yes so one possibility is to write it in latin yeah because it's got vowels in it so let's say i i give you an example like let's say now they um i'm

trying to just just trying to think even with this um even with this whole corona thing there was uh so let's take now corona this is a a simple example now if you saw corona written when it first came out it's a new word and you don't know what it is is it karuna is it is it like you wouldn't know how to read it because you can just see takara wow and you know it's going to have a ha

or a tamar buddha kind of thing now so an empty heart so how do you read that is it so this is an example of uh when you look at a word written in urdu even if it is a proper like whether it's an arabic word or an english word so you could take the word civics written in urdu as they write it often or the word like coach coach and now coach looks like kuch because you know like which so people like they wouldn't know unless they know it

and if you take an in an arabic word let's say like you could take a word like uh and this is why they they then make their own um kind of arabic out of it sometimes so words like uh let's say mustapbal in arabic which means future but they read it as mustac in urdu right and and and even though that is a pattern as well bustaquil but it actually means something else in arabic but uh okay that's fair enough that becomes then the urdu word i'm not arguing against that but what i'm trying to say

is if you took a particular i'm just trying to think uh let's say like the word uh now is this to be read as wibba or wabba or wubba like you wouldn't know unless you knew the word yeah so this would be i'm assuming this is difficult for people then i mean if you have been using urdu at home you will know the patterns of i mean same is true for like you gave example of arabic language we have uh quran in different scripts right

salvation script and if the if the people from south asia go to saudi arabia and they see the quran without those signs it's difficult for them to read because they don't know how to but see the difference is that when arabic people at home they use similar words those words are from the language so they would know that like because they've used the word uh let's say mother ris and they see the shad on the on the middle letter they know this would say muslim

because it's that's the pattern but when an urdu person reads these words arabic is not his language and they don't speak arabic at home neither is english necessarily their language so to them these are entirely foreign words like except they've just got a familiar script so do they read it as and every time the government or people would introduce um new words because what it does is it just borrows words so it will take it from arabic now but this is my point the the common person doesn't speak arabic so

he doesn't know that this pattern works like this so i've always wondered that how do they because this must be incredibly difficult for people because they reading it on the like let's say the word dan now the the lack of something now why is that obama and now okay in arabic they may know that okay we use uh certain words like this let's say but in inurdu why is that not ferpadan or fakhdan or you know why is it not like why is it dan with a bummer with that with a fish

nobody would just know that by growing up knowing that you wouldn't just unless you're taught it so i feel this is re i assume it's incredibly difficult to to to be able to speak or do properly yeah the thing is we have two main varieties of urdu so high variety and low variety as well so every day urdu is very basic without the difficult words so i think don would be used by very somebody who is educated not somebody who who's unlettered right so there will be a difference between the like you mentioned a difference of

vocabulary so high urdu has a lot of arabic and persian words which won't be the everyday urdu of let's say young people uh going to school unless and until they have read a lot of urdu but that's written language or do not not the spoken urdu and there will be difference between the urdu spoken in different parts of pakistan as well i'm assuming like somebody who is uh who lives in peshawar and he has or she has um as their home language but they are

studying urdu so for them to understand what's the right pronunciation it will be the same challenge as if they are studying french or other language except that they here they can hear urdu in on television and everyday life yeah it's just i felt that that always i've always had this on my mind that you know this must be so annoying like i've just thought that how can a language prosper in a country where you can't where you don't write vowels and people are not because it's an abject script but people are not familiar with the structures either so you can't

that just means that most the people will never be able to speak that language at a at a good level they'll only be able to ever get by and i've just felt hmm that's a proper handicapped way to [Music] to raise a nation hence maybe the it can never probably become the official language because people just would never be able to speak it at such a high level um well order phonology is not really my area of study but i'm i i think it's more political that urdu won't

be considered as the official language because more and more english is being used at least at the educational level so also to for your audience uh all the medical universities engineering universities and all the other higher educational institutions have always been an english language so somebody who wants to actually you go to uh higher education they must build up their english so that they can get admission there so they don't really have the motivation to learn or improve their order i think talk at uh up till um what's it

called the high school level afterwards but english is taught as a compulsory subject but at the bachelor's level as well but not for them so you you see the difference so there is already a motivation to improve your english um not just at that level but i've also heard that even like for primary school children who who want to take who are taken by their parents for admissions to preschools as well they actually make their children at the age of three or four memorized english or prepare them to

