Penzel has revealed the areas where Western ways, cultures, and technology have influenced the country. In order to explore the process of indigenization, Penzel (1961) has focused on English, French, and German loanwords in Pashto of Afghanistan.
English code mixing is a prevalent and an established pattern of communication in the Pashto speech community of Yousafzi dialect in KP.ħCode mixing (CM) is the innovative force of indigenization in the Pashto speech community of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Its use encourages the users in educated speech community and gives them an identity of an educated person. It is used as a tool to achieve the better end in discussion. It is used to facilitate the interlocutors in face to face conversation. (Khan, 2011: 122)ĦThe above two extracts show the attitude of the Pashto speakers, where they show solidarity and identity with the Pashto speech community but along with that they do not over rule the use of English in their conversation. I feel easy and comfortable in conversation by mixing two languages. I use English while talking to other Pashto speakers for the better interpretation of my feelings and thoughts. (Khan, 2011: 122)ĥIn response to the first question: why do you use English words in Pashto, the respondent states: I love to use Pashto while speaking to any Pakhtun but as an educated person I don’t mind to use English when it is necessary. I am pretty concerned about my own language Pashto. In the extract, the first respondent show solidarity with the Pashto speech community using English lexical items is not a threat to his identity as a Pakhtun. The following are the two extracts taken from Khan (2011), where he reports on an interview about the use of English CM in Pashto.
In KP, especially in the Mardan division, the Peshawar division and the Malakand division, code mixing (hereafter CM) is the driving force to introduce borrowings in the Pashto speech community. The real source of English-Pashto bilingualism in KP are the electronic media, the education system and ESL classrooms. On the other hand, Pashto is the dominant language of the speech community where it is used in the market, in the play grounds, in the family setting, with friends, in the café, in an office, and in informal educational settings.ĤIt is not only the post-colonial setting but also the prestigious nature of English and its instrumental quality in getting jobs and social status which has made it so attractive in Pakistan and across the globe. It can be said that function of English is mostly restricted to writing 1.
1 - The present article is a shortened and partly elaborated version of some of the chapters of the P (.)ģIn the bilingual speech community of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) (Pakistan), in the region on the border with Afghanistan, the use of English and Pashto can be characterized in terms of diglossia, where English has an official status and is used in formal settings such as in the office, in writing applications, in teaching, and in courts.Code-mixing is a device of indigenization whereby Pashto speakers of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) have adopted and nativized the English elements in their local use. Code-mixing and lexical borrowing have led to a large amount to indigenized English elements in Pashto. English nouns appear in determiner phrases marked with Pashto case endings, and English verbs have to carry Pashto inflections. In different bilingual language pairs, different strategies are found to create these links and associations, since the functional categories involved are generally taken from the matrix language (Myers-Scotton, 1993).ĢThis paper analyses this question with a case study of English-Pashto code-mixed bilingual speech. Nouns are the core of determiner phrases, and associated with functional categories expressing case, quantity, and definiteness. Verbs are often linked to functional categories expressed through inflection, including marking for Tense, Aspect and Mood, and for person and number. How can nouns and verbs from one language be felicitously incorporated into sentences from another language? Both nouns and verbs need embedding when taken from one language to another. 1A recurring issue in the analysis of code-mixed speech concerns the strategies for incorporating nouns and verbs.