Rizwan Ahmad

Qatar University · Department of English Literature and Linguistics

One of the contentious issues in religious translation since the legendary St. Jerome is the degree of the translator’s agency. The point of contention has been whether the translator can exercise agency and freedom in translating sacred texts or they should strictly adhere to the form and attend to what St. Jerome called the “mysterious syntax” of...

This is a documentary film based my research over the last 15 years. Link: https://youtu.be/jN3ok7aohNs

Covid-19 and multilingualism

This study examines the communication strategies employed by Qatar's government in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic. The study contributes to a growing body of work on the sociolinguistics of crisis communication. We focus on the use of South and Southeast Asian languages, spoken largely by blue-collar migrant workers, which are often seen as per...

This paper examines hate, bigotry, and discrimination against minority Muslims in India that pivots around the Urdu language, represented through its words and scripts, and Urdu/Muslim names, with a focus on its significant spike during the right-wing Hindu nationalist Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) rule since 2014. Tracing the ideological origin of t...

Based on an analysis of data sets consisting of sociolinguistic interviews and questionnaires, in this chapter, we make two points related to language variation and change in Qatar: (a) young Bedouins are abandoning the traditional Bedouin linguistic features in favor of the Hadhari ones, and (b) language ideology is the driving force behind the on...

Whether it is the challenge of disseminating correct information or dealing with the challenges of misinformation or fake news about COVID-19, multilingualism must be used as a resource to reach out to the people in languages they understand and trust. Along with other tools such as medical, clearly language is an important and effective one in our...

Newspaper Article: Muslims in Nizamuddin were reported to have been ‘hiding’. But Hindus returning from a temple and Sikhs in a gurudwara were said to have been ‘stranded’.

The UAE government provides lectures and tests to obtain a driving license in Urdu, Hindi, Malayalam, Tamil and Bengali, besides Arabic and English.

By renaming cities, streets and airports, the BJP government is trying to erase India’s diverse history and identity

Many recent studies, academic and non-academic alike, have argued that the use of Urdu in Bollywood has started to decline. These studies, important as they are, however, suffer from some limitations. They are either impressionistic or based on non-representative data. Furthermore, they do not specify the object of the study or the site of the assu...

Many recent studies, academic and non-academic alike, have argued that the use of Urdu in Bollywood has started to decline. These studies, important as they are, however, suffer from some limitations. They are either impressionistic or based on non-representative data. Furthermore, they do not specify the object of the study or the site of the assu...

The necessity of studying Arabic dialects has attracted more attention in the recent years. Qatar University chose to support the growing academic interest and research in the field by hosting the Association Internationale de Dialec-tologie Arabe (AIDA) conference on 11-13 November 2013. The AIDA10 conference and the tenth volume of AIDA proceedin...

This study examines the use of metaphors in Arabic language e-commerce websites and shows that metaphorical language plays an important role in enhancing the effectiveness of websites and e-commerce businesses in general. Arabic text was extracted from 3,065 websites across 22 Arab countries and 10 types of e-commerce domains. More than 14,000 meta...

Based on an analysis of a corpus of Arabic e-commerce websites, this article investigates the use of figurative language in e-business texts. While our focus is on metaphors, we also incorporate the related concept of metonymy to explain the data. Using the theoretical framework of cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis, we examine the lingui...

Following the rise of oil-based economies after the 1950s, the six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries became extremely attractive to workers from other Arab countries and beyond. Initially, Arabs were a majority in the expatriate workforce but were gradually outnumbered by Asians. Consequently, the GCC countries, which were monolingual in Ara...

While cultural diversity of India is highlighted, its linguistic diversity does not receive similar academic attention especially in the school curricula. When it does receive some attention, it is treated in a contextual vacuum. Students are not engaged in ways that can make them establish a meaningful connection between the classroom and the real...

Many scholars, politicians, and the lay people alike believe that Urdu in North India symbolizes a Muslim identity and culture. Based on an eight-month long ethnographic study and quantitative language data collected in Old Delhi, this article challenges this notion and shows that the symbolic meanings of Urdu have been mutating in post-colonial In...

In sociolinguistics, Urdu and Hindi are considered to be textbook examples of digraphia—a linguistic situation in which varieties of the same language are written in different scripts. Urdu has traditionally been written in the Arabic script, whereas Hindi is written in Devanagari. Analyzing the recent orthographic practice of writing Urdu in Devan...

SedlatschekAndreas, Contemporary Indian English: Variation and change. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009. Pp. xviii, 363. Hb. $158. - Volume 40 Issue 1 - Rizwan Ahmad

Based on empirical data collected in Kuwait, I show the disjoint between government and private institutions in terms of their use of non-official languages in public places. Although, Kuwait is constitutionally a monolingual country with Arabic as its national language, several immigrant languages such as Urdu, Bengali, Malayalam, and Tagalog are...

This study investigates the discursive construction of Hindu identity in the late nineteenth century in North India. Analyzing historical data from a language ideological debate, I show that the construction of the Hindi language and script as perfect and the Urdu language and script as defective were part of the construction of Hindu identity. The...

Sociolinguistic research using the concept of indexicality often assumes that at a given point in time, one linguistic element indexes one single social category. Calling this assumption into question, in this paper, I argue that linguistic units can often exhibit multiple layers of indexicality simultaneously.

In this dissertation, I investigate the indexicality of the Urdu language in India. I examine the assumed indexical link between Urdu and Muslim identity by analyzing the ideological structures of Muslims and Hindus of Old Delhi. The analysis of the ideologies is supplemented by frequency distribution of the phonological features that distinguish U...