speak a few words of english before they because otherwise they can't um pass the entrance entrance test at the age of four so there's also um like at the at the at the level of the language use it's it's a different uh behavior for different languages no i see i see somebody did highlight in the comments that look arabs have a similar problem i i do agree that arabs as well generally uh will struggle with high arabic because they may not know how to pronounce the words as well so i do agree but i feel that they would still

have it to some extent easier because the words will resonate with certain arabic words that they definitely know like you're not going to introduce a new pattern you might introduce a new word that you're not used to but you won't introduce uh you know a new pattern all of a sudden so that's all yeah i some extent english as well like uh when when we take shakespeare for instance here in the swedish context uh in ninth grade if they're they're they're reading the us shakespearean play it doesn't come uh

naturally to them to read such an old english so some of them actually use abridged form yeah because it's uh swedish and english are totally different languages yeah that's a good point actually because you you get sometimes it's easier for outsiders to sometimes be able to read something because if you're close to it what you know your medium sometimes becomes a hindrance um as as you're saying with with english so because with arabic as well

if you learn arabic from scratch uh so i learned arabic from scratch now uh i mean i speak arabic fluently but if you see because i learned it from scratch uh what is called high arabic or al arabiya fosha is for me very easy like to read you know what the language of of literature that is the natural default arabic for me and i would struggle with the uh something contemporary i mean not necessarily if it's modern standard but

if even some modern standard things are not as smooth to me as something of literature is but if i was arabic speaking then that would be you know i'd struggle with that because that isn't your natural way of speaking is it so that's a very good point i i can i can like um yeah i do agree like some researchers for instance say that academic english writing is a second language for everyone including native english speakers because that's a genre that you have to learn to develop

and as you mentioned arabic i grew up in saudi arabia so from the everyday arabic is much easier but i won't um like to read a complex arabic book like a literary arabic but every day like television plays cartoons or those things uh and i can uh i might find other arabic like daleks or iraqi arabic i find pretty hard then the saudi [Music] but same is true for urdu language if you listen to urdu from daily now

and urdu from somebody who's speaking in karachi you can find uh many differences like idiomatic differences the way it is being spoken pronunciation as well and that might be actually hard for people who are not familiar with i think uh same is foreign [Music] you said as well uh dr earlier that you'd been part of your analyses and evaluations has been uh seeing how language has been shaped including that of

people um i know you've mentioned politics and stuff but also relationships or people trying to how is this you know how has this language changed the language of um the conversation of relationships has it actually changed as the conversation of relationships today because that's a topic that i suppose hits home with many people that will be watching relationships um i mean we we are using uh new words every um in in every decade but are we not saying the same things or people today

saying more interesting things like if i say if i say no if i say mufti you are being fake it won't mean the same thing what it meant 10 years ago true or would if i say but would they just use a different word but are the conversations the nature of the conversations themselves have they evolved yes they keep on evolving the practices keep on changing from time to time the words the meanings keep on changing as well and in different contexts as they become like you mentioned arabic and urdu

already there's a popular joke actually about a pakistani guy so that was like a very popular joke okay what's the joke the fact that it's a pakistani guy yeah it is a joke yeah he was crying in urdu um near the kaaba and he was saying allah mafi allah mafia but then arabic guy he came and he said to him

because he was saying you know and in arabic they use it as in ain't like or isn't or something isn't there so muffy you will find similar words in uh persian and turkish arabic and urdu but their meanings might actually be uh different from each other so the nature of people let's say conversing on social matters especially relationships so people let's say they uh are at a courting

courtship level so they're trying to get to know each other not just i suppose words always change but has the actual process changed are people now they discuss are are we saying they discuss less they discuss more are they um i don't know has the actual qualitatively has it changed um i think in different contexts uh it's different uh i'm sure uh we we are we are like on the internet a global community but within the global community we are doing we're still doing things in

different ways in different spaces so um there is actually uh some latest research by a colleague from britain on first dates so she uh she video filmed first dates um and i've seen that data as well and she looked at how people so that's that was from a very uh caucasian white uh dates and she looked at how people were uh meeting for the first time and she so she analyzed i'm not sure how many uh of those dates and she found out uh and i've heard those conversations so she found out that the question

people were asking about dating history came like after um i think 20 or 30 minutes after or towards the end of the conversation asking them how many of the dates have you been on who have you dated stuff like that yeah the previous history whereas if this that question uh was moved towards the beginning that would have solved all the small talks and reaching but i mean wouldn't that just ruin the conversation because if somebody said isn't that a bit full like if somebody said well uh you know hi how you doing yeah you're right yeah yeah yeah

