"Our Z remains Z from Sindh to Punjab"?
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A few days ago, I cited the discussion in the Indian press about the nature and source of misspellings in the document claiming responsibility for the recent attacks in Mumbai ("Terrorist speech recognition?", 12/1/2008). Yesterday, I saw some discussion of pronunciation and word choice in what is said to be a recorded telephone conversation between one of the terrorists and TV journalists. Thus Yogi Sikand, "Lies of the Lashkar", Rediff, 12/4/2008:
Not possessing a television set myself, it was only just now that was I able to listen to the recording, hosted on the Internet, of a conversation which took place some days ago between a terrorist holed up at Nariman House in Mumbai and calling himself 'Imran Babar' and reporters of the India TV channel.
It is plainly evident from the conversation that the terrorist was a Pakistani, most likely a Punjabi. This is obvious from his accent and the sort of Urdu he speaks. One can easily make out that he had been carefully tutored by his mentors who masterminded the deadly terror assault on Mumbai to intersperse his hate-driven harangue with some Hindi words (shanti, parivar etc) and to use Urdu words in the typical Hindi way (jabardasti instead of zabardasti etc.) so as to give the misleading impression that he and the other terrorists with him were Indian Muslims, not Pakistanis. The terrorists claimed to belong to the 'Deccan' in India, but it is obvious that this was not at all the case.
I believe that the recording in question is this one:
There's some dissenting linguistic analysis in the YouTube comments, e.g.
seems like you know pakistanis more than we know huh? u gota b kidding dude we dont use these words
"Itihaas", "Prasashann", "Sarkaar"??? we dont know what they meant for sarkar we say hakomat or government but other two are too creepy to b understandable and I wont even bother. ALl I want to say. this BHAIYAA accent is not paki. we dont say JOROR we say ZURURRRRRR .. our Z remains Z from sindh to punjab& sarhad to balochistan!!!!!!
And again:
"Itihaas", "Prasashann", "Sarkaar"??? WHAT THE FUDGE???????? lolzzzzzzzzzzz we pakistanis dont even know what these words mean ahhahaha this is HINDI DUDEEEEEEEEEEEE he is INDIAN
Then again, there is this comment:
im indian muslim i know accent of indian muslim better than a paki. he is pathan from pakistani NWF province..
And this one:
Definitely not from the deccan…
Check out the accent when he says hamare or udhar or how he pronounces the word "twenty five" or "ye bateen". The guy probably knows english but is non urban. sounds like a panjabi.
He uses sanskrit words like like balak and Pathshala in a highly contrived way an indian especially from the deccan would never bother to do.
In India as well as in Pakistan both Z and J are used in spoken Urdu this means nothing. Incidentally he does both.
Back at Language Log, in a comment on the earlier post, Akshay wrote:
… spoken Urdu in Hyderabad is quite different from spoken Urdu in Pakistan; it's very very easy for a native speaker to make out the difference. Not just pronounciation, but also idioms, expressions and most importantly slang; I'm no expert on dialects, and quite evidently, I may be emotionally-biased, but to my ear, there's no way those recorded statements from terrorists holed up in the Oberoi can be Hyderabadi. There's a certain sing-a-long quality to the dialect that was missing; it definitely sounded more Punjabi-Pakistani than anything else.
And Karan added this comment:
I can second what Akshay says about the accent of the voice in the recorded statement to NewsX being Pakistani-Punjabi and not Indian-Hyderabadi (I'm from the Indian Punjab), although I'm not sure that the voice has been confirmed as being of one of the terrorists during the attack. There was a line or two that the person on the phone addressed to someone in the background that was entirely in Punjabi, roughly translated: "What are our demands?"
I'm inclined to believe Yogi Sikand, Akshay and Karan. However, for those of us who are interested in the linguistic details but are ignorant of Hindi/Urdu sociolinguistics, it would be nice to to see a transcript and a more detailed and systematic analysis.
Samir Chopra said,
December 6, 2008 @ 8:37 am
The accent is unmistakeably Punjabi (the up-and-down lilt is a dead giveaway).
Mark F. said,
December 6, 2008 @ 10:35 am
This seems to be a case where most of the people with the expertise to comment on the speaker's accent are people who have a stake in the answer.
language hat said,
December 6, 2008 @ 11:06 am
This seems to be a case where most of the people with the expertise to comment on the speaker's accent are people who have a stake in the answer.
