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Joshua Pien

Senior Lecturer in Foreign Languages, Hindi and Urdu

Undergraduate Chair

808 Williams Hall
By appointment
215-898-8438
215-573-2138

Education

PhD (with distinction), University of Pennsylvania

MA, University of Texas at Austin

BA, University of Pennsylvania

Bio

Josh Pien has been teaching at the University of Pennsylvania since 2012. Josh’s research reconsiders Hindi-Urdu origin accounts in light of historical linguistic, dialectological, and sociolinguistic methodologies and early New Indo-Aryan and Persian sources. It adopts a new approach to the question of Hindi-Urdu’s origins in terms of this variety’s development as a spoken lingua franca—a development that intersects with other major processes of the early second millennium such as vernacularization and Islamization in midland north India.

Research Interests

  • History of Hindi and Urdu language and literature
  • Hindi-Urdu origin theories
  • Dialectology of the Hindi belt
  • Sociolinguistics of South Asian languages
  • Delhi and Bahmani Sultanates
  • Islamicate South Asia
  • Teaching and acquisition of South Asian languages

Selected Publications

Pien, Joshua H., and Fauzia Farooqui. Beginning Hindi: A Complete Course. Georgetown University Press, 2014.

Pien, Joshua H., and Fauzia Farooqui. Beginning Urdu: A Complete Course. Georgetown University Press, 2012.