Young UK Muslims are reconnecting – or in some cases, connecting for the first time – with Urdu and Punjabi as a result of their devotional practices, a new study suggests. Writing in the Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, Andrey Rosowsky of the University of Sheffield suggests that many young Muslims are leading the way in rejuvenating their communities’ South Asian ‘heritage languages’. This new trend goes against the usual expectation of a community’s elders being key to the transmission of culture, but is it enough to reverse the shift to speaking English rather than Punjabi and Urdu that has taken place over the last three or four generations?
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Young English-speaking Muslims boost preservation of heritage languages through devotional practices
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