Exactly. I'm not inclined to believe anyone unless their answer goes against their political interest. If a Pakistani tells me "Yes, I hate to admit it, but that's definitely someone from Punjab," I'll buy that. If an Indian says it's clearly Pakistani, or a Pakistani that it's clearly Indian, to me that's just noise.
Mark Liberman said,
December 6, 2008 @ 12:02 pm
language hat: I'm not inclined to believe anyone unless their answer goes against their political interest. If a Pakistani tells me "Yes, I hate to admit it, but that's definitely someone from Punjab," I'll buy that. If an Indian says it's clearly Pakistani, or a Pakistani that it's clearly Indian, to me that's just noise.
The distribution of political views doesn't match up so neatly with national (and even ethnic) boundaries. For example, the Indian historian Amaresh Misra has been promoting the theory that these attacks were carried out by a conspiracy of Hindutva activists and Mossad agents.
I take it that he's an Indian national of Hindu ethnic origins, and thus in some sense arguing "against his political interest", but this doesn't make me think that his theories are any more plausible.
It makes more sense to me to evaluate arguments, even in a case like this, based on their empirical content and their logical coherence, regardless of their source.
TB said,
December 6, 2008 @ 12:41 pm
I don't have any way to judge this stuff, but it does seem to be bad form to quote only poorly punctuated/capitalized, heated arguments from the "he is Indian" side and more standard, relatively unemotional-sounding arguments from the "he is Pakistani" side. Maybe that's all you had to work with, but it ends up seeming like judging an argument on Urdu based on English proficiency.
I hope that made sense, I just woke up.
[(myl) The comments I quoted were the first I found that cited some specific evidence against the Pakistani-origin hypothesis, searching by recency on the YouTube post. There was an earlier comment in more standard language:
but it was less specific. Frankly, the spelling and style of the comments that I wound up quoting didn't bother me. ]
dw said,
December 6, 2008 @ 1:00 pm
In view of the title of this post, a glance at Masica, "The Indo-Aryan Languages", page 92, may be interesting.
Masica first says that for Hindi (as opposed to Urdu) speakers, it is characteristic of "educated urban speakers" to maintain the distinction between /z/ and /j/, but not necessarily of the non-urban or non-educated. He then writes:
"[F]or native speakers of Urdu … the maintenance of /f, z, ʃ/ [as opposed to /ph, j, s/ is _not_ correlated with level of education or sophistication, but is characteristic of all social levels".
Thus the claim that Z remains Z "from Sindh to Punjab" is as much a sociological one as a geographical one. Incidentally, "Punjab" must refer only to Pakistani Punjab: I've met several Hindi-speakers originally from (Indian) Punjab who would say things like "sabJi" for "sabZi" ("vegetables").
[(myl) According to the 2001 Pakistani census quoted in an earlier Language Log post ("Language in Pakistan", 12/28/2007), only about 7.6% of the Pakistani population speaks Urdu natively — for the rest, it would be learned as a second language. And I gather that the native Urdu speakers would mainly be Mohajirs in Karachi and Hyderabad and some other cities. If the recorded speaker is actually Punjabi (from either side of the border), as some have claimed, then I presume that his Hindi/Urdu would have been learned as a second language, right? What would that mean for the various sociolinguistic markers under discussion?
In any case, it would advance the empirical foundations of the discussion if there were a transcript of what he said, with specific data on his treatment of the z/j alternation — at least one commenter asserted that his pronunciation was variable in that respect. ]
Akshay said,
December 6, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
This seems to be a case where most of the people with the expertise to comment on the speaker's accent are people who have a stake in the answer.
You know, I was speaking with a research analyst yesterday associated with a local think-tank, and he made a very interesting comment on homogeneity. Said, unlike similar ethnic groups seperated by country (like say, Chinese in Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia, or Germans in Germany, Austria and Switzerland), there's a fair amount of linguistic homogeneity _across_ national and religious boundaries. Says, while there's an obvious linguistic diversity in the sub-continent, there's a fair amount of linguistic homogeneity immediately across the border; so a Sylheti and an Bengali from Assam would speak in similar tones, even though they would sound different from someone in Calcutta.
