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Education
Ph. D. in linguistics University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
M.A. in linguistics. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA.
M. Phil. in linguistic University of Delhi, Delhi, India.
I am Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English Literature & Linguistics in the College of Arts & Sciences at Qatar University. I am a linguist in both the popular and scholarly senses of the term. In the popular sense, I am a linguist because I proficiently speak Urdu, Hindi, English, and Arabic. In addition to commanding different levels of speech in Urdu-Hindi, I also have a good control of both the Devanagari and Arabic/Persian scripts. I also have a near-native proficiency in Yemeni dialect. In the scholarly sense, I am a linguist because I study language. I specialize in sociolinguistics –a branch of linguistics that studies the social, political, and cultural aspects of language.
In the popular sense, I am a linguist because I speak Urdu, Hindi, English, and Arabic. In the scholarly sense, I am a linguist because I study language.
My specialty is sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. I have done extensive fieldwork in the city of Old Delhi, previously known as Shāhjahānābād. See the research page for published papers on Urdu in India. My secondary specialization is the socio-linguistics of Arabic in the Arab World.