Joshua Pien

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.