How, When, and Why Hindi-Urdu Speakers Use the Roman Script

Abstract

Over the last few decades, the Roman script has become ubiquitous for writing Hindi-Urdu on websites, in digital communication, and in urban landscapes in India and Pakistan. In this dissertation, I collect a dataset of Roman Hindi-Urdu posts from X (formerly Twitter) and I conduct an empirical study of Hindi-Urdu speaking study participants. I use these two datasets to identify the newly developing orthographic conventions of Roman Hindi-Urdu, to determine why, when, and where Hindi-Urdu speakers choose to write in the Roman script, and to examine how Hindi-Urdu speakers feel about the Roman script and its increased use. I have several major findings. First, grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences are remarkably consistent, and I identify some of the psychological, sociocultural, and technological considerations which appear to have shaped these. Second, Hindi-Urdu speakers do not appear to agree on a name for Roman Hindi-Urdu, which is a stark contrast to most varieties of spoken and written language. Third, the majority of my study participants use the Roman script, and when asked why, they generally suggest that it is easier or more socially acceptable. Yet, even many users of the Roman script have negative views toward it. I conclude that cultural considerations have led the Roman script to become ubiquitous without individual speakers necessarily approving of it, and that the Roman script has become an important part of the Hindi-Urdu language and of South Asian culture.