Visitors to the BR Forums website cannot fail to note the number of misspelled words on the forum, especially in the popular BENIS thread. Do Indians not spell all that well, an acolyte asks? The real answer is very different actually. Many of the members are fluent in English and use it as their primary language of communication. The chief reason for the misspellings is because BRF members love to parody Pakistanis. Often a word may be accidentally misspelled in a leading Pakistani newspaper or journal and BRF members are quick to pick up the mistake and adopt it as their own (e.g. "Jaguar Vein", "Earth-e-shaster" etc.)

Another prime reason is because a leading Pakistani politician once claimed that Pakistan should be a prime outsourcing destination for IT, since they speak English better than Indians do. This led to a number of posters mangling words according to how a stereotypical Pakistani (or specifically, a Pakistani from Punjab) would pronounce them. Unfortunately this habit of "pak-speak" spread to quite a few threads in the forum, managing to confuse and annoy several members. Since then, a rule has been made that only certain threads are allowed to contain "pak speak" terms and only a few general pak-speak terms could be used on all the other threads. This rule is largely self-enforced by the various members and hence readers may occasionally see strange terms in threads other than the BENIS thread.

There is also a third reason which is sometimes used in technical threads. In certain threads, there is a great deal of technical information, some of which may be semi-public. In order to keep people from using search engines to find this information, some posters deliberately misspell words and use Paklish instead. An example of this would be this very technical discussion on jet engines which looks unintelligible to the uninitiated, but makes more sense to anyone who reads this dictionary.

With that said, here are the general rules of Pakistani Pronunciation, otherwise known as "Paklish"

B - A replacement for the letter 'P'. Arabs pronounce 'P' as 'B' (hence, "Bakistan" instead of "Pakistan"), as the letter 'P' is not in their language. What makes this particular mispronounciation funny is that many Pakistanis mistakenly believe that they're of Arab descent, in spite of evidence to the contrary. "Baki-stan" also literally translates to "What's left of"-stan in Hindi and Urdu, which sounds strangely prophetic. If you haven't noticed, the BENIS thread is named that way, since it is a stereotypical mispronounciation of PENIS.

J - A replacement for the letter 'S'. For instance, "mijjile" instead of "missile".

-e- - Often seen in official terms like "Quaid-e-azam". The '-e-' is from Urdu which uses it to denote "of" or "belonging to". BRF members often parody this in their own way, so "Bob's Pub" could be written as "Pub-e-Bob".

-bin- - Commonly seen in Arabic names. It actually means "son of", similar to "Mc" or "Mac" in Scottish and Irish cultures. BRF tends to parody this whenever they feel like mangling a member's name into its Islamicized version.

-al- - Similar in usage to 'bin' and also seen on Arabic names. The Arabic meaning of the word is "the", similar in usage to the Dutch "Van" and German "Von". E.g. "Al Andalus" for "The Andalusian", or "Al Libbi" for "The Libyan". BRF members are known to add "-al-" to convert their names to Islamicized versions. E.g. 'Tim-al-NewYorki"

Is - Many words that begin with 'S' are mispronounced by Punjabis as "Is". For instance, "Iskool" instead of "School".

With that said, on to the Glossary.