Six articles on the socio-linguistics on Urdu, one of the most interesting languages of South Asia.

Once it was one of the highest registers of Hindi itself (the other one was Braj), but today it is almost relegated to invisibility in India. In Pakistan it is reified at the expense of other languages (Sindhi, Panjabi, etc), yet it is losing ground to English, and many educated people there speak and write it poorly. In short, its future is highly uncertain.

Yet, just as a person cannot say they know Hindi well without some knowledge of Sanskrit and Braj, Urdu is indispensable for understanding northern India. To illustrate the point, Munshi Premchand, perhaps the most beloved writer of 20th c. Hindi, started out writing in Urdu and had to "translate" his stories into a more formal Hindi.

As you will see in these articles, the attitude toward Urdu is highly schizophrenic.

In this package, you get:

1 H. Mukhia, The Celebration of Failure as Dissent in Urdu Ghazal (1999)

2. D.J. Matthews, Urdu Language and Education in India (2003)

3. R. Russell, Urdu & I

4. A. Farouqui, The Problem of Urdu in India (1994)

5. A. Abbi, I.Hasnain, A. Kidwai, Whose Language is Urdu? (2004)

6. D. Gold, The Appeal of Urdu: Its Significance and Potential (2003)

Hindi-Urdu