As I thought about it over the past day, I think I agree with him. This distinction between 'region' and 'nation' is rather crucial here; 'regions' tend to speak more alike than 'nations'. Except for Bangladesh, there is no mono-linguistic nation in South Asia, so it's perhaps impossible to state which _country_ a person is from. But in many ways, it's extremely easy to state which _region_ the person is from; in trans-national challenges like terrorism, it's perhaps prudent to think about other forms of trans-national linkages as well.
I listened to the extract again, and I repeat my assertion: I don't see how the accent _cannot_ be Punjabi. Take how he pronounces "anti-terror" for instance; most Hyderabadis I know pronounce it with a thick 'y' in front, and a rolling 'r'. "YaanTI TeRRor", is, not surprisingly enough, an exact pronounciation of how it's transliterated in Telugu (యాంటీ టెఱ్ఱర్).
The voice in the clip doesn't say that; instead, it pronounces it as 'enti terror', with a clipped 'r', and a shorter 'e' sound. Substituting the 'a' in 'anti' with a 'e' (ए) is a very very Delhi/Punjab/Lahore thing to do; had it not been for the comment on Muslim persecution, it could have easily been my friend from Delhi discussing the decline of kebabs in Connaught Place (to, again, discount country or religion and comment on _region_).
Take my assertion as you will; I have already said that I could be more emotional than rational on deciding this, perhaps I do have a stake in decrying suggestions that us Deccanis are rebelling against the Indian Union. All I'm trying to say is this: Dakhni, the Urdu dialect spoken in the Deccan, is distinct, rich in literature, is older than 'regular' Urdu and is a badge of identity for many people. A seven-minute clip from a news interview perhaps shouldn't be conclusive proof of national identity or governmental involvement, but that this person is _not_ from the Deccan should be extremely clear.
If an Indian says it's clearly Pakistani, or a Pakistani that it's clearly Indian, to me that's just noise.
I was hoping discussion in the lingua-blogosphere would have more signal than noise than than that cringe-worthy YouTube thread, but I'm sorry my ethnicity comes in the way of your appreciating my analysis.
Rest assured, sir, that in all the years I've followed your blog, I was never interested in finding out about _your_ ethnicity, and that I would read your comments on _all_ linguistic matters with interest, even those on your home-town, wherever that may be.
Samir Chopra said,
December 6, 2008 @ 3:42 pm
"f an Indian says it's clearly Pakistani, or a Pakistani that it's clearly Indian, to me that's just noise."
Unbelievable. With one stroke, our views are consigned to the dustbin of tribalism. How do you parse political discourse in this country, sir? When, for instance, a Democrat is speaking, do you simply turn the TV off because he isn't speaking against his political interests? But then, you must do the same for Republicans? Have you so lost the ability to evaluate arguments?
Ran Ari-Gur said,
December 6, 2008 @ 3:44 pm
It seems from all these comments that the speech had certain features that group A associates with group B, and certain features that group B associates with group A. Even without the political interests, I think members of group A would tend to notice the former and members of group B would tend to notice the latter. (Compare the recent discussion here of the noun "committee", where we Americans think that Britons prefer plural verb agreement for it, because that sort of usage sticks out.)
Yogi Sikand seems to be the only observer giving an explanation for both kinds of features: he (she?) argues that the Pakistani/Panjabi-specific features are real or unconscious, while the Hindi-specific features are consciously affected in attempt to be perceived as Indian. I'd be interested to hear the explanations of other knowledgeable observers.
Samir Chopra said,
December 6, 2008 @ 4:26 pm
The Hindi-specific features belong in the realm of vocabulary, the Punjabi specific features are in the realm of the accent. The former are easier to feign for one. Furthermore, the Hindi that is being used is quite "shudh" or chaste. Someone speaking that "shudh" Hindi with a Punjabi accent is more likely to be a Punjabi trying to pass himself off as a Hindi-speaking person than a Hindi-speaking person trying to put on a Punjabi accent (and the accent is uniform throughout with no slippage).
chris said,
December 6, 2008 @ 10:18 pm
Ran Ari-Gur:Yogi Sikand seems to be the only observer giving an explanation for both kinds of features
Not quite. dw above suggests that the z/j alternation is found among people from Indian Punjab. Akshay says that the voice could be from either side of the border in Punjab: "had it not been for the comment on Muslim persecution, it could have easily been my friend from Delhi discussing the decline of kebabs in Connaught Place". So presumably all the "Hindi" aspects (z/j alternation and the vocabulary items) could be explained by the person being originally from the Indian side of the border.
This explanation – that this person could be an Indian Punjabi, possibly recruited and trained by a terrorist organisation in Pakistan – seems much more plausible to me than the person being a Pakistani pretending to be from the Deccan. If you were doing that, surely you would at least make a major attempt to mask your accent?? You wouldn't just slip in a few Hindi words and say your Zs in a Hindi way from time to time. In any case the attempt would probably be doomed to failure because as Samir Chopra suggests, it is very difficult to maintain a fake accent perfectly, without slippage. So if you were trying to maintain the illusion of Deccan responsibility, you probably wouldn't be having phone conversations with TV journalists at all.
Mark F. said,
December 6, 2008 @ 10:32 pm
Language Hat: "If an Indian says it's clearly Pakistani, or a Pakistani that it's clearly Indian, to me that's just noise."
Samir Chopra: "Unbelievable. With one stroke, our views are consigned to the dustbin of tribalism. How do you parse political discourse in this country, sir?"
I'm not sure I'd go quite so far as Language Hat, but really the problem here is my ignorance, not any particular excess of tribalism among south Asians. Ideally, I would judge arguments based on their merits, and I would be able to bring some knowledge of the facts to bear. But I don't know anything about the respective accents, so I am relying on experts. But, just as with investigations of aircraft accidents, all the experts have a stake. So it's troublesome. But, with aircraft accidents, generally it seems like they arrive at a pretty good idea of what happened, so I wasn't saying it was hopeless.
Frankly, I do give weight to the fact that the people saying the accent was Punjabi are so much more coherent and well-spoken then the ones saying the guy was obviously from India. And it's not just a matter of spelling and capitalization. There are norms of rational argument, such as being impersonal, giving supporting details, and at least entertaining counterarguments. Even if I can't judge the arguments on their actual merits (and It's not like I'm *completely* unable to do so), I can analyze the style of discourse.
But I'd still like to hear a Pakistani concede that the guy sounds Pakistani, assuming that's actually the case.
Stuart said,
December 6, 2008 @ 11:12 pm
"I've met several Hindi-speakers originally from (Indian) Punjab who would say things like "sabJi" for "sabZi" ("vegetables")."
Without getting into the politics of this tragedy, I can definitely agrre with this statement. My Hindi is nowhere near good enough to tell whereabout s a speaker comes from, but in my small town of around 50K, there are around 3K Punjabis, and among them I have yet to meet any adults who don't struggle to pronounce "z" as "z" – I hear जरूर for ज़रूर, सब्जी for सब्ज़ी and ज्यादा for ज़्यादा so often that I now tend to pronounce them that way myself. One local restaurant has a menu that spells the word सब्ज़ी in English once as "sabji" and once as "sabzi". The pronunciation persists in English and a Punjabi nurse (with excellent English) I work with once wrote "region" for "reason" and all her family say "jero" for "zero"
Stephen Jones said,
December 7, 2008 @ 5:22 am
You're grossly oversimplifying here. A large number of Hindus, particularly amongst intellectuals, absolutely detest the BJP. They are no more going against their political interest than a white American would be criticizing the Klu Klux Klan.
[(myl) I agree entirely — my point was to counter Steve's too-simple equation of nationality and ethnicity with "interest" and partisanship.
Though just to avoid any further misunderstanding, I should note that Misra goes way beyond detesting the BJP, to promote bizarre conspiracy theories that attribute to Hindu nationalists (and of course to the Jews) things like the recent Mumbai attacks that they are clearly not responsible for. This charge is not plausible when it appears in the Pakistani press — as it has — but it's no more plausible when it comes from a Brahmin intellectual in India. ]
nat said,
December 7, 2008 @ 5:52 am
I'm awfully curious about the following comment:
"Itihaas", "Prasashann", "Sarkaar"??? we dont know what they meant for sarkar we say hakomat or government but other two are too creepy to b understandable
I wonder if anyone knows what he's getting at by "too creepy". Does he just mean that they're completely unfamiliar terms? Or that their pronunciation is too foreign to him for him to figure out what the words are? Of is there something taboo about their use?