so how many dates have you been on uh no of course uh but okay so we do study these conversations like landscapes uh sorry race tracks okay so let's say those the the racetrack of that colleague she was studying the dating race track so in the beginning if that question didn't come there uh the the the conversation will go off track to another tangent but that question not like you mentioned it but in another way uh should have come much earlier uh so let's say uh the greeting

uh pairs so anybody in any conversation the norm would be i'm not saying that everybody does that anybody meets on a telephone or a zoom meeting audio video or physically on campus wherever they'll have some sort of a greeting exchange so if i say hey to you in swedish you'll reply hey whether you say it cheerfully or in another way that's another thing but people people reply with the same kind of vibe that you're bringing to the table that's what you're saying so if you're not so if you're saying like but you do change the vibes if you do that that is true but what i'm saying is that we call them

adjacency pairs so their peers these greetings and they are usually find in the beginning of any conversation but if you find that converse that pair in the middle of a conversation like we start chatting and then assalamualaikum so that's that's that's called split personality yeah so talk is basically uh very systematic there are other adjacency pairs as well so we can actually if we see let's say if we read some uh so this uh method let's say if i

was given like 20 emails of somebody i can i can um use this method or any other discursive linguistic method as well to track patterns and i can tell you a lot more than what you see so one off work and also one different word can also give a lot of details about that are people today when they are in these uh conversations of let's say courtship or relationships are they discussing uh different kind

of themes and discussions than people previously or are they discussing more less or do they omit certain things altogether get straight to business nowadays or is it like people are like no they still go through words are different but are people still having the same kind of conversations people have always been having previously i'm sure the conversations have changed yeah i mean the themes have changed so like obviously i'm sorry like today if somebody's talking about donald trump uh oh do you think donald trump's gonna become president do you think

so if you went back 50 years they might be talking about the prime minister of that day and age but really the discussion is still kind of the same it's just different characters it's it's very systematic this whole dating landscape as well so you have the similar kind of patterns but obviously like um now we have internet as well yeah so internet might bring in different topics uh different ways of doing and saying things as well and also depending on sociocultural uh differences upbringing and

what they have internalized in from their previous interactions in different settings so that would definitely have an effect uh but if somebody is willing to let me observe i'll come with my video camera and i can uh give further details about that people you've heard it if you want your conversations being recorded in addition to the uh secret intelligence services where you can also contact dr alia that's uh that's gotta be services do really like a profession actually seriously okay

right you know analyzing words and a dialogue analyzing a dialogue even though we don't call certain things within a religious discourse a dialogue but it is i suppose ultimately it's a kind of expression if we go back to scripture in the quran out of curiosity this is just curious it may not apply do you feel that things like this uh analysis of words it has some applicability to

religious scripture to to quran or not really that would be a mistake definitely definitely yes how so how so i mean you can you can look at discourses you can for instance look at intertextuality between between different scriptures uh i did i think uh look at uh by um bible or uh and quran's uh element eve i think for some assignments uh and i did find that there are similar intertextual patterns in them but they can be different ways of looking like how the the metaphors have changed over appearances sorry the metaphors

members might have changed in language use they might have been different but also are you talking about arabic or translations because i think there's a lot of need to study translations are we creating a similar world through urdu quran to persian quran because i suppose i i suppose because as we're translating if we you know we're kind of reconstructing a particular interpretation which could then get kind of locked like so for example if a person is always

uh translating every struggle in a military sense he's even though the word could mean that but if they always coming from a position from a power position to generate power or to um this would then shape the reading of all the people that read that yes for that for that language group and i i mean i i see that i mean if you if you look at different language groups and that's how i mean that was quran is at the let's say at a textual level but how we have interpreted it and how we are performing our muslimness if you go like between different groups you'll

find so many uh differences an example that's coming straight to to my mind is and i've spoken about this on my monday night sometimes that you have um certain words in the quran that are being that are about that are said are they descriptive are they prescriptive uh this this huge debate or area for interpretation like let's say allah speaks allah speaks about uh certain certain people who were preventing

women from getting married do not prevent them from then marrying the husbands this was if a sometimes people had feuds but the woman wanted to marry such and such but maybe the the parents the father or maybe the the the the patriarchy whoever is relevant it could be brothers uncles the tribe do not prevent them this other this kind of prevention here if you

even me saying it in english you see do not prevent them does it mean that am i saying it that in the sense that if that i actually can prevent them legally speaking because here some scholars understood that oh well the worly he even rightfully or wrongfully can prevent a woman from doing a nika it is ultimately up to them like what they're doing is this verb although it is saying

