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Language: Urdu

  • Apr 22, 2012
  • 06:29 PM

Only right people can develop Urdu language: Dr Durrani

Manzoor Qadir / Daily Times
ISLAMABAD: The government should select right people with vision to prepare a group of linguistic experts the way experts are groomed in other fields, if it is genuinely interested in the development of Urdu language, said Dr Attash Durrani, the founder and head of Urdu Informatics Project at the National Language Authority (NLA).
  • Apr 19, 2012
  • 07:58 PM

My education, my language

Zubair Torwali / Pakistan Today
In mainstream Pakistan, the linguistic diversity of the country is still thought to be a threat to the national cohesion despite the fact that Pakistan has lost one of its arms mainly (including other factors as well) due to the denial of linguistic diversity.
  • Apr 12, 2012
  • 03:41 PM

'British Raj promoted Urdu'

The Express Tribune
“The textbook tale that British colonial rule in the subcontinent harmed the development of Urdu is false,” Dr Tariq Rehman, Dean of School of Education at Beaconhouse National University, said in a lecture at the Forman Christian (FC) College University on Tuesday.
  • Apr 02, 2012
  • 08:08 PM

Urdu declared official language in Bengal

Zee News
The state Assembly passed the West Bengal official language (amendment) bill, 2012, declaring Urdu as official language in respect of certain districts where the population of urdu-speaking people exceeds 10 per cent as a whole or part of the district like sub-division or block.
  • Mar 28, 2012
  • 08:32 PM

Verbal abuse against Urdu speakers must be stopped: Altaf

DAWN.com
KARACHI: Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) chief Altaf Hussain on Wednesday said elements using inflammatory language against Urdu-speakers of Sindh must be restrained, DawnNews reported.
  • Mar 28, 2012
  • 02:52 PM

New Languages Democratising Social Media in the Middle East

Journal of Turkish Weekly
Digital communication, as a way to share information and debate ideas, is now central to many parts of life. One prominent example is the focus on online activity in contentious political activities. Twitter and similar networks have been hailed as important tools of communication and organisation for opposition movements to authoritarian regimes.
  • Mar 21, 2012
  • 10:57 AM

Now playing: Bard in 37 languages

Sarju Kaul / The Asian Age
For the first time, it is hosting 37 international companies, including two from India, to present all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in 37 different languages. Theatre companies from Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas will present plays in 37 different languages during the six-week drama festival, Globe to Globe, which is part of the World Shakespeare Festival due to run till November.
  • Mar 17, 2012
  • 11:42 PM

100 Years of Hindi

Jaskiran Kapoor / Indian Express
Though Landour Language School started primarily to teach Hindi, it added other Indian languages to its profile over the years. “In pre-Partition India, Urdu was the most sought-after language. It was replaced by Gujarati and Tamil as the most popular languages in the following years. Now, Hindi is drawing the most students,” says Datt, attributing the trend to India’s reputation as an emerging economic power.
  • Mar 12, 2012
  • 01:38 PM

Bilingual dictionaries to promote India's mother tongues

Madhusree Chatterjee / TwoCircles.net
New Delhi : The campaign to preserve vernacular mother tongues and make knowledge accessible to students through translation across the linguistic arc has taken a big stride with a new bilingual dictionary series in Hindi, Bengali, Oriya, Malayalam, Tamil and Kannada from the source language, English.
  • Mar 08, 2012
  • 05:45 PM

Translating Twitter into languages read right to left isn't easy

Deborah Netburn / Los Angeles Times
Twitter now comes in 28 languages. The newest ones -- Hebrew, Farsi, Arabic and Urdu -- were added just this week. Those four languages posed a particular problem to Twitter's team of translation volunteers because they are read from right to left, rather than left to right. Therefore the translation required not just word challenges, but technical and design challenges too.
  • Mar 08, 2012
  • 01:28 PM

