Something Modern Warfare 2 Got Wrong About Pakistan

Pakistani reader Saad was thrilled when he heard that Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was getting a multiplayer map set in the city he calls home, Karachi. That is, until he played it.

“I, being a Pakistani, was so excited at seeing a Karachi map and then immediately so disappointed when I played the map,” says the Karachi resident. The map has Arabic written all over, even though that isn’t the country’s language.

The country of Pakistan has two official lingos: English and Urdu. With somewhere between 60 and 80 million speakers of the standard language, Urdu has more speakers than, say, Italian, Korean or Polish.

“Infinity Ward probably thought, ‘Oh hey its a Muslim country so Arabic is the language,'” says Saad.

While Arabic and Urdu use the same script, the words are completely different. For example, the noun “people” is “al-naas” in Arabic (الناس), and “log” or “loug” (لوگ) in Urdu.

“To someone who doesn’t know urdu won’t be able to tell the difference,” Saad explains. “It’s like Spanish and English, I guess. Some letters are same, some are different but the words are completely different.”

There isn’t a single Urdu word on the entire Karachi map and no one writes in Arabic in Pakistan.