Politics of language: ‘Use mother tongues for primary education’

Researchers urge govts to promote smaller languages.

MUZAFFARABAD: Linguistics and local languages’ activists have demanded using local languages as mediums of instruction for primary schools.

They were speaking at the 2nd Kashmir International Conference on Linguistics, held at the the University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (UAJK) held earlier this week.

Participants from a number of countries read papers on the importance of smaller languages and challenges they face for survival.

Azad Jammu and Kashmir Minister for Secondary Education Matloob Inqilabi addressed the concluding session.

Speakers said that a whole culture dies with the death of a language.

Swathi Vanniarajan, a psycholinguistics professor at San Jose State University (SJSU) California appreciated learning foreign languages for employment but said that ignoring the vernacular and mother tongue would be injustice to the people and society which give an individual their identity.

Hala Abdelghany of the City University of New York said the concern of people and academics of the area about languages showed that they still want to remain in touch with their roots. This sense, she said, was one of the biggest achievements of the conference.

The speakers agreed that governments around the globe, particularly in regions which are very diverse in languages such as India and Pakistan, should take steps to save people’s languages by allocating more resources.

They also said that there was a need for bringing the endangered languages to the internet and place their literature online.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 9^th, 2015.