Daily Times

Who could have imagined that the language spoken by Anglo-Saxon tribes, living on the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea, would one day travel across continents and assume a global presence?

English became the official language of the sub-continent in 1857. It stayed here even though the British left seven decades ago.

English has become the lingua franca of the world. It is the only truly universal language spoken and understood in all parts of the world.

Pakistan’s constitution has decreed Urdu as the national language. However, English would continue to remain the official language until arrangements have been made to replace it with Urdu.

Three deadlines set for making necessary arrangements to replace English with Urdu have expired. English, it seems, has become indispensable.

In 2015, Justice Jawad S Khwaja took notice of the issue and gave the government three months to replace English with Urdu. That period also expired and nothing happened.

Urdu is the lingua franca of not only Pakistan but also the Indian subcontinent. It is mutually intelligible with standard Hindi. Urdu-Hindi has the largest literacy in the subcontinent, being spoken or understood from Calcutta to Peshawar.

Only seven per cent people in Pakistan claim Urdu as their mother tongue

Urdu-Hindi is the third most spoken language in the world, with approximately 329.1 million native speakers, and 697.4 million total speakers.

Urdu was traditionally the language of Muslims of north western India. It has a large vocabulary borrowed from Persian and Arabic. It is written in Persian script. Most of the Hindi roots come from Sanskrit. Hindi is written in Devnagari script.

There are 72 local dialects spoken in Pakistan. In India, the number is nearly 10 times that.

Amidst such a large number of languages and dialects spoken in this region, there was an imminent need for a uniting language. It was on account of being the symbol of Islamic identity in northern India that Quaid-i-Azam selected it to be the national language of Pakistan.

Given the similarities between Urdu and Hindi, many linguists consider them two standardized forms of the same language, spoken or understood in most parts of India and Pakistan.

Speakers of Hindi and Urdu can conveniently converse with one another and hardly feel they are speaking two different languages.

Despite being the national language of Pakistan, Urdu is the mother tongue of only seven per cent of its people.

Punjabi is the most widely spoken language in Pakistan. It is spoken as a first language by more than 44 per cent of Pakistanis, mostly in the Punjab. Sindhi is spoken by 15.4 per cent; Pashtu by 14.5 per cent and Balochi by 2 per cent, all largely in the respective provinces.

Most linguists agree that early education should be imparted in the mother language. An English medium education is thus a barrier to progress in Pakistan.

Sadly access to quality education is often based on one’s ability to pay for it. The rich have ready access to schools that consistently produce people with higher salaries in mid- and senior-level jobs in the formal market. Low and middle-income and poor households have access only to an education that produces people with low salaries.

The Constitution allows a provincial assembly to prescribe laws and measures for teaching, promotion and use of provincial languages in addition to the national language. Thus, local languages and literature are encouraged and financially supported at the provincial level.

Learning of English is necessary due to its universal appeal. However, it should not be promoted at the cost of intellectual development in our own languages.

Language is a means of communication. It has nothing to do with our cognitive intelligence. Currently English opens a window so wide that all vernacular languages, Urdu included, are but tiny peepholes in comparison.

English cannot be the tool for basic learning for the masses which is only possible in their mother tongue. Even if English is made compulsory from the primary stage (as was done under prime minister Benazir), there is insufficient language teaching capacity to make that work.

As a compromise English should be introduced in Class V or VI, while allowing the option to study English from Class I.

The real enemy of education in Pakistan is a regressive mindset, not a language or financial resources. Critical thinking is actively discouraged and memorisation encouraged.

Ideological content affects the learning of science subjects and stifles free enquiry and an analytical approach essential to the growth of science and technology.

Effective learning of languages is only possible if we simultaneously use the four basic skills: listening, speaking, reading and writing. This is often achieved in the indirect method, which seeks a high level of student involvement in observing, investigating, drawing inferences from data or forming a hypothesis, a technique used by some of our urban elite centres of learning. This also helps the students learn the correct idiom of the language. Unfortunately, the knowledge of English is imparted directly in our district and rural centres. In this method, the teacher stands in front of a classroom and presents the information, which the students might retain. The result is that teaching of English (and other languages) falls far short of international standards.

In the English Proficiency Index, the Netherlands, Sweden and Norway are on the top of the list. India stands 22nd and Pakistan 48th.

Several Pakistani governments have maintained the British policy of providing education in both English and vernaculars. This creates two classes of people: one trained to rule the country and take the best-paid jobs, and the other expected to fill the lower and middle-level jobs that do not offer the same benefits.

An Anglicized Urdu is fast emerging. One misses the chaste Urdu of radio icons like Akhlaque Ahmad Delhavi; Mustafa Ali Hamdani and Azizur Rehman.

The writer is a former member of the Provincial Civil Service, and an author of Moments in Silence