[lg policy] Pakistan: Imposing an arbitrary national language would only divide Pakistan further

Wed Sep 14 14:51:06 UTC 2016

 * Imposing an arbitrary national language would only divide
Pakistan further *
September 13, 2016 11.44am EDT
Author

   1. Arthur Dudney
   <http://theconversation.com/profiles/arthur-dudney-219338>

   Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, Asian and Middle Eastern Studies,
   University of Cambridge

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Arthur Dudney receives funding from the Leverhulme Trust. Views expressed
are his own.
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Urdu-language maxims adorn a school in the Swat Valley, Pakistan. EPA/Bilawal
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For a country seven decades old, Pakistan is dealing with a surprisingly
fundamental political and cultural problem: a struggle over what language
to use for government.

The Supreme Court has ordered the government to use the
constitutionally-mandated national language, Urdu
<http://www.dawn.com/news/1243652>, in place of English in the many
contexts where English is currently used. (Ironically, the court’s order
was itself written in English.) Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has declared
his enthusiasm for the transition to Urdu, and a committee
<http://nation.com.pk/editors-picks/24-May-2016/pm-forms-body-to-implement-urdu-as-official-language>
was constituted to monitor its progress.

But is imposed monolingualism a good fit for South Asia – or does it in
fact follow a very Eurocentric idea of how a nation-state should work?

This discussion has been rumbling on and off ever since India and Pakistan
achieved independence. Both of their post-colonial constitutions required
that after 15 years, English should be officially replaced by Urdu and
Hindi respectively, but both countries eventually side-stepped the
requirement. Pakistan continued to use English without comment alongside
Urdu; India declared it a “subsidiary official language”, symbolically
inferior to Hindi but nonetheless still recognised.

Today, the problem comes in how narrowly Urdu and Hindi are defined by the
bodies tasked with monitoring and developing the official languages.

Pakistan’s National Language Promotion Department
<http://tribune.com.pk/story/458570/national-language-authority-renamed/>
(formerly the National Language Authority) and India’s Department of
Official Language <http://www.rajbhasha.nic.in/> both have a reputation for
filling their respective languages with clunky neologisms. These are used
to avoid common English loanwords; Hindi ones are drawn largely from
Sanskrit, and Urdu’s largely from Arabic and Persian.

The people who complain <http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-34215293>
about the language policy aren’t necessarily trying to maintain their
English-speaking privilege; there really are genuine questions about the
character of the official language. If its speakers commonly use words that
aren’t recognised by governmental language bodies, is it right to have a
two-track system in which there is a governmental variety of a language and
very different one that normal people use?
Up in arms. EPA/Nadeem Khawer
<http://www.epa.eu/politics-photos/citizens-initiative-recall-photos/christians-protest-photos-01816019>

Taking a hard line against English as a colonial language makes little
sense decades after independence, especially when it has become the
language of international business and when English loanwords have become
embedded in people’s everyday usage in other South Asian languages. And
looking back over history, this is a very recent argument anyway.

The scorched-earth cultural politics of imposing a national language never
took hold in the subcontinent before modern India and Pakistan came into
being. Persian was the apex language during Mughal times and well into the
era of British colonial rule, but it never overwhelmed the subcontinent’s
longstanding linguistic diversity.

Many modern historians never think to question the colonial line
<https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=zGNJAAAAIAAJ&dq=On%20the%20Education%20of%20the%20People%20of%20India&pg=PA144#v=onepage&q&f=false>
that Persian was “thoroughly debasing and worthless” in India, but this is
a fiction; I myself wrote an entire book
<http://newbooksnetwork.com/arthur-dudney-delhi-pages-from-a-forgotten-history-hay-house-india-2015/>
arguing against the idea that Persian was a foreign imposition that
patriotic Indians never really embraced. In reality, people used the
languages available to them, making allowances for difference and freely
taking words from other languages.

It was recognised, as the old Hindi saying has it, that in South Asia “*kos
kos par bhasha badle, do kos par pani*” or “the language changes every
mile, and the taste of the water every two miles”.
Overridden and overwhelmed

In Europe, where national languages are largely a foregone conclusion, we
tend to forget how brutal and undemocratic their imposition was.

Languages other than English, notably Irish and Welsh, were repressed
across the British Isles in early modern times. The 1536 Welsh Act of
Union, for example, excluded Welsh speakers
<https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/apr/08/wales-language-commissioner-welsh-speakers>
from all government posts.

Across the English Channel, the adoption of standard French involved
centuries of violent confrontation with Occitan and Breton speakers. The
1539 Ordinance of Villers-Cotterêts
<http://www.academia.edu/11317362/Interpreting_early_French_linguistic_policy_The_meaning_and_impact_of_Fran%C3%A7ois_Is_Edict_of_Villers-Cotter%C3%AAts>,
which replaced Latin with French in legal documents, has often been read as
an act of popular liberation from the dead hand of Latin, but from the
minority-language perspective it was a disaster; whereas all linguistic
communities had previously used the same Latin documents, now only one
community was represented.

But while Europe’s worst battles over minority and non-standard languages
have been largely swept under the rug in recent centuries, radically
multilingual India and Pakistan simply don’t have enough rug to do the
same. An unintended consequence of decolonisation has been an almost
colonial imposition of artificial, non-colloquial registers of Hindi and
Urdu by Indian and Pakistani elites, who are concerned that without a
unifying national language their nations will face devastating social and
political disintegration.

This is misguided. Instead of repeating some of the unsavoury linguistic
nationalism of early modern Europe, these elites should celebrate the wide
variation in usage. They should acknowledge the ways Hindi and Urdu mix
with languages like English and Punjabi, and make allowances for the
complexity of language in society.

Far too little attention is routinely paid to how the citizens themselves
might wish to speak. Nothing illustrates this more poignantly than a 1951
speech
<http://www.amaana.org/ismaili/arabic-universal-language-of-the-muslim-world-aga-khan-iii/>
by the Aga Khan, in which he argued that the only possible national
language for the new Islamic Republic of Pakistan could be Arabic. While he
addressed the point that Urdu was the mother tongue of a tiny minority of
Pakistanis and thus apparently unsuitable as a national language, he did
not acknowledge the undeniable fact that Arabic was the mother tongue of
precisely 0% of Pakistanis.

And of course, he gave the speech in English.
http://theconversation.com/imposing-an-arbitrary-national-language-would-only-divide-pakistan-further-59838

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