It also occurred to me that he might mean that the two terms are so distinctively Indian that no self-respecting Pakistani would use them.
Just curious, really.
None of these seem like they would be very forceful arguments, except, possibly, if the words are somehow taboo. It's kind of funny how he follows "we dont know what they meant" with a definition of one of the terms.
Eskandar said,
December 7, 2008 @ 5:55 am
Mark F. said,
December 6, 2008 @ 10:32 pm
Frankly, I do give weight to the fact that the people saying the accent was Punjabi are so much more coherent and well-spoken then the ones saying the guy was obviously from India. And it's not just a matter of spelling and capitalization. There are norms of rational argument, such as being impersonal …
Being impersonal is much easier for a detached, unaffected observer in the West than by someone personally affected by the situation, as most commentators from India and Pakistan are. Making the issue personal does not preclude one from being rational, logical, or accurate, and furthermore placing so much emphasis on being cold and detached in argument is the norm of Western rational argument. It is culturally specific and not universal. As I'm not from the Subcontinent, I can't speak to their norms of argument, but in the Middle East the norms of debate can be very different from what is appropriate in the West. This does not mean that Middle Easterners are less rational than Westerners, but merely that people value different things when it comes to debate. I think some degree of cultural relativism should be adhered to when assessing the style and form of an argument made by someone from a culture different than your own.
Finally, you're judging how coherent and well-spoken the commentators are in English, which is probably not their first language. There may be much more articulate arguments (which may even conform to your Western standards of debate) written in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, or other languages, but you're judging arguments made in English, and posted as comments on Youtube, no less. You're not analyzing the "style of discourse" insomuch as analyzing various people's command of English and willingness to bother typing up a coherent comment on Youtube (which is a site notorious for its unintelligible comments, and not exactly a refined forum for intelligent debate).
Eskandar said,
December 7, 2008 @ 5:57 am
Akshay said,
December 6, 2008 @ 1:38 pm
Except for Bangladesh, there is no mono-linguistic nation in South Asia
Tell that to the Rakhine, Bihari, Bishnupriya, Chakma, Garo, Ho, Oraon, Tripuri, Meitei, and Santal peoples, all of whom live in Bangladesh and do not speak Bengali natively.
Mark Liberman said,
December 7, 2008 @ 9:05 am
Eskandar: Tell that to the Rakhine, Bihari, Bishnupriya, Chakma, Garo, Ho, Oraon, Tripuri, Meitei, and Santal peoples, all of whom live in Bangladesh and do not speak Bengali natively.
In fairness to Akshay's passing suggestion that Bangladesh is "mono-linguistic", note that these (and other) non-Bengali-speaking groups together constitute only a small percentage of the population, no more than about 2%. Ethnologue gives numbers of 200K for Arakanese, 40K for Bishnupriya, 312K for Chakma, 102K for Garo, ? for Ho (most of whom are apparently in India), 166K for Sadri/Oraon, 100K for Tippera, 15K for Meitei, 157K for Santali. ( "Bihari" is apparently a cover name for a set of related languages, most of whose speakers are in India.)
According to Heitzman & Worden, "Bangladesh: A Country Study", 1989:
There are few countries anywhere in the world that are more ethnically and linguistically homogeneous than that. (And while we're on the topic of the small linguistic non-homogeneities in Bangladesh, let me remind readers of the plight of the several hundred thousand Urdu-speaking ethnic Biharis, stranded as stateless refugees in Bangladesh since 1971.)
Mark Liberman said,
December 7, 2008 @ 8:39 am
nat: I wonder if anyone knows what he's getting at by "too creepy".
There's a general development towards treating creepy as meaning simply "weird" or "unexpected" — see "It is so neat and creepy", 10/19/2006.
Mark Liberman said,
December 7, 2008 @ 10:06 am
In an article published early this morning in the Guardian ("Revealed: home of Mumbai's gunman in Pakistan village"), Saeed Shah has tracked down the origin of the surviving Mumbai terrorist, Ajmal Amir Kasab, to a village named Faridkot in (Pakistani) Punjab. The article is full of circumstantial detail and seems quite persuasive.