don't do this but it's ascribing a power position to that but like if i said to you uh don't stop them from going to school although i'm advising you like let's say i said these children don't stop them from going to school yes i'm telling you don't do it but i'm also am i ascribing a power position to you where you technically hold the power to prevent them or am i simply saying hey you like as if imagine i said that to another child don't stop them from going to school there would be no power position

being ascribed does this make sense so not enforcement yeah so not enforcing but uh yeah no it's not only not acting as not acting as the police yes but also what what i'm saying is it's it's more than that like i'm ascribing i'm not i'm assigning agency because and and people are doing that in the translations yes uh yeah and and there are i think several examples of that if you i mean one word that you

probably you can answer that question better uh because you have such uh vast knowledge about the dane it's the word muslim and in the quran it's not just for those who are muslims now right it's for all who um for the previous um groups okay like just to submit those who have submitted okay isn't it for everyone who has submitted to god or is it for those who have accept but has the word

changed its meaning now in its current form are we understanding it from um like different um angles are i mean that's a very good uh point which i have spoken on um on some occasions randomly here and there and it is that islam um even though the word islam and muslim are obviously they are in the quran it's not that these words don't exist in the early islamic discourse but they don't necessarily go on to mean

what they have later on what what they necessarily mean today or even later on so a hundred years after the prophet um islam has you see it it's it's taken on a it's kind of had a more nuanced identity the words so um so let's say in the time of the prophet sallallahu alaihi did they or in the language of the quran used to go around saying oh we are muslims or you're a muslim mashallah or you have embraced islam or you have even islam as a term

where they're using it like this so research by people like fred donner and other people highlighted which i feel is accurate highlighted that actually they used to refer to themselves as the believers and this it was they never really uh went around saying things like oh this is the religion called islam and you come to but around maybe 70 80 years after the prophet this does become the the widespread thing that there's a new shaped identity it's now called islam

you're called a muslim so that is fascinating that in the quran if you read the quran it seems to be more about those who have brought faith and not so much about uh you know latina aslam that will not really be the the case yeah same is true i guess for the words brothers and sisters common the uh words used in muslim spaces brothers and sisters i i can't recall if any of the

yeah i mean that i totally agree i i think that you can find you can find some um presence of these words but i don't i agree with you and and i've definitely expressed this that it's not the way it is today so just as i said with islam the word is in the quran in nadine and the word muslim is there in the quran but in the life of the prophet they wouldn't have gone around generally saying i'm a muslim you're a muslim they might have occasionally as a one-off use this word

but they use the word mutmen believers and this brother so for example that the uh that the believers are brothers this is used but did they used to always go around saying you know no they wouldn't have done this kind of stuff this is a very modern and they wouldn't know about they wouldn't know about the word hijab as well i guess which is shocking the word hijab uh is a very modern phenomenon isn't it it didn't exist i think 15 years ago i

don't remem i don't recall uh growing up definitely not in the classical whether it existed in the last hundred years um but if we're going to look at let's say 800 years ago 500 years ago in the prophet's time if the word is an arabic word which means a barrier but did it exist with this meaning of the like what what what you're wearing uh they would not have like if you were in imam malik's time and you said i've come to ask about the hijab he wouldn't understand what you're talking you'd think you're talking about some kind of a wall or a barrier

and you'd be like imam malik doesn't even know about the hijab it has become more of a construct of the of western muslims would you say yeah it's an identity um yeah definitely i mean although hijab today is is also used in the disney cultures and it's become like people it's it's taken a i feel it's very after colonialism it's kind of become this a reaction to uh the colonial identity that we have our own identity and part of it is a

woman wearing a himalaya and it's just for some reason doesn't carry the word at all sorry we just lost you there for a moment what would yeah so it didn't exist in this in the vocabulary of the south asian context at least other words so it has it's interesting if somebody did a study of the intertextuality of how the word hijab another very interesting word same kind of process

is what they use in arabic a lot this well in english it's not actually english but this indo-pak english free mixing where they will say i don't know what they'll say in uh what do they say in urdu about the mixing free mixing um i think is the arabic word yeah

but even it's interesting that this word obviously the word exists in arabic it's an arabic word but it didn't exist with this context that like today is understood as uh uh it's understood as shared space between the genders so what the pre-mixing a lot of discourse about that in the in the south asian muslim literature or languages religious or otherwise as well the words like co-education as something uh

