WE keep talking about the beauty and sanctity of the national language, but hardly anyone ever talks about the corruption the language has been subjected to for the last few decades. The language being used by the country’s electronic media, especially the dramas, is seriously flawed, and it is hard to call it Urdu anymore. What is happening cannot be defended in the name of evolution. Urdu, as used by the national media, is not evolving. It is a process of linguistic corruption; not evolution.

Just to establish the point, I will mention a couple of dialogues that are frequently taken from Indian dramas by Pakistani playwrights. Woh uski beemari ko laker bohat pareshan hay. It is a purely Hindi sentence which can be easily written in Urdu as Woh uski beemari key wajah say bohat pareshan hay. This Hindi version is being used for quite some time now, but nobody has ever bothered to publicly point out or to correct this brazen mistake. Besides, this sentence is grammatically wrong when used in an Urdu context.

Another example is: Yeh kaam achhe se karna. Again, it is a grammatically wrong sentence in the Urdu language, and should be: Yeh kaam sahih se karna. Another sentence is: Usko phone lagao. In Hindi, this may well be correct, but in Urdu, the correct sentence is: Usko phone karo.

The greatest tragedy is that in Pakistan there are many excellent Urdu writers and poets as well as centres, like Muqtadra Qaumi Zaban, working for the last many years, but I have never come across any noteworthy job done by them in this critical regard. What a pity!

Abid Mahmud Ansari
Islamabad

Published in Dawn, December 31st, 2023