Why Pakistan is changing its official language from English to Urdu

Pakistan is poised to ensure key government documents and official speeches prioritize Urdu over English.

|
Anjum Naveed/AP
A Pakistani boy looks a mural of a three-wheeled tuk-tuk that is painted on the wall of a school in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Monday, July 6, 2015. Writing in Urdu reads, "when I grow up, I will become a truck."

The switch in Pakistan’s official language from English to Urdu, a popular language in the Indian subcontinent, has legal and cultural roots.

The Pakistani Constitution, passed in 1973, includes a clause that specified the government must make Urdu the national language by 1988.

More than two and a half decades after the deadline, Pakistan is finally ready to make the change.  

Ahsan Iqbal, Pakistan's Minister of Planning, National Reforms, and Development told Time, “Urdu will be a second medium of language and all official business will be bilingual.” The country will not abandon English, which will still be taught alongside Urdu in schools, he said.

So what will change with Urdu as the national language?

A range of government documents – including passports, utility bills, and websites – will be published in the language, Al Jazeera English reports.

The Tribune, a Pakistani newspaper, notes the President and Prime Minister will only deliver speeches in Urdu, even on foreign trips.

The Tribune also reports the government will change signs and names of public places to reflect Urdu translations.

However, critics are wary these latest developments may undermine Pakistan’s regional languages.

The CIA Factbook finds nearly half of Pakistanis speak Punjabi but only 8 percent speak Urdu. Sindhi, Saraiki and Pashto are all more popular than Urdu.

Asif Ezdi, a former member of the Pakistan Foreign Service, wrote in a blog post about the importance of federal initiatives to preserve regional languages, which “must go hand in hand with the promotion of Urdu.”

Mr. Iqbal maintains the changes will help make Pakistan more democratic since it will “help provide greater participation to people who don’t know English, hence making the government more inclusive,” Time reported.

In an interview with the United Nations Development Fund, Iqbal spoke about how such accessibility is relevant in education.

“Children thinking in Urdu may face difficulties in expressing themselves in English if their classroom learning is restricted to just English. A poor command over expression translates into poorly and insufficiently expressed thoughts – early stage learning and conceptualization require free expression in both languages, and a free internalization of knowledge.”

Osama Sajid, an undergraduate student in Pakistan, wrote that most high school students in Pakistan were “unable to read even the most basic headlines from Urdu newspapers” and most chose to take Urdu, a compulsory subject, as a second language.

“The unfortunate dilemma is that we find it ‘cool’ or trendy to dissociate ourselves from it,” Sajid said. “Unless we start to take some pride in our national language, and derive a sense of belonging and unity from it, we will always be a confused nation on the brink of success, but never really there.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Why Pakistan is changing its official language from English to Urdu
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Global-News/2015/0729/Why-Pakistan-is-changing-its-official-language-from-English-to-Urdu
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe