Pakistan is one of the many countries in the modern world that can boast of a rich cultural, demographic, and geographic diversity. People in the US are often surprised when they are told that Pakistan has beautiful mountain ranges and places where it snows even in summer (many Americans consider Pakistan to be a desert country somewhere in the Middle East!). The same Americans are frequently stunned to learn that Pakistan is a multilingual country where roughly 72 languages are spoken (many Americans think that every country in the world is largely monolingual and mono-ethnic). To confound my American audience further, I usually add that more than one million people each speak seven of these 72 languages. However, unfortunately, the good news ends here and the bad news begins.
We Pakistanis seem to be harming ourselves in the domain of social and cultural heritage like all other fields of life. Instead of being proud of our rich cultural heritage and diversity, we are destroying our own sociocultural background and history. How aptly someone has been quoted in a recent British Council study that, “Pakistan is a nation of people who don’t know who they are.” This attitude is evident in our education and language policies. Even 64 years after independence, we still have the colonial era language policies that are not only detrimental to our social and cultural fabric but are also exploitative of the tens of millions of people who have no recourse to wealth and power (both in the literal and electric sense!).
The colonial language policies were designed to help the Raj perpetuate its rule and did not respect or care about the local languages and cultures. These policies were aimed at eradicating dissent against colonial rule. The epitome of this policy by the Raj could be seen in their education-language policy. They declared Urdu to be the medium of instruction for the masses and English for the elite. This policy ignored all other languages of present day Pakistan. The continuation of these colonial policies has not only created a chasm between our people and their culture but has also caused irrevocable damage to our society in the social, economic and educational spheres of life.
A recent report by South Asian Forum for Education Development (SAFED) claimed that only half of the children in grade five could read grade two level Urdu or mother tongue book and just 40 percent could read a grade two English book. Another study by the British Council has pointed out that one of the reasons for the high dropout rate from our primary schools is the language of the medium of instruction. Having taught in Pakistani schools and colleges, I can claim from experience that half of my students could not express themselves in the written mode in any language, let alone English.
The above-mentioned situation demands an immediate and lasting solution but instead of addressing this situation in an objective and scientific way, we are actually trying our best to make matters worse, which is evident from such decisions as making English the language of instruction and examinations for middle and high school children by some provincial governments. Decisions like this by our respective governments are harming our rich cultural and linguistic heritage. If the present situation continues, it is possible that before long we will be on the brink of possible abandonment and extinction of some of our beautiful languages. It is time that the federal and the provincial governments accord due recognition and status to all our indigenous languages.
The question that could be asked is how our languages can be given their proper place in our society and how they can be used to control illiteracy and many other social problems our society is facing. Modern linguistics looks at languages as capital and if this capital can be traded fairly and squarely in today’s burgeoning economy, then the speakers of that language tend to retain and promote their capital (language). One of the many ways to make a language more marketable and desired is to give it an official status and use it in different public spheres. Declaring the mother tongue as the medium of instruction for elementary education in the country and making the local languages official languages at the lower level of the bureaucracy can start the process of empowering our neglected languages and their speakers. These small steps will not only give these neglected languages their due share in society, they will also address and solve many of our social and educational problems and needs.
The writer is a PhD candidate in Linguistics at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana