Whilst at my parents’ this evening I was watching the Urdu speaking channel (Geo). During the interview, I noticed a plethora of lexical items which were casually embedded into the Urdu discussion. Now this is nothing new, and bilinguals like me readily ‘play’ with language in this way for comical and rhetorical effect. But I just had to get my phone out and record it after I heard the man say: “jab beans spilledhogahain” which means: “when the beans were spilled”!?

The extent to which English infiltrates Urdu is fascinating.

Some others examples from this clip include:

“Nahi milangay fair treatment tho isko expose karangay” – If they don’t get fair treatment then they are going to expose this

“dealing kee” – had done some dealing

“video exist karti hai” – a video exists

“Recording jama’ kiya gaiyn” – have been accumulating recordings

“over the dho-teen saal” – over the last 2-3 years

“pura motive kyat ha” – what was the overall motive

And many more…