Phonological Simplification: Gradual Deletion Of Phoneme /H/ In Spoken Urdu Language

Abstract

Pakistan is a multilingual country where among many other languages Urdu serves as a Lingua Franca. With the passage of time, this language has also undergone many changes and is still in a process of constant flux. Among many other changes, a prominent change is the deletion of the phoneme /h/ in some words in the spoken form of the Urdu language. The present study takes into consideration forty participants, twenty male and twenty female, on a convenient basis to evaluate whether they pronounce this /h/ phoneme when occurring in the middle of a word or not. For this purpose, three Urdu words i.e., “mujhay (me), tumhain (you) and nahin (no)” are taken as a sample. The data is collected through short interviews to notice whether or not this phonemic deletion of

/h/ actually occurs. Content analysis is applied to interviews and has served as a theoretical framework to explore this data. It has also analyzed the reasons behind phonemic variation. The results are obtained through mean value.