demonish or yeah and religion and also the words uh parda for instance okay and like you talked about the gender so that's those words actually do because uh assigned roles for yeah because to this you see before you can demonize something you it has to exist as a word because and then the usage becomes yeah different in a different way because if you think about it this concept islam has existed from the prophet's time and you're going to have the concept of let's say

shared space between the genders has existed but they haven't had a word for it like this word where's the word in any of the thick books of the sharia written by the old the there is no word they don't have this is a very modern uh arabic word used for this the word exists mixing just as they use free mixing it's an english word but in the english language it's not used for uh free mixing is like mixing music and stuff it doesn't this is a a desi english word free mixing so the first i think the translations of

english of of the muslim um religious literature is the big body of it is from the south south asian uh writers or translators nothing wrong with that but there are some concepts of religious uh like the parda thing i don't think it exists in the in the in the in the scripture or uh the muslim um religious uh texas uh but that concept has been like brought in this um english muslim english as well yeah and there are so many other discourses uh and concepts of uh like about

mosques for instance uh the general uh i think uh idea from the south asian perspective is that women should pray uh in their homes uh that's a popular belief and you won't find uh spaces for women in majority of the mosque and if you do find then most then women do not actually uh voluntarily participate in them or nobody takes them there but you won't find the same in the arabian peninsula you will find spaces for women everywhere so i think it's also how those different taxes have been

interpreted and how they were the word that they use for women uh sometimes in a religious context when they're going to say have you got a space for women is sometimes mastur i don't know if you've heard this they'll say like it's obviously denoting that straight away that that it's giving it that that meaning so it's it's a power position straight away that okay this must be covered hidden uh out of sight

mastur um it's straight away just by using the word uh there's a power play and not necessarily by that it is meant in that particular context that they should be fully covered but not seen in in those uh manly spaces that's when the trouble starts uh when women enter their places even if they're wearing a burka or nikab or whatever so the very body is like not really accepted because there's already this perception that it's the

cha that the chad the recovering and char diwali is the space so a lot of south asian languages even the word you see even the word right now it's interesting that it comes from the the arabic word aura which is something which must be covered and it's something which must be kind of like uh protected away and covered otherwise it's it could be an issue whereas in arabic imra just means female of a man it just means like a human just like you've got a

imran it's not actually and even though people urdu speaking people may not know that actually means that but the way the word comes from is fascinating that they they brought it from that yeah but there are other words like masculinity is power right but if you say zana so it's it's it's lesser even those well words the way they will be used will have a different like

okay yeah yeah but mardan and zana are the the spaces for men and zenana is for women but mardangi is the the masculine power but if somebody uses the word zanana for you or you're looking like a zanaga so it's like somebody is degrading you from their your uh manhood to women but it won't be used the other way i guess yeah i suppose uh like they it might be used but then it would be considered a bad quality to be like a man for a woman in

in this context yeah i suppose like they could you see in that sense with words they could say uh about a man um like to not have his merdangi or like uh or like the way they have in fact a better example coming to mind if somebody is impotent sexually they will say he's not a man well you wouldn't say okay but that's a totally separate word though but but if you use the word he's no he's non-man but they wouldn't have that for a woman

on the on the plus side they wouldn't say na urat then they will say bunch or that's yeah but that's still that's that's that's the product it's actually got a uh it didn't go that way i'm just saying that that's interesting it did for the men but it didn't do it for the women because it just said it's very fascinating the whole power play

and how words are kind of set out language is power words have their impact so definitely words even one word if we change it you i mean if you go on and have a like let's say if not deliberately but you like have a fight with somebody over something and you recall how it all went like replay it in your mind you might realize that just a word could have changed the whole trajectory of that conflict so i think all conflicts uh miscommunication

and even the um world powers fighting each other is all at the communication and it sets a entire social um a mood it sets a um and i've said this before um and we that it's interesting um when how words and i've said it before but it just occurred to me right now as well actually on a side note that uh even the word divorce i remember um hearing it once before that in uh hindi

for example they because they don't even have the word divorce because obviously because the concept doesn't exist it's so they have to either borrow the english or the arabic balak or divorce but i was saying the similar thing about modesty on steroids within the indo-pak region that they don't actually have uh any general words for the reproductory organs at the private parts we do have they they don't i mean they

have swear words but they have then no we we we do have words uh proper words in biology for all uh all um organs no but including because as far as i'm moving from no but as far as i'm aware they are like euphemisms but they're not the actual word like they would say like so for example there would be a word like let's say is a general word which just means a place of modesty or shame now yeah but then they would have like a word let's say which means a reproductory organ it's not actually a word