This doesn't prove anything directly about the ethnic, linguistic and national identity of the man speaking in the YouTube telephone call, but it certainly increases the plausibility of the theory that he was also Punjabi.
Samir Chopra said,
December 7, 2008 @ 10:18 am
I think the "creepy" being alluded to above is simply short-hand for "excessively pompous" or "a bit too high-faluting for me". Hindi speakers from India sometimes have the same reaction to the chaste Urdu spoken on Pakistan Television!
MarkF: Thanks for that response. I agree; for a non-speaker of the languages in question, this really is a matter of relying on "experts". I expect I'd find myself in the same situation were I to be reading a debate about Serbo-Croatian accents and dialects. I was responding to the extremely dismissive characterization of all arguments of a particular kind as being "noise".
Re: the "j" and "z" sounds. My mother-in-law (an Indian who speaks Urdu fluently) is very fond of mocking my "j"s when I should be using "z"s! But the "j" and "z" sounds are not split along an India-Pakistan divide, rather they are split up along the Fluent Urdu Speaker-Not-so-Fluent Urdu speaker divide. The speaker in the excerpt above, if from Pakistani Punjab, is not likely to be someone that uses "z"s either. Wrong socio-economic class.
language hat said,
December 7, 2008 @ 10:26 am
I'm sorry my ethnicity comes in the way of your appreciating my analysis.
And I'm sorry I made my off-the-cuff comment more sweeping than it should have been; I have a tendency to do that. I certainly didn't mean it as strongly as I said it; obviously there are lots of people in both nations capable of thoughtful analysis to whom I would listen with interest. What I meant was that life is short and unless one is willing to put in a great deal of effort to absorb all the nuances of every argument, a quick and easy tool is to look for people arguing against what one would expect to be their interest. It is, I hope you will agree, extremely common for people to defend their family/religion/nation; this doesn't mean that they're always wrong, but someone saying "my country is right and its ancient enemy is wrong" is, on the face of it, about as persuasive as a parent saying "my child is unusually smart." Both statements could be true, but who has the time and energy to investigate all such claims? If someone argues against their perceived national interest, that's (on the face of it) more creditworthy; again, it's not necessarily right, but it passes the first barrier, just as a manuscript that comes to a publisher from an agent is going to be read more carefully than one that just shows up in the mail from an author. That's all I meant, and I apologize for giving offense.
It makes more sense to me to evaluate arguments, even in a case like this, based on their empirical content and their logical coherence, regardless of their source.
Ideally, this is of course true. If you in fact evaluate every argument you hear and read about every subject, however peripheral to your interests, based on empirical content and logical coherence, and still manage to get your professional work done and post on the Log, my hat is off to you.
Stephen Jones said,
December 7, 2008 @ 1:31 pm
We're going off topic but many did suspect a false flag organization. Agents provocateurs have a very well-established place in history. I prefer cock-up theories to conspiracy theories, but wouldn't totally rule them out.
dr pepper said,
December 7, 2008 @ 2:55 pm
Question: is Bangladesh's homogeneity historical, or were there larger minorities driven out during the initial partition and the later split from Palistan?
Mark F. said,
December 7, 2008 @ 6:31 pm
Eskandar said,
December 7, 2008 @ 5:55 am
Making the issue personal does not preclude one from being rational, logical, or accurate, and furthermore placing so much emphasis on being cold and detached in argument is the norm of Western rational argument.
Be that as it may, the commentaries arguing that the speaker was Punjabi seemed to follow that norm.
Finally, you're judging how coherent and well-spoken the commentators are in English, which is probably not their first language.
I think this is a red herring. The commentators saying the guy wasn't from Pakistan seemed to follow the norms of argument and linguistic conventions used on YouTube fairly well. For instance, "lolzzzzzzzzzzz we pakistanis dont even know what these words mean" is perfectly good informal internet English, but it doesn't really lead me to take the guy's argument seriously.
Spinoza said,
December 9, 2008 @ 6:13 am
Consider this: if you had someone claiming to be Californian and using mostly standard English words with the odd California-ism thrown in, but all in a heavy Texan drawl, where would you guess the person was from?
As many have pointed out, the accent of the speaker is distinctly Punjabi, quite far from the way an Indian Hyderabadi would speak.
