8.10 Cultural Notes and Extra/Optional Online Materials
Cultural Notes
| Topics | Explanations | |
| 1. | Good Morning/Good Afternoon/Good Evening/ Good Night | In English, we generally wish each other good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, and good day. But in India and South Asian, native speakers, generally speaking, do not greet each other in these ways. People generally say السلام علیکم، سلام، آداب, etc. |
| 2. | Instruction and Polite Requests | Generally, when you learn Urdu, your instructor—including me—teaches you to use آپ form of imperative construction to express polite requests/instructions. However, when you travel to India and South Asia, native speakers typically use the subjunctive form to express polite requests/instructions. You can observe by watching any recipe video by a native Urdu speaker. All the written instructions on the roadside and elsewhere in Urdu are also written in subjunctive. |
| 3. | Conjunct Verb | In this chapter, you learned about conjunct verb. You learned how we can take a noun/adjective/adverb and add کرنا/ہونا to form a conjunct verb. However, these days, the influence of English on the Urdu language is significant. You may hear native speakers using conjunct verbs with English “کرنا + nouns/adjectives/adverbs”.
For example: کرنا + text/message/phone/email/Google” |
| 4. | Letter Writing | Letter writing was very prominent in India and South Asia. However, after the new development in technologies, and telecommunication boom, people bought mobile phones and now the letter writing does not happen very much. |
| 5. | Festivals | Indian and South Asian festivals can be divided in two parts, namely, national festivals and regional festival. National festivals are Independence Day and Republic Day. On these public/national festivals, the whole country enjoys a break from work. All the offices, colleges, schools, and other institutions are closed. Indian and South Asia also celebrate a few regional festivals. On regional festival days, certain regions of the country observe a break from work. |
Extra Optional/Online Materials
Hindi-Urdu song that uses subjunctive:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vbeVLBW8Fk
!شکریہ