it's i mean it's a word but it's not the actual name it's a it's an it's a description it's like saying reproductory organ um that like i i've not known of actual words in in that actually represent their actual names of of these let's say of the private parts they've got euphoria shame is connected yeah in those contexts to like even talking about and i think not like the words that you use otherwise i think people also create words so that it's not used in the

in the in the right context yeah because the you see because this then the fact that you don't even have a word to call something shows how taboo it would be in society like if like that's just you know if you think about it it's quite kind of like so crazy that there aren't even like there's obviously street words which are seen as vulgar like there's words for obviously all kinds of but but people can't use those words uh in a formal setting and then you've just got euphemisms or you've got very just which are just euphemistic

uh descriptor descriptive uh terms which sound just more medical because they're just speaking about function i i think that speaks volumes on how a society sees a particular topic yes and it has its facts i mean like you said if they are taboos and you don't even have words for regular things which are everyday things then then it has it it's it's in fact i mentioned this once and the reason i once contemplated i i really went into this kind of i thought about this at one particular time this is why i shared it on a

monday nights before and it was actually to do with because uh there was there was a the kind of backstory to it was uh several years ago i did a part-time job as an interpreter and i was called out to to a hospital and it was somebody to a kind of urology department and i had to translate for someone and and there was this baba sabzi and i was had to translate for him who uh he had he had now uh he was quite senior in age he must have been maybe late 60s

uh but he had remarried quite a young wife from pakistan and brought her over and he was obviously having impotence issues now he wanted the doctors to provide him certain medication but they were saying well you know we don't want to provide that yet try some apparatus instead but they wanted me to translate how all the instructions in urdu now it was only at that point when they were saying okay you do this with this particular thing and you move back a particular and i was thinking what word do i use and i realized

i didn't know the words and i thought well obviously i know vulgar words i'm not going to use them and i was thinking to myself what would so it was actually they were saying to because the doctor was saying to him well you need to hold back and and they were using the word obviously he had to kind of press against his testicles and they were telling me can you translate for him uh that in urdu so i was thinking what do i say like i don't know what to say yeah because i was like uh and and i remember just using the arabic words josiah

and and i think he kind of just figured it out that what i was trying to say but afterwards i was trying to think to myself what would be the word and and i realized and this is what i shared this story that that the urdu language is so taboo about these things it doesn't really keep words and that speaks like so many volumes i was actually watching some urdu dubbings of [Music] turkish series some of the turkish series like herzegrul and a new obsession

in you know pakistanis kind of somehow think that they are now turks i wanted to see what was the what was the reason of the popularity so when i looked at several uh plays i saw that they were actually uh he was actually urdu arthur an urdu place and urdu world is created by those who do dubbings uh i'm currently writing about that so to give you an example like the way they they they're talking about things it's it's a very

urdu atmosphere that's been created and people connect those words with what they know about the uh usmania khilafah the ottoman empire and the the the glory of the muslim days uh so kind of nostalgia uh also has uh inspired people to watch but turkish disease as they are called disease they are not new to pakistani or what are diseases this is the the series or the drama as we call it in turkish so people have been the pakistani or the

south asian audience have been watching the urdu dubbed place for about 10 years now so this isn't the first one but it has broken the record and the difference i found was that the previous ones are more about love and romance and urban life it's it's a different world from what we see in the south asian everyday life yeah so kind of an escape from uh what we can't do how we how we wear clothes we can't wear clothes like um how the urban turks might wear but but what i've also seen is the audience was actually more

women but now the shift in ethereal is that it's men as well who are watching it's a 60-plus generation of south asians who are watching it unlettered people people from the villages as well who could connect to that kind of a world that has been created through the urdu dubbing and isn't it like what they've done is it's a a kind of fantasy nostalgia like they somehow feel that oh this is us this is our history i mean yes

yeah and there has been like a lot of criticism as well about this this um craze about turkish place and turkey and and if you if you go through those comments as well under those youtube videos because i'm i'm i'm analyzing them as well you'll see um an imaginary um turkey being built through those words uh it's a it's it's it's nostalgia and a utopia um that comes through uh that comes out through those words which is not what i i feel that there's a there's a lot of you know behind the scenes there's politics at play as well with

turkey trying to also promote this uh leadership role throughout the muslim world and also the i mean from the south asian uh angle we had we were we were looking towards the arabian peninsula for a few decades but now there is a shift toward turkey and turkey of course through these place is also importing their uh cultural way of doing things and and there are there are so many but there are positive things as well in within those uh place as compared to what the south

