Language Hybridization in Advertisements of Banks in Pakistan

The study investigates the Persuasive role of Urdu and English hybridization in Pakistani banks’ advertisements. In the current decade a rapid increase in the hybridized uses of languages has been observed in Pakistan in particular and the world in general. The rise of hybridized uses of languages necessitates the fact that this linguistic phenomenon requires to be explored in depth. Consequently, the current study explores language hybridization between Urdu and English in the advertisements of banks in Pakistan aiming to unpack its nature and the perception of bankers about this phenomenon. Data were collected by means of collection of hybridized phrases from the different banks’ pamphlets in district Mardan and serving a questionnaire to its 200 staff members. The descriptive and grammatical analysis of the data showed that the bankers tried to use hybridized language for a number of purposes including to ascertain surety, guarantee, legality and righteousness. The banks persuade their customers by using a hybrid language (English and Urdu) and thus effectively putting their message across. The hybrid phrases are mainly consisted of the grammatical categories of noun, adjective and adverb. Most of the words in the category of noun, adjective and adverb show ethnic, religious and cultural solidarity and empathy. They also ascertain legality, correctness, surety, safety and licitness. This study would have numerous implications for professionals in the bank sectors as well as for applied linguists

Language Hybridization in Advertisements of Banks in Pakistan

The study investigates the Persuasive role of Urdu and English hybridization in Pakistani banks’ advertisements. In the current decade a rapid increase in the hybridized uses of languages has been observed in Pakistan in particular and the world in general. The rise of hybridized uses of languages necessitates the fact that this linguistic phenomenon requires to be explored in depth. Consequently, the current study explores language hybridization between Urdu and English in the advertisements of banks in Pakistan aiming to unpack its nature and the perception of bankers about this phenomenon. Data were collected by means of collection of hybridized phrases from the different banks’ pamphlets in district Mardan and serving a questionnaire to its 200 staff members. The descriptive and grammatical analysis of the data showed that the bankers tried to use hybridized language for a number of purposes including to ascertain surety, guarantee, legality and righteousness. The banks persuade their customers by using a hybrid language (English and Urdu) and thus effectively putting their message across. The hybrid phrases are mainly consisted of the grammatical categories of noun, adjective and adverb. Most of the words in the category of noun, adjective and adverb show ethnic, religious and cultural solidarity and empathy. They also ascertain legality, correctness, surety, safety and licitness. This study would have numerous implications for professionals in the bank sectors as well as for applied linguists

Code-Switched Urdu ASR for Noisy Telephonic Environment using Data Centric Approach with Hybrid HMM and CNN-TDNN

Call Centers have huge amount of audio data which can be used for achieving valuable business insights and transcription of phone calls is manually tedious task. An effective Automated Speech Recognition system can accurately transcribe these calls for easy search through call history for specific context and content allowing automatic call monitoring, improving QoS through keyword search and sentiment analysis. ASR for Call Center requires more robustness as telephonic environment are generally noisy. Moreover, there are many low-resourced languages that are on verge of extinction which can be preserved with help of Automatic Speech Recognition Technology. Urdu is the $10^{th}$ most widely spoken language in the world, with 231,295,440 worldwide still remains a resource constrained language in ASR. Regional call-center conversations operate in local language, with a mix of English numbers and technical terms generally causing a "code-switching" problem. Hence, this paper describes an implementation framework of a resource efficient Automatic Speech Recognition/ Speech to Text System in a noisy call-center environment using Chain Hybrid HMM and CNN-TDNN for Code-Switched Urdu Language. Using Hybrid HMM-DNN approach allowed us to utilize the advantages of Neural Network with less labelled data. Adding CNN with TDNN has shown to work better in noisy environment due to CNN's additional frequency dimension which captures extra information from noisy speech, thus improving accuracy. We collected data from various open sources and labelled some of the unlabelled data after analysing its general context and content from Urdu language as well as from commonly used words from other languages, primarily English and were able to achieve WER of 5.2% with noisy as well as clean environment in isolated words or numbers as well as in continuous spontaneous speech.Comment: 32 pages, 19 figures, 2 tables, preprin

Suggestion to use codeswitching as an L1 resource in the students' written work: a pedagogical strategy, A

Department Head: Bruce A. Ronda.2010 Summer.Includes bibliographical references (pages 91-99).Pakistani English has marked its presence in all genres and poses pedagogical implications for both teachers and students. Most students in English as Foreign Language (EFL) settings are unaware of how and when to use code-switching (CS) as an L1 resource in their written work to convey local social meanings as no common standard has been established for teachers and students. This situation negatively affects uniformity in instructional and assessment procedures. While the use of CS in academic settings is still a relatively new area of research, recent studies advocate the use of L1 as a resource in the classroom. This focused study provides an overview of previous CS research centered on its importance as a discourse tool in the oral and written work of multi/bilingual persons who use CS to convey social aspects which cannot be appropriately communicated through the target language (TL). Some studies observe the CS patterns found in teacher talk during instruction and advocate its use as a potential L1 resource, but they fail to address how it can be regulated in students' written work without hindering TL learning. This study fills in the gap by suggesting the use of bi-directional translation methods in conjunction with acceptability judgment tasks in order to instruct students in identifying how and when CS should be used as an L1 resource. The study is conducted with the pool of 36 students in a local university in Lahore, who read four English newspaper articles and code-switched in Urdu in pre and post-instruction stages. Paired t-test results showed significant improved results for the acceptance rates and number of attempts by the participants in the post instruction. This suggests that students can use L1 as a resource to convey concepts in the TL when properly instructed and that further research in this connection can be useful for FL learning settings