Words that sound distinctly Punjabi to my ears
– "parshashan" for prashasan
– uh-tuhnk-vaad for aatankvaad
– the pronunciation of the English word "terrorist"
– hakumat for "hukumat" (the latter being the Indian pronunciation)
An Indian Hyderabadi would have used Urdu words as a matter of prestige.
No Indian educated enough to use "prashaasan" or "aatankvaad" would mispronounce them.
While it's hardly perfect proof, the data we have is consistent with a Pakistani Punjabi pretending to be Indian and being unfamiliar with subtle issues of prestige in language.
Vinay said,
December 9, 2008 @ 2:29 pm
According to the latest news, the terrorist talking in the video (Imraan Baabar) has been identified by the Indian Police to be from Multan. Multan is a town in Southern Punjab (Pakistan). However, the primary language spoken in the area is not exactly Punjabi, but Saraiki. The dialect spoken in and around Multan is also called Multani. Saraiki is a tonal language like Punjabi but has many similarities to Sindhi as well.
Coming to the video clip, I noticed an interesting peculiarity in the language of the terrorist that identifies him as someone whose native language is not Urdu (or Hindi).
Here's the part of the transcript that betrays it:
==
(In iTrans)
ham log apane kaam waam se aayaa hai
jab ham thak gayaa hai
to ham aisaa karane par majabuur ho gayaa hai
aap log pataa nahii.n kaisaa baat karataa hai
[…]
ajiib sawaal karataa hai
(In Devanagari)
हम लोग अपने काम वाम से आया है
जब हम थक गया है
तो हम ऐसा करने पर मजबूर हो गया है
आप लोग पता नहीं कैसा बात करता है
[…]
अजीब सवाल करता है
==
Notice that he uses 'aayaa hai' instead of 'aaye hai.n' and similarly through out while 'ham' in Hindi/Urdu would require the latter. A native Urdu/Hindi speaker wouldn't make that mistake.
Now his accent. That also clearly proves him to be a non-native Hindi or Urdu speaker. It's pretty thick for almost all regional variations of standard Hindi and Urdu. Hyderabadi (Dakkani) can also be easily and safely ruled out. It does not sound even Punjabi to me. I don't have a first hand experience (or at least don't remember) of listening to a Saraiki person speaking Urdu, but if Saraiki is anywhere close to Punjabi and Sindhi then even that looks unlikely to me.
Adding the accent to the peculiarity of constructions like "ham aayaa hai", my guess would be that the person is a native speaker of a language from North or Northwest Pakistan (e.g. Pashto). That however is not in sync with the Indian Police revelation that he is native to Multan. It will be interesting to see if it changes.
Stuart said,
December 9, 2008 @ 10:30 pm
"Notice that he uses 'aayaa hai' instead of 'aaye hai.n' and similarly through out while 'ham' in Hindi/Urdu would require the latter. A native Urdu/Hindi speaker wouldn't make that mistake."
What about the use of हम for मैं ? Do those speakers who do this still use the plural forms when using "ham" for "main"?
Vinay said,
December 10, 2008 @ 11:02 am
'हम/ham' for 'मैं/mai.n' is common in several Hindi speaking regions. However, it is used with the correct pluralized form of the verb. So, for example, people might say 'ham jaate hai.n' when they mean 'mai.n jaataa huu.N' but rarely 'ham jaataa hai'. OTOH, Pathans (people from NW Pakistan area or Afghanistan), for one, are known to use that kind of construction when speaking Urdu/Hindi.
Stuart said,
December 10, 2008 @ 2:54 pm
"OTOH, Pathans (people from NW Pakistan area or Afghanistan), for one, are known to use that kind of construction when speaking Urdu/Hindi."
Thanks, Vinay. My Dad's family home was in Quetta, maybe that's why I was sure I'd heard the "ham jaataa hai" construction before.
John Cowan said,
December 14, 2008 @ 4:30 am
dr pepper: The dominance of Bengali in Bengal (including both Indian West Bengal and Bangladesh, but particularly the latter) is mostly a matter of its extremely widespread adoption in the past millennium by people who formerly spoke either non-IE languages or less widely spoken IE languages. "Bengali" is a linguistic identity that has become over time an ethnic identity: Bengalis are people who speak Bangla.