asian south asians were watching all around the world for instance if you look at bollywood it was the similar kind of language that we speak but there were different norms so you know when you see bhagwan people would feel a bit off or if there is like an anti-pakistan discourse or anti-muslim like what whatever was khan i'm not a terrorist my name is yeah so those kind so it's a different uh different thing has been uh like brought to the the south asian viewers as compared to hollywood as well

you can't connect but now you see people who look like you um but also strong family ties because those those uh plays show strong family ties as compared to what pakistani plays are showing uh um even though people are still watching pakistani plays it's not that they have left or not watching them but a different kind of womanhood is shown in those place there is this mother-in-law and daughter-in-law conflict or a love triangle a man was marrying another woman that's the like the common theme but in

those place you see a different kind and i also have noticed that since they're dubbing an urdu uh in in turkish for instance people would greet each other good morning but in order even though we do have the words but it's not used a word or it's pakistani would probably use good morning or uh maybe other forms and now it's a good point actually what do people say like what would they say i'm trying to think back in the village what would they say they just wouldn't say anything i don't think they would greet in the morning like uh there

wasn't a paper what would they say maybe they'll say maybe they'll say put that together yeah like oh like you've woken yeah yeah like you've got up yeah have you woken up yeah but i mean a word there it wasn't a you're right there isn't really a and and i found several other uh several other words that are not there and i'm actually writing about that for a research article for instance um thank you we do say shukriya but then we don't have a return a reply yeah yeah yeah you're right you're right actually that's a good

what what does one say in do you say you say you just go you just stay back you go [Laughter] and then how people address each other in in those place at least in the turkish place that people are watching now in urdu so when people um translate so let's say the word in turkish janam or if somebody is talking to their fiance or their missus in a certain in a certain way

but there since there was absence of those words the words that have been dubbed for urdu are really absolutely such as what have they done [Music] uh like darling or sweetie that has been dubbed for the turkish words in what they just used like john no they didn't use janu so it's like sweetie and very so not the words that we would actually use because but it seems like it's more used in turkish in everyday conversation among friends or

but not by supposing they would use that the word like john is there uh like it does exist like john john these kind yeah but you won't probably say that in like a social setting oh yeah you wouldn't maybe yeah privately but you wouldn't say it privately yeah of course but not like a regular like if you would probably use like let's say if you uh uh four or five couples you know in a party or i suppose like in english you could say that too any you could just say like oh if you could just do that dear or something like this you could say

uh that to even it doesn't even have to be people you're with they do but then i suppose in english that is quite um usable even words like love like they do actually sometimes just say to oh uh like let's say somebody i don't know if it's considered sexist actually but uh people will say to sometimes when oh listen love if you could just do this but whereas you wouldn't uh yeah i suppose it wouldn't be like that in urdu in bazaar in the markets you would probably say or auntie or mo yeah yeah

but that would be very formal but bhaji or something but i suppose is that because of the taboo like in english if if i said to a lady let's say a shop oh listen love if you could uh whereas if you said that in urdu like john and people be like wait a minute something going on yeah so just like we talked about the words brothers and sisters like you have to assign um some sort of a relation

to somebody like a bobby you would if you if you met somebody in um like somebody you know you might call them bhabi or baji or you have to i thought that bhavi thing was more indian no it's it's it's very much used for instance in the military families in pakistan or in karachi but in other settings as well so a guy who meets somebody's missus would say oh no if he met somebody's missus yeah but if he just meant a lady whereas i i noted i i i felt that in india they often if they just me

as well they would just say whereas i didn't assume that in pakistan it would be it's that much just i mean it's different if they're standing next to the friend then they would yeah so first name basis would can be considered um rude rude but also breaching the noise because it's seen as too intimate isn't it like how do you like if you said uh if you called somebody's wife by her name it would be seen as like huh is there an affair going on here but that's the assumption that there's an affair or something but how are you

so you know this there was an issue i remember discussing with someone that uh you see step moms so like what does you see like in in those households they don't have a word for them and they have to call them the children the children have to call them mom or dad but there is a word isn't that negative it's the same like you wouldn't say to her

so whereas in english or in so for example in arabic they would just say she's or they would sometimes just call her by her name or call her sometimes yeah like but in english they would just call her by her name or just i mean they could call her mom if they wanted but what i'm saying is in urdu i felt that they don't give them a choice except to call them and that causes i think an issue with people because they feel that you know sometimes there's that rebelliousness that that isn't my dad or that isn't my mom

