Language
Education in Pakistan is carried out in two languages, Urdu and English. While Urdu is the national language of Pakistan, the language was originally and initially developed in Uttar Pradesh in neighboring India. The language was chosen as the national language by the Founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah and has no relation to the belief that it was brought to Pakistan during the Partition of India by migrants called Muhajir Urdu. Urdu quickly dominated the Pakistani political landscape and Urdu is mandatory in all schools and educational institutions as part of a strategy to undermine the indigenous languages and cultures of the region (some of them being Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Brahui). Education in Pakistan was severely affected by the language bias. According to a 2010 British Council report, this forced imposition of Urdu on non-Urdu speakers in Pakistani schools and universities has resulted in the systematic degradation and decline of many of Pakistan's indigenous cultures, is partly responsible for a rise in reactionary rebellions against this ethnocracy (such as Sindhi nationalism, Baloch insurgency etc.), and contributes to discontent and political instability in the country. The report also cites rising illiteracy rates in Pakistan among the indigenous and attributes it to the forced imposition of Urdu in schools, leading to non-Urdu speakers, feeling threatened by the neglect of their languages in Pakistani education, becoming increasingly reluctant to enroll in these schools.
Read more about this topic: Education In Pakistan
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“A language does not become fixed. The human intellect is always on the march, or, if you prefer, in movement, and languages with it.”
—Victor Hugo (1802–1885)
“There’s a cool web of language winds us in,
Retreat from too much joy or too much fear:
We grow sea-green at last and coldly die
In brininess and volubility.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)