A Threatened Language By Dr Tariq Rahman

The answer lies in language being a symbol of an ethnic identity and a way of life.

I had the pleasure of being invited to preside over a seminar on the Wakhi language held at the Institute of Folk Heritage in Islamabad recently. Outside the hall there were people in traditional woollen robes and caps, some embellished with feathers.

Their merchandise displayed an array of exotic clothes, gems, artifacts and a delightful array of edibles I had never seen before. The seminar addressed many of the problems of the Wakhi language, stressing that it was a threatened language.

Spoken in the area where the paths of the empires - the Chinese, Russian, Afghan and Indian - of yore crossed, the Wakhi people were perforce divided. They were on the move with their animals in search of better pastures and their language and traditions gave them a sense of belonging, a certain unity in dispersion and constant movement.

Besides the high valleys of Pakistan, the Wakhi people live in Tajikistan along the Pamir river and the Sarikol area of China.

They are a wonderful people - good-looking, dignified, gentle and friendly. You do not associate them with religious fanaticism or, indeed, with fanaticism of any kind. They are peaceful people and like to live and let live.

The Karakoram Highway brings in money and scarce luxuries as common salt. But the luxuries come at a price - the possible disappearance of the Wakhi language and way of life.

One could ask why we should be concerned. After all, the world has over 6,000 languages and many of them are dying. The answer lies in language being a symbol of an ethnic identity and a way of life.

Once a language dies a worldview also dies. The identity of a people disappears. Their songs, jokes, riddles, stories all disappear. The voices and memories of their ancestors disappear.

This means that the world is short of one distinct form of human existence. Can we enter into the minds of people who are threatened with becoming inauthentic clones of some other dominant community? If we cannot then we cannot understand why the Wakhi language activists do not want their language to die.

Yet another thing which happens when a language disappears is that the words in it -referring sometimes to unique natural herbs, foods, etc - cease to exist and that particular folk wisdom disappears.

This may not appear to be a great loss but if one listens to stories about how certain berries and grasses were good for certain ailments, one feels that it is at a cost that we cut ourselves off from the land which nourishes us.

And for those who value diversity, the loss of a language is a loss in itself. But those who want a monochrome world - something which will never be achieved - the loss of a language is good riddance.

However, I am of the view that we need to celebrate human diversity and accept people despite their differences. And that is where the issue of our some 61 Pakistani languages comes in (the Summer Institute of Linguistics counts 72 but I limit myself to a lower figure). So if we are losing any of them - which we are - we must sit up and take note.

A number of linguists are doing precisely that. They are writing the grammar and collecting sound bites and word lists of the world's dying languages. This is sometimes called ‘preventive linguistics' but let nobody imagine that linguists can actually prevent the death of a language. They cannot but language activists and governments can.

Linguists merely describe and analyse what they do. But the crux of the debate on this phenomenon - sometimes also called ‘language shift'- is whether it is best described by the metaphors of death, murder or suicide. Those who call it ‘death' say that language communities simply shift to a more widely spoken language so their own language ‘dies'.

Others say that policymakers create conditions because of which people shift to other languages so it is best described as murder. Still others contend that people willingly shift to other languages so it is ‘suicide'.

My own view is that it is murder. People do become ashamed of their language and do not teach it to their children - but only because the state has never created a policy giving any value or sense of dignity to their language. They do not find their language useful - but only because it is not used in jobs, radio, TV, schools, colleges or anywhere. Now who creates such discriminatory policies? The state, of course. So are we justified in speaking of the ‘language murder'? I leave this to the reader to decide.

There are countries which give linguistic rights to their citizens. Papua New Guinea, for instance, teaches about 200 mother tongues to children as a stepping stone to languages of wider communication. We need such policies too but we do not even teach the major languages - Punjabi, Seraiki, Balochi, Brahvi, Hindko etc - to our children as a stepping stone to literacy in Urdu and English.

Where we have tried such experimental projects as we did in Balochistan between 1990 to 1992 the experiment has failed. As soon as the compulsion was removed in 1992 parents abandoned their own languages and reverted to Urdu. Why? Because the experiment was tried only on the children of the poor.

The English-medium schools never taught Balochi or Brahvi or Pushto. The parents knew very clearly that there would be no jobs, no respect, no usable skills at the end. Obviously they did not want to burden their children so the experiment failed. A policy must be uniform to appeal to anybody.

So, if we want our linguistic wealth not to come to an end, we need to change our attitudes. Everything else will follow.

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