Urdu as Persian

Abstract

Focusing on the writings of Siraj al-Din ʿAli Khan ‘Arzu’ (d. 1756), a critic of Persian literature and early theorist of what would come to be known as Urdu, Arthur Dudney shows how the sociolinguistic concept of ‘language planning’ can be used to understand the historical process through which a literary language is delineated and defined as such. Defining a new literary idiom involves identifying what that idiom is but also specifying what it is not. In the writings of Arzu and others, Dudney finds that the concept of rozmarrah (colloquial or ‘everyday’ language) was essential to defining what Urdu was, just as the exclusion of lexical items and forms of speech from Persian and Brajbhasha established what Urdu was not.