The following dialogue was prepared by the late Qamar Jalil (d. 2019), who taught Urdu at the Berkeley Urdu Language Program in Pakistan, the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and the University of California, Berkeley from the 1970s until 2016. Two generations of Urdu students and scholars owe their language skills to the guidance of this exceptionally talented, dedicated, and humble teacher.
The following dialogue is taken from an unpublished course packet which Qamar wrote for an Introductory Urdu college class. I have reproduced it and the related drill exactly as they appear in the packet. To these I have added his grammar notes on this and the preceding dialogues, as well as his cultural notes on the current one. I have lightly edited the notes, added Urdu words, transliterations, and translations, and included examples from the dialogue (or based on it) to illustrate Qamar’s points. Qamar typically taught vocabulary in class through dialogue, demonstration, and occasionally sharing an English synonym. He therefore did not typically include glossaries with his dialogues. I have therefore added my own here.
The dialogue illustrates a very typical conversation between acquaintances, نجمہ [najmā] and حامد [hāmid]. In addition to introducing and reinforcing standard Urdu greetings, it also shows how plurality, gender and verb agreement, tense, emphasis, and postpositional phrases work in Urdu. It also introduces readers to the everyday vocabulary describing familial relationships and the use of honorifics. See the notes for Qamar Jalil’s perspective on these and other themes in the text.
نجمہ : السلام علیکم، آپ کیسے ہیں؟
حامد : و علیکم السلام، میں ٹھیک ہوں، آپ کیسی ہیں؟
نجمہ: میں بھی ٹھیک ہوں۔ یہ میرے شوہر ہیں، جمال۔
حامد: آپ سے مل کر خوشی ہوئی، جمال صاحب۔
جمال: مجھے بھی۔ وہ آپ کی بیٹی ہے؟
حامد: جی۔ اور وہ میرا بیٹا ہے۔
نجمہ: آپ کی بیوی یہاں نہیں؟
حامد: نہیں، آج وہ ہمارے ساتھ نہیں، وہ میری والدہ کے ساتھ ہیں۔
