from Lucknow, should a person coming from a place like Mohan or Malihabad also be considered eligible? Mohan is not a part of the district of Lucknow, while Malihabad is. But district boundaries, we know, are arbitrarily determined by man, and do not necessarily conform to the linguistic profile of a place. And what about Panjab, where most people until a few years ago were truly bilingual in Urdu and Panjabi? Such people are still in the majority in the Pakistani Panjab. Then we have the case of the Hyderabad!, who often speaks at home a language very similar to old Urdu, or Dakini, and whose first language is modern Urdu anyway. I confess that in matters of language one may often be driven or tempted to adopt the position that I, the dictionary maker, am a true ahl-e zaban, and my decisions reflect the truth about the language. This position is highly repugnant to all of us provided we aren't ourselves occupying it. Muhazzab Lakhnavi, the compiler of the 13-volume Muhazzab-al-Lugat, often rounds off his discussion on a word or phrase by his own aaul-e faisal (the decisive observation). In his Farhang-e A^afiyya, Sayyad Ahmad Dihiavi often sneers at Amir Mina'i, a native of Lucknow, a considerable poet, and a friend of Ghalib. All these assets are not defense enough for poor Amir Mina'i against the barbs of Dihiavi, who himself occasionally delivers extremely ludicrous opinions about the meanings and origins of words in his dictionary, and even indulges in a bit of reminiscing or sermonizing when the mood takes him. Amir Mina'i himself, in the preface to his unfinished AmTr-al-Lugat, declares that he wants to compile an encyclopedia of the language and denies to the non-ahl-e zaban the competence to compile a dictionary. And yet, in one of his letters, he says that the whole kulliyat of Nazir Akbarabadi didn't yield a single word for his dictionary. Everyone knows that Nazir, for all his faults, is a veritable storehouse of Urdu words. But Amir Mina'i's own ahl-e zabTin-ness was apparently not sufficient to make him recognize in Nazir's usages the material for his work. Or perhaps he thought that Nazir, being a native of Agra, wasn't an ahl-e zaban himself, and so he didn't qualify as a source for a dictionary compiled by an ahl-e zabUn for the members of that august community. Closer to our time, the compilers of the voluminous Urdu Lugat from Pakistan have declared that they have entered no words not used by a least two "authoritative" Urdu authors. Yet they have not only failed to offer a definition of the term "authoritative," but have also entered numerous words on a single authority or no authority at all. So, what do I mean by the term, "educated native speaker"? Since the problems that I propose to tackle under the present category of the "living reality of the language being ignored by dictionary makers" relate mostly to pronunciation, I propose to adopt, with necessary modifications, the definition of Daniel Jones in his English Pronouncing Dictionary. He says that the pronunciation determined in the dictionary in question is one which he himself uses. "It is probably accurate to say", he explains, "that a majority of Londoners who have had a university education, use either this pronunciation or a pronunciation not differing greatly from it." He goes on to explain that he has lived all his life in or near London, and was educated at London and Cambridge. Not having had the benefit of a university education in Urdu, and not having lived all or most of my life in or near a "centre of Urdu" like Lucknow or Delhi, I can only say that I have lived among and dealt with university-educated speakers from Lucknow and Delhi, and the pronunciation peculiarities that I propose to describe below are those which I, and most of us, have found to be Annual of Urdu Studies, #7 ^