May 31
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
SDPI, Islamabad

Entry
is open to all. You may confirm your participation through an email or phone
..The event can also be watched live at
http://www.sdpi.tv/live.php
(Concept Note)
The lecture investigate the characteristics of “mock”
Punjabi in Pakistani popular media, and hope to understand both the
indexicality exhibited in the borrowing of lexical, grammatical, and multimodal
features of Punjabi into Urdu, and the regularity of this process.
The lecture shares the result of a study on a comedic
television serial that aired in 2012 which revolves around the culture clash
between a muhajir family from Karachi and a Punjabi family from Lahore as they
attempt to arrange a marriage between their son and daughter, is linguistically
very complex.
The preliminary investigation of this corpus shows that a
variety of marked Punjabi features are mapped onto speech that is perfectly
understandable to Urdu-speakers in order to project a certain panjabiyat onto
Urdu grammatical forms. These are used to deploy the characteristic of
panjabiyat, ‘Punjabi-ness,’ which has a certain negative or humorous
connotation when used during Urdu utterances.
This
study speaks on language, identity, and stereotyping with a broader
understanding of the Pakistani sociolinguistic situation and seeks to better
understand the formal constraints on this kind of language mixing.
Bionote of Ms Gwen Kirk: She is a doctoral student working on issues
surrounding Punjabi cinema, state language policy, and popular culture in
Pakistan. Her research addresses questions of vulgarity, social movements, and
performance as well as exploring the theoretical flows and exchanges between
linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics and cultural/cinematic/literary
studies. Some of her previous research projects have focused on Urdu poetic
performance and semantics in performative genres of South Asian literature as
well as textual analyses of popular media. Ms Krik general research interests
include: linguistic anthropology, cinema, popular culture, cultures of Pakistan
& South Asia, performance, circulation & publics, dialectology,
language ideology, sociolinguistics, register, and Punjabi and Urdu literature
and literary genres.
[Image Sorce: http://www.theartsdesk.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/mast_image_landscape/mastimages/b992702fdd06de305b2e1db804f81c06.jpg ]
Speakers:
Ms GWEN KIRK, Visiting Research Fellow, American Institute
of Pakistan Studies