Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: English words appear almost everywhere in daily Urdu conversation across Pakistan. Speakers routinely use words such as "light," "cabin," "set," and "tension" without registering that these forms no longer carry their original English sense. This qualitative study examines how common English loanwords change meaning when they enter everyday Urdu usage in Pakistan. Data were drawn from semi-structured interviews with twenty-four adult Urdu speakers from Karachi and Lahore, together with a corpus of forty widely used English loanwords collected from daily speech, television dramas, and newspapers. The analysis is anchored in Haugen's (1950) classic loanshift typology and extended through Zenner, Speelman, and Geeraerts' (2012) cognitive-sociolinguistic salience model, which explains why particular loanwords drift toward particular new meanings. The findings show that Urdu speakers regularly widen, narrow, or completely shift borrowed meanings, often without conscious awareness, and that these shifts are shaped by cultural salience, social prestige, and communicative need rather than English grammar. The study argues that Urdu does not merely borrow English words but actively reshapes them into locally meaningful forms. These findings are relevant for language teachers, lexicographers, translators, and media practitioners working with contemporary Pakistani Urdu.
Authors: Zeenath Khan, Anbarin Fatima, Muhammad Zubair
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7219628628