Joshua Pien
808 Williams Hall
- 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
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.
PhD (with distinction), University of Pennsylvania
MA, University of Texas at Austin
BA, University of Pennsylvania
Pien, Joshua H. "Reconstructing the relationship between Hindi-Urdu and Dakani: a diachronic dialectological approach." Journal of South Asian Languages and Linguistics 13.1 (2026): 23-64.
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.
