Urdish,Urglish orUrdunglish, aportmanteau of the wordsUrdu andEnglish, is themacaronic hybrid use ofSouth Asian English andStandard Urdu.[1] In the context ofspoken language, it involvescode-switching between these languages whereby they are freely interchanged within a sentence or between sentences. InPakistan andIndia, many bilingual or multi-lingual Urdu speakers, being familiar with both Urdu and English, displaytranslanguaging in certain localities and between certain social groups.[1]
In the context ofwritten language, Urdish colloquially refers toRoman Urdu — Urdu written inEnglish alphabet (that is, usingRoman script instead of the traditionalPerso-Arabic script), often also mixed with English words or phrases.
The termUrdish is first recorded in 1989. Other less common colloquialportmanteau words for Urdish include (chronologically):Urglish (recorded from 1995),Urdlish (1997) andUrduish (1998).[2]
WhenHindi–Urdu is viewed as a single spoken language calledHindostani, the portmanteausUrdish andHinglish mean the samecode-mixed tongue.
On 14 August 2015, theGovernment of Pakistan launched theIlm Pakistan movement, with a uniform curriculum in Urdish.Ahsan Iqbal, Federal Minister of Pakistan, said, "Now the government is working on a new curriculum to provide a new medium to the students which will be the combination of both Urdu and English and will name it Urdish."[3][4][5]
Within India, however, other regional forms exist, all denoting a mixing of English with indigenous languages.Bonglish (derived from the slang termBong 'a Bengali') orBenglish refers to 'a mixture of Bengali and English',Gunglish orGujlish 'Gujarati + English',Kanglish 'Kannada + English',Manglish 'Malayalam + English',Marlish 'Marathi + English',Tamlish orTanglish 'Tamil + English' andUrdish 'Urdu + English'. These terms are found in texts on regional variations of Indian English, usually in complaint-tradition discussions of failing standards of language purity.