Kader Khan designing courses for Arabic, Urdu speakers

Mauli Buch / Times of India
For over 40 years we have known Kader Khan for his humour and dialogues. But now this Kabul-born Bollywood actor is immersed in academics. He has designed courses for studies in Arabic and Urdu languages and says education can remove lot of misconceptions about religion.
  • Mar 07, 2012
  • 11:47 AM

Google+ Now Available In Nine Indic Languages; No Transliteration Support

Vikas SN / MediaNama.com
While Google didn’t categorically mention the 16 newly included languages, we are quite certain that only Hindi was available during the launch of Google+. So with that assumption, the newly added Indic languages include Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu. (Correct us if we’re wrong). Users can change their Google+ language through their Google Accounts settings page.
  • Mar 07, 2012
  • 12:51 AM

Twitter Moves Right-To-Left, Adds Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi, and Urdu

Josh Wolford / WebProNews
In January, Twitter added four new right-to-left languages to their Translation Center, the crowdsourcing project that allows users from multiple different languages to help translate Twitter (the service, not the actual tweets). Now, they’ve announced that the work is complete and you can now interact with Twitter in Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, and Urdu.
  • Mar 06, 2012
  • 12:08 AM

Rehmat Aziz Chitrali— the reigning father of the Khowar language

The Dardistan Times
ISLAMABChitral Pakistan, a free launce journalist, researcher, TV Host of khowar programme, and Mahir-e-Iqbliat has been awarded a linguistic award for the promotion and preservation of Khowar and Urdu language from the International literary Association “mylanguages.org”.
  • Mar 04, 2012
  • 01:41 PM

Urdu and the bilingual Pakistani

Aakar Patel / The Express Tribune
There is a very attractive bilingual quality to the urban Pakistani because of his knowledge of Urdu. This comes out in Pakistan’s news television. The urban Indian reads and writes mostly in English, and so speaks a broken version of his mother tongue. In Pakistan, one is likely to find many more people who know Urdu almost as well as they know English.
  • Feb 23, 2012
  • 08:29 PM

3-day National Seminar on Structure of Contemporary Urdu begins at AMU

TwoCircles.net
Aligarh: Inaugurating a three-day national seminar on “Structure of Contemporary Urdu & Tracing the Footsteps of Urdu Grammatical Traditions”, the Vice Chancellor of Aligarh Muslim University, Prof. Sibghatullah Farooqui on 2nd February said that Urdu occupies a unique unusual position in the Indian linguistic scenario.
  • Feb 22, 2012
  • 12:46 AM

Bengali Language Day: Celebrating A Universal Human Right

Salman Al-Azami / The Platform
Today, the 21st February, marks a significant point in the global calendar. Exactly sixty years ago some brave men laid down their lives for Bangladesh (then known as East Pakistan), so that Bangla could be established as a state language. It is a tragic tale with a happy ending as Bangla eventually achieved the status it deserved, albeit at the cost of valuable lives.
  • Feb 20, 2012
  • 05:28 PM

Pundits of Urdu fail to convince Senate to make it official language

Business Recorder
The so-called pundits of Urdu miserably failed to convince the Upper House of Parliament to make it official language, totally replicating English as a medium of instruction.
  • Jan 12, 2012
  • 02:30 PM

Mind your language

Zubair Torwali / The Friday Times
Why are English-medium kids different from Urdu-medium kids? Surely the difference doesn't lie simply in the medium of language and teaching. What is it then? Is it that the EMT ("English Medium Type") kids have "liberal" parents? Or is it that their parents are richer? Do they always get better opportunities in life?
  • Dec 22, 2011
  • 08:21 PM

Will Pakistan's Language Be Lost in Texting Translation? (audio)

Fahad Desmukh / PRI's The World
Because the first generations of mobile phones couldn’t send text messages using Pakistan’s Urdu script, Pakistanis improvised and started transliterating Urdu phrases into the Latin alphabet. Even though Urdu-capable phones are more common now, many people have become used to using the Latin script.
  • Dec 15, 2011
  • 12:43 AM

