Uncommon tongue: Pakistan’s confusing move to Urdu
by M Ilyas Khan
While many nations are adopting English, Pakistan is going the
opposite way, with the Supreme Court ruling for it to be replaced with
Urdu as the official language. Urdu is beautiful, vastly expressive, and
the medium of some of the most powerful literature generated in the
Indian sub-continent over the last two or three centuries.
It is spoken by many in Pakistan, especially in the main urban
centres.
But there is no region in Pakistan which can be categorised as
originally Urdu-speaking.
And Urdu has also been a victim of the early rulers’ controversial
desire to thrust administrative, political and linguistic uniformity
over the country’s local cultures, causing political alienation.
Many believe the seeds of secession in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)
were sown when Pakistan’s founder Mohammad Ali Jinnah announced in 1948
that Urdu alone would be the state language of Pakistan, though East
Pakistan could use Bengali as its provincial language.
East Pakistan, which was home to a majority of the Pakistani
population who had hoped Bengali would become the second state language
after Urdu, seceded in 1971. e languages can be found at stands in
Pakistan Some in Pakistan view the current Supreme Court judgement as
the continuation of that policy.
An ethnic Pashtun tweeter calling himself Durandline (the name for
the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan) recently tweeted that “Urdu
is not the language of majority, still it is the national language of
Pakistan. Even in linguistics, minority is imposed on majority.”
Naina Baloch tweeted: “Urdu is the language of Mohajirs (refugees
from India) and this does not make sense that a country adopts the
language of refugees as its national language.”
Many others see the move as likely to undermine major investment in
English medium education during the last few decades.
“It’s not like the 1960s or ‘70s when knowledge of English language
used to be the preserve of a small class of political and business
elite,” says Wasim Ahmad Shah, the Peshawar-based legal affairs
correspondent of Dawn newspaper. “Nearly every village in Pakistan has
at least one privately run English medium school these days, and there
is a proliferation of English language material in print and on
electronic media.”
Professor Ijaz Khan, who heads Peshawar University’s International
Relations department, says over-emphasis on Urdu may erode this progress
and take the country in a direction “180 degrees opposite to that of the
rest of the world”, which is increasingly using English as their lingua
franca.
“It will curtail the motivation to learn English, and in the long-run
cause disconnect between us and the rest of the world, both politically
and economically,” he says.
There are also questions over whether an efficient switch-over would
be possible.
“There are millions of pages of laws and statutes, court rulings,
legal commentaries and digests which lawyers use to formulate their
cases,” says Mohammad Haroon, a senior lawyer who practices at the
Nowshera district courts in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province.
“I don’t see any administrative capacity to build suitable Urdu
vocabulary, translate all material and knock new jargon into our heads
all in a generation’s time,” he says.
‘Prostitute’ pun
Since the 1990s, successive governments have set up institutions to
research and create technical Urdu terms for use in the five main
fields, namely government, administration, judiciary, military and
education.
In 2005, the head of the National Language Promotion Department (NLPD),
Prof Fateh Mohammad Malik, “reported that there was enough vocabulary to
shift all government from English to Urdu if desired,” writes Dr Tariq
Rehman, a Lahore-based linguist and academic, in a recent newspaper
column.
The problem is that since most Pakistanis are not Urdu speakers, many
Urdu terms that meant one thing in northern India, the home of Urdu
language, would mean quite another in Pakistan.
When a religious alliance, Muttahidda Majlis-e-Amal (MMA), came to
power in KP in 2002, they decided to draw on NLPD’s diction to Urduise,
and thereby Islamise, the provincial administration.
They were “in power for five years, but Urdu went nowhere further
than causing a lot of confusion in office work, and turning
terminologies into jokes,” says Ismail Khan, resident editor of Dawn
newspaper in Peshawar.For example, the term “office circular” is known
to all and sundry, but its rendition in Urdu, gashti marasala, not only
sounded strange, it created room for ridicule.
“The word ‘gashti’, which literally means ‘on the move’, or roaming
about, is often taken to mean a prostitute in these parts,” he explains.
Likewise, an official from Kabul, where office work is conducted in
Pashto and Persian, used the term “Star Munshi” for a Pakistani chief
secretary.
The chief secretary, whose designation means he is the top bureaucrat
of a province, was furious, recalls Ismail Khan.
The reason: while Munshi in India or Kabul may mean a respectable
official, in Pakistan it is mostly understood to mean a lowly cashier or
clerk of a ration depot or a brick kiln.
KP dropped Urdu as the official language towards the end of MMA rule.
Professor Ijaz Khan points out that national language mattered in the
world of the 1960s and 1970s because nation states were asserting their
individuality at that time, which is not the case now.“English is not a
colonial language any more, it is the lingua franca of the world.”
But the urge for cultural uniformity can still find takers, and so
can dissent.
A tweeter, Wajahat, fended off trollers by asserting: “Suggesting
that English should remain the (official) language instead of Urdu
doesn’t mean I’m a traitor or I suck up to the West.”
BBC Asia
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Pakistan’s many languages
English and Urdu are not even the most common first languages in
Pakistan, despite their official adoption.
* 48% speak Punjabi, mainly in eastern Punjab province
* 12% speak Sindhi, mainly in south eastern Sindh province
* 10% speak Saraiki, a variant of Punjabi
* 8% speak Pashto, in west and north western Pakisan
* 8% speak Urdu
* 3% speak Balochi, mainly in Balochistan
* English is the most popular among government ministries
There are numerous other languages spoken by minorities in the
population, including Brahui, Burushaski and Hindko.
-CIA Factbook
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