Language
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Parsi Nanis Are Gujarati
X.T.M reads genetic studies of the Parsis, with Iranian paternal lines and roughly half South Asian maternal lines, to argue that Parsi Gujarati comes from founding Gujarati mothers. A Facebook…
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Obscure and Obscurity: Fatima Ijaz’s Shade of Longing
Furqan Ali reviews Fatima Ijaz’s debut collection The Shade of Longing, reading its abstraction and repeated, unresolved lines as an indictment of language’s failure to capture memory and longing, and…
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The many ways of being Brown Diasporic
The author admits he cannot follow half of Zach’s posts because of their South Asian pop-culture and Hindi-Urdu references, and uses this to show that diasporic brown people differ widely,…
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Map of Civilizations
Prompted by a world map labelling countries in local scripts, the author finds Huntington’s equation of civilisations with religions too blunt and cites Mises on how language and dialect, as…
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How English is taking Over
Responding to a Guardian piece on English as the world’s hypercentral language, the author argues English merely reflects Anglo-American supremacy, that China’s rise will not move Chinese speakers to English,…
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Two Videos in Urdu (both having problems with the language)
Omar Ali compares two Urdu videos, one from a Pakistani elite journalist and one from a woman from Kasur, to argue that neither speaker’s Urdu is their mother tongue and…