Urdu language facing official apathy: State Cong Chief

Kashmir Dispatch
State Congress chief and member Rajya Sabha, professor Saif-udin Soz Wednesday said that the Urdu language was facing neglect at government level and demanded that it should be declared second language after Hindi in India.
  • Dec 12, 2011
  • 11:26 PM

Before leading PPP, Bilawal must learn Urdu, Sindhi

Hafeez Tunio / The Express Tribune
KARACHI: If Machiavelli wrote The Prince in present-day Pakistan, an additional chapter in the book would be titled: Learn local languages before leading your party.
  • Nov 26, 2011
  • 10:11 PM

International Urdu Conference concludes

Zaib Azkaar Hussain / The News International
The concluding session of the four-day International Urdu Conference demanded of the government to implement Urdu as the official language on Friday. President Arts Council of Pakistan Muhammad Ahmed Shah observed that there was no clash of languages in Pakistan. However, he said Urdu had produced powerful literature throughout the world and deserved to be implemented as the official language in the country.
  • Aug 10, 2011
  • 05:47 PM

Speakers for Urdu as official language

Pakistan Observer
Karachi—Speakers at a seminar organized by Tehreek e Nifaz e Urdu have strongly recommended proactive measures for implementation of Urdu as an official language in the country.
  • Aug 10, 2011
  • 03:12 PM

The murder of linguistic history — III

Tariq Rahman / The Express Tribune
...This article is meant to correct this misperception so that it becomes clear that Urdu is an ancient language and not an upstart pidgin as some people would have us believe. This fiction probably comes from Meer Amman Dehlavi who, in the preface of Bagh-o-Bahar (1801), asserts that it was in Akbar’s reign that people speaking different languages came together and Urdu was created.
  • Aug 10, 2011
  • 01:41 PM

The primary school where just FOUR pupils out of over 400 speak English as mother tongue

Louise Eccles / Daily Mail
In one of Britain’s most extreme cases, it has emerged that less than 1 per cent of pupils at Bradford Moor Community Primary School speak English as their first language. The school is in one of the city’s most deprived areas, and 90 per cent of the 417 pupils are from Pakistan. Many arrive at the school unable to speak a word of English.
  • Jul 24, 2011
  • 03:06 AM

The murder of linguistic history — II

Tariq Rahman / The Express Tribune
While the word Ordo — from which comes the English word ‘horde’ — does, indeed, mean ‘military camp’ in Turkish, this is not the only name for the ancestor of the language we now call Urdu. Indeed, the oldest name for this common ancestor of both present-day Urdu and Hindi was Hindi, Hindvi and sometimes Hindui.
  • Jul 18, 2011
  • 05:49 PM

The murder of linguistic history — I

Tariq Rahman / The Express Tribune
While some form of indoctrination goes into the deliberate construction of identities — mainly nationalistic identities — all over the world, it is rarely as crude as in the textbooks one comes across in our educational institutions. Even so, I was surprised when looking at the guidebooks students study for Pakistan studies at the BA level. I found versions of linguistic history which are simply untrue. Let me expatiate upon some of these untruths in a series of articles, of which this is the first.
  • Jul 01, 2011
  • 12:04 AM

Language loss and social stratification

Firth McEachern / Sun.Star
When Tagalog was declared as the basis of the national language in 1937, it was spoken by less than 20% of the Philippine population. Similarly for Pakistan, less than 10% of Pakistanis spoke Urdu, with the bulk of the people speaking one of the regional languages such as Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Balochi, and others.
  • Jun 19, 2011
  • 07:16 PM

Omar admits official neglect of Urdu, Kashmiri

Kashmir Watch
Srinagar: While as experts call for urgent need to focus on Urdu and Kashmiri, Chief Minister Omar Abdullah Saturday admitted neglect on part of the government to the languages.
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