The ambivalent role of Urdu and English in multilingual Pakistan: a Bourdieusian study

Abstract

Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world’s fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world’s second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by people in Pakistan, although the only two official languages are Urdu and English. After its Independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, it took much deliberation for the country to make a shift from its monolingual Urdu orientation to a multilingual language policy in education in 2009. This entailed a shift from the dominant Urdu language policy for the masses (and English exclusively reserved for elite institutions), to a gradual and promising change that responded to the increasing social demand for English and for including regional languages in the curriculum. Yet English and Urdu dominate the present policy and exclude regional non-dominant languages in education that themselves are dynamic and unstable, and restructured continually due to the de facto multilingual and plurilingual repertoire of the country. Using Bourdieu’s (Outline of a theory of practice Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977a, The economics of linguistic exchanges. Soc Sci Inform 16:645–668, 1977b, The genesis of the concepts of habitus and field. Sociocriticism 2:11–24 1985, Language and symbolic power Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991) conceptualization of habitus, this study analyzes letters to the editor published between 2002–2009 and 2018–2020 in a leading English daily of Pakistan. The analysis unveils the linguistic dispositions that are discussed in the letters and their restructuring through market forces, demonstrating a continuity between the language policy discourse and public aspirations. The findings also indicate the ambivalences towards Urdu and English in relation to nationalistic ideologies, modernity and identity.

An Analytical Study of Sociolinguistic Variations in Urdu Language

“…'(Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by people in Pakistan, although the only two official languages are Urdu and English', [7]. The main purpose of this is to guide young Urdu speakers to bring their native language (Urdu) with them in their original form to assess the changes.…”

Genetic diversity and forensic application of Y-filer STRs in four major ethnic groups of Pakistan

“…Pakistan is a diverse nation where several different languages are used as first languages [35,36]. The bulk of Pakistan's languages are from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family [37,38].…”

“…The bulk of Pakistan's languages are from the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family [37,38]. Urdu is Pakistan's national language while it shares official status with English and it is the preferred and dominant language used for inter-ethnic communication [36]. Pakistan's numerous ethno-linguistic groups speak a variety of regional languages as first languages.…”

Exploration of Sindhi Corpus Through Statistical Analysis on the Basis of Reality

“…Each script has a unique authorized range of code points in the Unicode standard due to the fact that the visual layout of the characters varies greatly between languages. Urdu is the most well-known of these, using a script borrowed from Arabic, while Kashmiri, Punjabi, and Sindhi are both Arabic-and Brahmi-derived (2) . Central Indian and North-Eastern Indian languages, which historically…”