or that isn't um the the kind of psychological struggle i feel hmm because there is a forever the concept of forever the the happily married forever life so there is no second wife i think that's a very hindu concept as you said there is no talaq a divorce so how can a second mom come as well but in urdu like you mentioned talak it's also used in a way that a man serves the lord so the man has given divorce yeah yeah

but in english it's um they are divorced you can't say that in urdu how right okay it's a passive for the woman it's always a passive verb yeah and it actually sounds funny i have heard some people say sometimes it sounds funny like they say like the girl it sounds so funny that you think

but in in some respects swedish language the usage the current usage is very equal since we are on first first name basis here whether it's the university a student teacher even at the compulsory school level um stepmom step dads so mostly people are on first name basis it is interesting because you meet some people like let's say generally um like let's say from in a western setting not muslim of course but they will refer to their own mom and

dad by their name and sometimes often so i uh and i i is quite i mean i don't know i suppose maybe because we're so conditioned as you know with our background and culture that that's i mean one is as a one-off but they will by norm some of them always refer to their dad by his name and i initially when i i remember when i encountered it i initially thought oh that must be because he's not the real dad he must be the stepdad and then i found out no it's the actual

dad but they just call them by their name and i found that so weird like that can be really blasphemous in in a desi or even yeah i mean it'd be considered very rude yeah very rude but mind you even the woman mentioning the husband's name generally that she doesn't often now i think now they do yeah in the last 10 years or so i think things have changed but my parents like they would say the

[Laughter] but they will certainly still be um cultures many cultures within the daisy community where women won't use the name of their husband so it's like who are they calling that'd be like a persian

it's amazing that the things that the world that is trapped within words isn't it because the world isn't it's an entire culture uh rules regulations everything just trapped within like even like imagine like we're saying now about this language like urdu or it could be any language even if you learnt the language by textbook but you try to operate it without its social setting it would be a disaster like but like the example of trying to say oh my stepmom uh meriso

but also uh the point that when you switch a language you become a totally different person you know this is uh if you use punjabi or um persian or french you you are a totally different person you know the sapir wolfian hypothesis it's and it's the hypothesis that when a person uses a particular language that language impacts their perception of the world so and as they shift their perception is uh is kind of a shift as well with the language if you listen to yourself if you film

yourself i mean you have films so if you listen to yourself in different languages you'll see that your voice the quality of your voice intonation um and the way you are speaking the words you use and your whole uh the gestures as well change with the language and that is i mean doing things other people who are looking at you will interpret it from their own conditioning and social construction of reality and you are presenting what um the words that have collided in your mind or brain or wherever they are so this is girls yeah you're right actually

you would um it would have uh because the expressions are so um that they tie into body language isn't it i suppose like the whole i i know what to do what to do [Laughter] that's so amazing i have to say but um wow shukran i know uh dr alia this you you're not unlike me you're not a vampire and it has gone on so so late it's been absolutely

incredible having this discussion sharing these thoughts out there language is just so profound in and of itself and i feel that it is uh it is a gift from god definitely um yes it is it is um languages power and language has um power within itself and we give it power with our use in different ways um and yes i'm not a vampire i'm a very very morning person so um so i do apologize for all this inconvenience

uh dr alia what i'd like to say uh uh request as well for people who are watching this they may want to reach out to you they may want to connect with you what are the best platforms uh to connect with you on um if if they are like students of linguistics or studying languages or researchers or people who would just like to read my work then i would suggest that they go to researchgate it's a free website where all my research work and all the other researchers is there as well and i'm there by the name of alia

amir a l i a and a m i r i do have that written uh on the screen as well by the way so research gate would be one place if you want to read for instance chronicles of the english language or my latest research conversation analysis but otherwise if twitter is a good space to connect with me as well as uh instagram to some extent um linkedin sure as well there's plenty of options right there uh it's been an absolute pleasure uh

dr cyber having you on um it's really you know these i these discussions they rob them once i get talking as well but you shall lie do you look forward to connecting in the future again and do share your you know any interesting insights to share them with me uh keep me always uh posted with any kind of linguistic breakthroughs and things like that once again shukla and new zealand people ladies and gentlemen dr aaliyah barakallahu fikum it's been an absolute pleasure guys with that as well it's got late we're

gonna call it a night if you i'm going to put up my exit page do make sure you like subscribe put this out there any uh if you want to reach out you know the platforms take very good care of yourselves and to you all as well salam