The Sindhi, a people named after the Indus (Sindhu, in Arabic), River are said to be one of the oldest groups in the Indian subcontinent. They inhabit both sides of the Indus River which divided India and Pakistan. Until Pakistan became an independent Muslim country in 1947, the Hindu and Muslim Sindhi lived together in the same region. As a result of the partition of India and Pakistan, a majority of the Hindu Sindhi migrated to metropolitan areas of India whereas the Muslim Sindhi live in Pakistan (The Sindhi of India, 1997).
Of the more than two million Sindhi living in India, 93 percent are Hindu and a 3.8 minority are Muslim. Sir Richard F. Burton (1973), during his travels throughout India and Asia, commented that the Sindhi speak a unique language which can be characterized as a dialect or recognized as an autonomous language of its own. Burton (1973) also noted that under the rubric of Sindhi are several disparate dialects, many of which trace their roots to specific clan or tribal groups. Additionally, Burton (1973) maintained that Sindhi is a language that has many features or words or entire phrases that are similar to Arabic, Persian, and other Hindi dialects. Consequently, Sindhi is a complex language that owes much to its interaction with other languages and cultures.
The purpose of this report is to provide a historical overview of Sindhi. The report will draw upon the literature to further present a sound inventory of English and Sindhi. A discussion of code switching and borrowings with respect to Sindhi and English as well as Sindhi and other languages will be discussed. It should be noted that Bond and Lai (1986) have suggested that code switching and borrowing are linguistic phenomena that tend to occur as speakers of one language become more enmeshed or integrated into a culture in which another language predominates. Additionally, code switching and borrowing are commonplace when a langua...