THIS morning, when my mobile phone kept flashing and pinging, I found that I was being sent updates from one of those chains of part-serious, part-trivial sociopolitical exchanges with which even casual users of Facebook soon become familiar. The debate, about democracy, the military, and the merits and demerits of all Pakistani leaders past and present (and possibly future), had no more in it to commend it to me than many others of the kind. But as I extricated myself from the discussion, a singular phrase caught my eye: “aap apni mind ko rationally grow karein.”

I blinked. What language was that instruction in, exactly? Not a translation from English, in spite of the English words. So how would I express something similar in Urdu? The first phrase that came to mind was ‘apni (siyasi) soch sudhariye’; or if I want to retain the rational bit, perhaps ‘apni aqal durust kijiye’ (and Urdu isn’t even my first language so it’s not unlikely that an English influence will creep into my formulations.) But even if we are trying to convey a concept that seems stilted in our mother tongue, the trick is to stretch our own linguistic resources to create an original phrase, rather than randomly reassemble foreign words which ultimately create sentences that barely make sense.

I often hear the rejoinder that this gratuitous anglicisation is a phenomenon most often encountered in virtual speech, which is by nature a jumble of tongues. But I’ve heard enough examples on the street and in gatherings to convince me that it flourishes in common conversation as well. And then there are also those odd linguistic borrowings that make me dissolve in laughter: for example, the frequent subcontinental use of the word ‘backside’. “Frere Hall ke backside mein,” I recently heard someone say, evoking a strange image of a new protuberance in the old building; surely ‘Frere Hall ke piche’ would have done? (Is there any point in telling the speaker that the term he has just used is actually a rather coy and outdated way of describing a part of the human anatomy?) Or the commonly-heard ‘tension na lein,’ which oddly enough gets translated back into English as ‘don’t take tension,’ a phrase which would baffle any native speaker of the language, not to mention ‘mera wait karein’ and ‘mujhe late ho rahi hai’.

Jokes apart, mine is not so much a diatribe about linguistic purity as a query about when a language seems to cease to serve its users in its natural form; along with an inevitable acquisition of new technical vocabularies or neologisms, it also loses its own simple and pithy terms, becoming near-gibberish at either end of the lexical spectrum, from the pompous newspeak of TV announcers to the idiolects of students.

If I’m playing devil’s advocate here, it’s partly an echo of a report from Iowa I read, about Lebanese novelist Iman Humaydan’s comments on recent developments in Arabic: “The Arabic language is deteriorating, not only because of globalisation and the mainstream English language, but because the educational system of the Arab world is connecting the language to social values that can no longer talk to the youth.”

Let us apply this comment to the situation of Urdu. Is it, in the case of the ‘growing’ lingua franca of Pakistan, the use of roman letters and abbreviated speech on the internet, the speed with which we often communicate virtually, the prevalence of globalised English, or in fact a dearth of good Urdu pedagogic materials that have the greatest impact on its development? (As a long-time expat, I wonder; at festivals and conferences, I frequently meet youth who are quite well-read in Urdu fiction and quote easily from Faiz’s poetry.) Will a hybrid dialect, one day, become the language of fiction (if Urdu fiction survives) — as it already has become the language, across the border, of Mumbai television soaps, in which, apart from the customary spliced Hinglish sentences, or phrases reiterated in both languages, we have terms like ‘mind your language!’ and ‘what nonsense,’ which are regularly used in irrelevant contexts?

Has the daily use of vernacular languages, too, become hybridised to this extent because they have failed to grow to meet the demands of our changing times? I’ve often heard it said that the young are no longer very interested in writing in Urdu, which has no international market; is there then a possible future in which a brand of Pakistani English will emerge with features similar to the dialects frequently used on social media and heard on the street? (That doesn’t seem to be the present scenario; though I’ve seen plenty of examples of syntactically mangled English online, I still haven’t come across a notable example of English, except perhaps in a couple of parodic novels, that uses Urdu expressions with the same panache as Urdu speakers use English.)

