The Morphology of Loanwords in Urdu

Although a major language in itself, Urdu has borrowed words from three major languages of the world, namely Persian, Arabic and English, with various loan morphological and phonological features. There have been very few studies on this phenomenon, and many features are still unexplored. This study focuses on loanword morphology, and looks at the nature of loanwords borrowed from these three languages.

The book begins by examining the morphological adaptation of loanwords. Secondly, parallels and differences are explored between the relatively recent adaptation of English loans and the older adaptation of words from Arabic and Persian. The descriptive content of the book—covering as it does not only English loanwords, but those from Arabic and Persian as well, in addition to examining native Urdu structures—is refreshingly broad.

The study itself is primarily descriptive, carefully teasing apart the sometimes complex interactions between syntax, semantics and linguistic function relative to loanword adaptation. However, even beyond the question of loanword adaptation, there is much to recommend itself descriptively here, with regard to the morphological structures of Urdu, including endocentric, exocentric, copulative, postpositional and verbal compounds. In addition to such derivational processes, this study also considers various inflectional issues, such as gender, number and case morphology, the pluralisation of English nominal loans, and the adaptation of English verbs through the use of Urdu dummy verbs.

The book offers a good foundation for a more in-depth examination of the data against current morphological theory. Taken as a whole, it not only presents a large quantity of interesting data in pursuing the immediate question of loanword adaptation in Urdu, but also provides a fruitful starting point for a wealth of further investigations into Urdu and into loanword adaptation more generally.