URDUNIZATION AND CULTURAL LEXICALIZATION IN PAKISTANI ENGLISH: A WORLD ENGLISHES ANALYSIS OF I AM MALALA

Abstract

This study explores Urdunization and cultural lexicalization in Pakistani English through a World Englishes reading of Malala Yousafzai and Christina Lamb’s I Am Malala. The study adopted Kachru’s (1985) framework of Outer Circle Englishes, that treats Pakistani English as a norm-developing variety shaped by multilingual contact, Islamic discourse, postcolonial history, and regional cultural practices. The study fills in a gap in the existing scholarship on Pakistani English by theorizing the functional role of Urdu-mediated, Arabic-Islamic, Pashto and culturally embedded lexical items in globally circulated autobiographical writing. Using qualitative textual analysis and a functional lexical matrix, the study reads selected lexical items across four categories: religious and Islamicate terms, socio-cultural and Pashtun terms, context-specific semantic items, and affective/everyday local terms with apparent English equivalents. The analysis shows that terms such as Allah, Rasool, shariat, purdah, jirga, hujra, Pashtunwali, aba, bhabi, and shaheed are not decorative borrowings or deviations from Standard English. Instead, they serve semantic, religious, emotional and identity-creating roles, sustaining the Muslim identity, embodying the social institutions of the Pashtuns, establishing kinship relations and avoiding cultural leveling in translation. The paper further argues that Urdunization in I Am Malala should be understood as part of a broader process of Pakistani multilingual lexicalization, because Urdu-mediated English also carries Arabic-Islamic, Persian, Pashto, and regional cultural resources. The study contributes to World Englishes scholarship by showing how Pakistani English extends the expressive range of global English while retaining local epistemologies and identity markers.