KARACHI, Pakistan — My family doesn't speak much Urdu. Unlike most of Karachi's residents, none of my grandparents or great grandparents grew up on the subcontinent. It wasn't until after partition, when India and Pakistan had split into two separate countries, that they decided to move to Karachi from East Africa in the early 1970s.
Originally from the state of Gujurat in India, my grandparents’ grandparents spoke fluent Gujurati. Though they spent decades in British Tanzania, and picked up quite a bit of the country's Swahili, it wasn't until my grandfather moved to Karachi that anyone in my family learned to speak Pakistan's national language.
I was never a good student of Urdu. But I know enough to recognize that the language I struggled with in elementary school isn't what I hear on the streets of Karachi today. The pidgin language here has always reflected its polyglot origins, changing with the times and the culture.
I was born in Karachi, but moved to the United States when I was 11. Before that move, I was failing almost every Urdu class I took. I was lucky enough to go to a school where the majority of classes were taught in English. "Religion" and "Urdu Language and Literature," however, were not. On the streets I'd understand most spoken Urdu just fine, but those weren't the words that showed up in my vocabulary books. I'd take my homework assignments to my mother, who barely read the language but would help me decipher the text.
I'd heard that Karachiites' modern usage of Urdu was more similar to Mumbai's Hindi than the Farsi-influenced language Pakistan's traditional poetry was written in during the country's founding in the 1940s.
But even that modern version has evolved greatly in the past decade.
I hardly ever spoke Urdu while living in the United States, which is probably why I didn't notice how much Karachi's Urdu had changed when I first moved back to Pakistan. For example, it took me about a month to realize that almost no one responded to my “hello” and “goodbye” the way that they used to.
I'd grown up stringing together the polite Arabic greeting common in most Muslim countries, "assalam alaikum," as though it were one long, fluid word. But that style now draws glares; responding to me, people instead enunciate each syllable distinctly.
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