Mother tongues languish to national detriment

On 21^st February 2023, another International Mother Tongue Day came and passed by, more or less unnoticed, but for some social media mention, sans serious commitment, public or private.

Neglecting mother tongues and avoiding giving them their true status in our constitutional and educational system has always been a problem. We forget that withholding the grant of a national language status to the language of a majority of our population, Bengali, became the first seed germinating into the breakup of the fifth largest country in the world!

There are nearly 3,400 languages spoken in the world and 74 of them have completely disappeared. Will our regional languages Punjabi, Sindhi, Baloochi, Pashto or Pakhto be the next to disappear?

International Mother Language Day is a worldwide annual event held on each 21 February to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and to promote multilingualism. The proposal for commemorating the Mother Tongue Day was initiated by Bangladesh.

In 1948 declaring Urdu as the national language was met with widespread protests in erstwhile East Pakistan. Bengali was sought to be declared as a national language on a par with Urdu. This demand was first raised by Dhirendranath Datta from East Pakistan on 23 February 1948 in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan.

In protest against the 1948 announcement, large protest rallies and meetings were held. On 21 February 1952, police opened fire on peacefully striking students killing six with hundreds injured. February 21 became a Shaheed Day as well as part of a nascent separatist nationalist consciousness.

On 17 November 1999, the 30^th General Assembly of UNESCO unanimously resolved that “21^st February be proclaimed International Mother Language Day throughout the world to commemorate the martyrs who sacrificed their lives on this very day in 1952”, later ratified by the UN General Assembly in 2001.

With our pathological preoccupation with an external and internal “enemy”, real, perhaps more exaggerated, regional ethnic and lingual diversity is wrongly considered imperiling national unity. We forget that nationhood, amidst cultural diversity, cannot but be dispersive and accommodative.

While the urge for national unity in new states is paramount, the question of national language took a different direction in India.

With more than a hundred regional languages, it followed accommodation, giving the status of national languages to 22 regional languages along with Hindi, English remaining the official language.

Switzerland has four separate nationalities and national languages French, German, Italian and Romance.

The seeds of mutual mistrust, non-accommodation and of exclusivity born from the urge for uniformity were sowed early due to misconceived ideas about how people with different languages and histories could live together in harmony, acceptance and peace. Such myopism was exacerbated by misconceived racial concepts treating certain local ethnicities as more martial than others. This, coupled with economic exploitation and control, led to incurable ethnic distrust.

The shortsighted desire to enforce conformity, rather than fostering a commonality by allowing mutual ethnic and cultural coexistence, was a path fraught with inbuilt dangers. The separation of a majority from a minority was foretold. Misfortunes are brought upon people by the minds of small men, not kismet.

Regional languages possess a rich historical and literary past. The Pashto language is synonymous to Pashtunwali, the honour bound code of conduct that each Pashtoon conforms to. Doing the ‘Pashto Laar’ (the pashto way) is a common metaphor.

Pashto language is also associated with a fierce nationalist spirit of unbending freedom which many conquerors, Greeks through Mughals, Sikhs, the British and the Russians learnt the hard way. Herodotus, the Greek historian accompanying Alexander on his world conquering exploits, wrote of a ‘Packtuiyike’ people speaking a ‘Packtuyi’ language nearly 2350 years back by people occupying areas in Afghanistan and present day KP.

Languages create and carry forth a people’s folklore, provide an idiom to their norms and values, a metaphor feeding its music and daily lives as a living, throbbing and inextinguishable reality. It is part of a people’s geist. The first word entering the ears of a newly born child is its mother’s language which remains part of its personality and living soul.

In 1990 as Secretary Education, Government of KP (then NWFP) I discovered that there were nearly 150 to 200 primary schools in KP in which the medium of instruction was Pashto. Their syllabus, curriculum, class books, teacher selection and training had received scant attention and therefore their gradual diminution in numbers was totally construeable.

A proposal was made to the provincial cabinet to make mother tongue a compulsory subject in primary and secondary schools along with Urdu and English on the pattern of other multilingual countries like India and Switzerland. Nothing unfortunately materialised.

A language is the repository and transmitter of the total civilisation, including the history, literature, poetry and culture of a people. Not according mother tongues their due place in education is tantamount to severing the connection of a people to their historical and cultural heritage and identity, besides blocking avenues for further advancements.

Most of our children today cannot read the scripts of their mother tongues. Civilised government is responsible not merely for the physical but the cultural and spiritual endowment of its peoples.

A National Charter For Mother Tongues is warranted which should inform political debate.

Mother tongues should not face extinction due to the indifference or misguided apprehensions of policymakers.

Promoting mother tongues will invigorate creation of inclusive national unity rather than enfeebling or emaciating it. Participatory nationalism, growing out of ethnic and lingual diversity, provides robustness and endurance to feeling part of a greater whole and is a principle manner in which possible regional discontent is avoided, making for harmony and solidarity.

The paramount need for future generations to be fully literate in their mother tongues cannot be gainsaid for which making it a compulsory subject at school level must receive priority attention of the government and state. Multilingualism and according mother tongues the status of national languages along with Urdu would add to national perceptions of cultural inclusion and tolerance of diversity, leading to feelings of equal participation and ethnic acceptance.

Besides fair and transparent sharing in economic resources and equal political access, cultural and lingual embracement are the permanent and abiding cornerstones of national unity. Mother tongues languish to national detriment.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 19^th, 2023.

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