Language and Culture: Identifying culture specific items of Urdu poetry by Using Newmark’s (1988) Framework

Abstract

This is a quantitative descriptive research finds the element of culture in language and identifies the culture specific items of Urdu poetry by using the Newmark’s (1988) Framework. Identification of culture is very important in order to accomplish different functions of language such as language understanding, second language acquisition and language translation, but unfortunately the phenomenon of culture is ambiguous. It is hard to know which items of a language are culture specific or culture related concepts. There are many frameworks given by different linguists and scholars but the notion of culture is still ambiguous. More over Urdu language is still less explored and there are no or less studies that tells the frequencies of each category of Culture specific items in Urdu poetry. So, this study uses the framework given by Peter Newmark (1988) in order to identify the frequency of each category of Culture Specific Items (CSIs). After careful data analysis it is found that the Organization was the most frequently used CSI category and gestures and habits was the least frequently used category. Total 36.9% percent items come under the domain of Organization, 24.1% in Material Culture, 17.4% in Ecology,15.3% in Social Culture and the least number of CSIs 6.1% comes in the domain of Gestures and Habits. This paper provides a base for translators, linguists, scholars, researchers and students to understand the notion of culture in Urdu language.