THE IDENTIFICATION OF FORMULAIC SEQUENCES IN URDU LANGUAGE AND THEIR PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATION FOR SLA (ESL/USL)

In this study, an effort has been made to explore formulaicity in the Urdu language and its pedagogical implication in second language acquisition, both for English as a second language and Urdu as second language learners. It is believed that formulaic sequences or prefabs make more than fifty percent of a language. These formulaic sequences are of various kinds encompassing idioms, proverbs, collocations and sometimes, simple fillers. For the current study, data will be collected from two widely circulated Urdu newspapers. The data will consist of lexical chunks or formulas, which will be identified on the basis of eleven criteria proposed by Wray and Namba (2003). To maintain inter-rater reliability, the data will be shared with an Urdu language expert. After the identification, the formulaic sequences will be classified into six classes. Results of the pilot study show that there is formulaicity in the Urdu language. It was found that Urdu is also replete with almost all kinds of formulaic sequences, like many other languages

Doctoral Dissertations on South Asia, 1966–1970

This volume gathers the harvest of recent doctoral dissertations on South Asia, principally from North America and Western Europe, but exclusive of theses from universities in South Asia itself. The yield—1305 dissertations based on research carried out during the early and middle nineteen-sixties and brought to completion between 1966 and 1970—is even greater than one would have guessed, eloquent testimony to the expansion of South Asian studies in the West over the last decade. Doctoral Dissertations on South Asia seeks to be a comprehensive compilation of recently completed theses dealing in whole or in part with the former civilizations and the contemporary affairs of Ceylon, India, Nepal and Pakistan. At the same time, this work provides striking testimony of the dynamic growth of Asian Studies outside the subcontinent and particularly in the United States, Great Britain, Germany and France, where most of the major centers of scholarship are presently found. It is an interdisciplinary work covering the natural sciences as well as the humanities and social sciences

Translating Islamic Law: the postcolonial quest for minority representation

This research sets out to investigate how culture-specific or signature concepts are rendered in English-language discourse on Islamic, or ‘shariʿa’ law, which has Arabic roots. A large body of literature has investigated Islamic law from a technical perspective. However, from the perspective of linguistics and translation studies, little attention has been paid to the lexicon that makes up this specialised discourse. Much of the commentary has so far been prescriptive, with limited empirical evidence. This thesis aims to bridge this gap by exploring how ‘culturalese’ (i.e., ostensive cultural discourse) travels through language, as evidenced in the self-built Islamic Law Corpus (ILC), a 9-million-word monolingual English corpus, covering diverse genres on Islamic finance and family law. Using a mixed methods design, the study first quantifies the different linguistic strategies used to render shariʿa-based concepts in English, in order to explore ‘translation’ norms based on linguistic frequency in the corpus. This quantitative analysis employs two models: profile-based correspondence analysis, which considers the probability of lexical variation in expressing a conceptual category, and logistic regression (using MATLAB programming software), which measures the influence of the explanatory variables ‘genre’, ‘legal function’ and ‘subject field’ on the choice between an Arabic loanword and an endogenous English lexeme, i.e., a close English equivalent. The findings are then interpreted qualitatively in the light of postcolonial translation agendas, which aim to preserve intangible cultural heritage and promote the representation of minoritised groups. The research finds that the English-language discourse on Islamic law is characterised by linguistic borrowing and glossing, implying an ideologically driven variety of English that can be usefully labelled as a kind of ‘Islamgish’ (blending ‘Islamic’ and ‘English’) aimed at retaining symbols of linguistic hybridity. The regression analysis confirms the influence of the above-mentioned contextual factors on the use of an Arabic loanword versus English alternatives

Interpreting the change, perceptions versus reality: a research study on performance of the KP Government: October 2013 - April 2014

"The report aims at assessing the performance of the government to get a real picture of the change the people have been experiencing under PTI. It is a sincere effort to highlight gaps in governance mechanism and suggest recommendations if there is a room for improvement. One of the main objectives of the report is to educate the people and make the process of governance publicly accountable, accessible and democratic in real sense.

Global Digital Cultures: Perspectives from South Asia

Digital media histories are part of a global network, and South Asia is a key nexus in shaping the trajectory of digital media in the twenty-first century. Digital platforms like Facebook, WhatsApp, and others are deeply embedded in the daily lives of millions of people around the world, shaping how people engage with others as kin, as citizens, and as consumers. Moving away from Anglo-American and strictly national frameworks, the essays in this book explore the intersections of local, national, regional, and global forces that shape contemporary digital culture(s) in regions like South Asia: the rise of digital and mobile media technologies, the ongoing transformation of established media industries, and emergent forms of digital media practice and use that are reconfiguring sociocultural, political, and economic terrains across the Indian subcontinent. From massive state-driven digital identity projects and YouTube censorship to Tinder and dating culture, from Twitter and primetime television to Facebook and political rumors, Global Digital Cultures focuses on enduring concerns of representation, identity, and power while grappling with algorithmic curation and data-driven processes of production, circulation, and consumption