I’ve often discussed bilingualism with friends who were educated in English-medium Pakistani schools. In my own case, I wasn’t ever taught Urdu properly at school, where we were discouraged — if not forbidden — to speak it. I could barely express myself in it until I went, as an adolescent, to spend some months with my maternal grandparents in Indore (India).

Because I learnt it properly as a teenager, I have, perhaps, a convert-like zeal for trying to use my mother tongue as precisely as I can. That doesn’t necessarily mean abstaining from a few judicious borrowings, but I hate to hear its rich Indo-Persian vocabulary depleted or impoverished. (I remember being asked, recently, what the words ‘ghilaf’ and ‘tashtari’ in one of my Urdu stories meant; in Islamabad, I heard an interviewer say: “Aap ki books ke subjects ke bare mein listeners ko inform kijiye,” which could, without undue fuss, have been rephrased as “sunne valon ko apni kitabon ke bare mein kuch bataiye”; I frequently hear the words ‘table’ and ‘bed’ instead of ‘palang’ or ‘mez’ which I would use without thinking.)

Some younger contemporaries tell me that in their English-medium schools the Urdu texts they were made to read were turgid, robbing them of all nascent interest in the language. On the other hand, in the mid-60s my older sister Shahrukh (also a novelist) found a diligent and gifted teacher at her convent school, and developed a life-long love for the language (she is a scholar of 20th century Urdu poetry). She is not the only one, as recent translations from Urdu by Anglophone Pakistani authors prove.

Iman Humaydan also observed that a serious issue she encountered was “convincing students that their mother tongue [Arabic] was capable of connecting with their inner selves.” If we extend the issue to Urdu, or include all the Pakistani languages that are being marginalised by the hegemony of English, we have a wide range to choose from, particularly in the Pakistani context. I have younger acquaintances who seem effortlessly to bridge the gap between languages; their English is fluent, and they read, speak and write Urdu well. Interestingly, two of the greatest advocates I know of Urdu fiction and poetry are Pashto-speakers who also have an abiding loyalty to their own language. One is a published poet, the other has dedicated a website to Qurratulain Hyder; both use English as their main medium of written expression — a matter of academic or professional expediency — while they maintain their interest in Urdu and Pashto literature.

As I write about these multilingual friends I am reminded of a writer I hadn’t read or heard of until only two years ago, but whose novels and memoirs I now revisit often. Now in her 80s, Nisar Aziz Butt is almost the last living novelist of the great generation that included Qurratulain Hyder, Khadija Mastur and Jamila Hashmi. Unlike them, however, she hasn’t had her due recognition, though she has written some fine novels. Unlike them, too, she doesn’t belong to a region or a milieu in which Urdu is dominant; she largely grew up in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, speaking, and listening to Pashto, Punjabi, Hindko, Urdu and Persian, and reading both Urdu and English. (She acquired French at some stage, if I’m not mistaken, and has published a book of essays in English.)

For her, then, writing in Urdu is not a matter of contingency or constraint, but of choice and preference; there is little doubt that her multilingualism gives her novels a flavour that’s quite distinct from those of her contemporaries. She is one of our most cosmopolitan writers. Her canvas shifts from the megacities (and the rural hinterlands) of the subcontinent to the centres of Western civilisation. Firmly grounded in world history, she constantly navigates not only between cultures but also between many worlds of the mind; we might find her quoting Miraji on one page and translating Pablo Neruda from Spanish on the next.

As a result, her prose has a polyglot feel to it: though it may appear hybrid to a purist, it is actually the sort of richly-textured tapestry of sound and image that works well in Pakistan. A new language for our times that glosses, alludes to, and freely borrows from all of our traditions and those of the world, giving readers today a rich precedent to follow, demonstrating that the cadences of our regional heritage and the sophistication of our urban realties can make equal contributions to Pakistani arts and letters.