A JOURNEY FROM URDU TO URGAIZĪ: A STUDY OF ENGLISHCODE SWITCHING IN THE URDU NOVELS OF UMERA AHMEDAND NEMRAH AHMED

Abstract

This study set out to investigate the phenomenon of code switching in Pakistani contemporary novels written in Urdu. Pakistan is a multilingual society and, therefore, bilingualism and code switching is a recurring practice in the discourse patterns of its people. It is a fact that instead of pure Urdu, Urdu with a code mixing of English is prevalent and more easily understood in the Pakistani society. A majority of people are able to understand only the type of Urdu that contains almost 4-6 % words from English. This form of Urdu is rapidly becoming the language of print and electronic media, too. This pattern is also reflected in Literature written in Urdu by contemporary Pakistani writers. This paper analyses ten novels written by two contemporary and popular Urdu novelists of Pakistan viz., Umera Ahmad and Nemrah Ahmad, with a purpose to find out the proportionate use of code mixing in our daily language practice as depicted through these novels. The findings revealed that both the novelists make ample use of English code switching in order to appeal to the readers from this multilingual society where many expressions of English are becoming part of the Urdu language used on daily basis and the incidents in Umera Ahmed’s (6.02%) novel are greater than in Nimrah Ahmed’s (4.25%) novels.