Urdu as the National Language.
by Peter J. Sumner
Once again, the Government of Pakistan is studying proposals to make Urdu the National language. Oh, it must be election year! How many times have they done this before? They keep flogging this dead horse. What do you mean - you thought urdu already was the national language of Pakistan? Don't believe everything you read in school textbooks! The government obviously hasn't read them.
The history of this fruitless task goes back to British India times when 'Roman Urdu' was introduced with very dubious results. The numerous times that the medium of education in Pakistan has been switched between urdu and english is well demonstrated in a former Balochi education minister. This dear lady can neither speak urdu nor english, but a peculiar mixture of both. She is actually a very typical example of her generation, who has had her educational years highly disturbed by these language complications. The fact that she is now part of the committee studying the proposal is... well, strange!
Why don't we just admit the fact that the vast majority of the population doesn't speak urdu as their first language. Furthermore, those who can speak urdu generally have a very poor vocabulary and the grammar is almost non-existant. Urdu is a very difficult language to master - it's grammar is far more complicated than that of English. While it may be considered good to have a national spirit and identity, and I'll fly the flag as much as anyone, do we really need to include urdu? Afterall, our National Anthem isn't even in urdu!
This time around, the situation is quite different to the previous attempts to make urdu the national language. We are in the Information Technology age, as our government keeps reminding us. Where does urdu stand in this scenario? Absolutely nowhere! It isn't a recognized language in web browsers and very few computers have a full unicode font installed to permit the rendering of urdu characters. Apart from these technical problems, we have the 'human' problem of a very severe shortage of urdu language typists. Today, a good urdu typist can obtain a very respectable salary and there is no shortage of jobs. The problem is that few people can type, spell and translate urdu with any degree of competence. The foolishness of our government is amply demonstrated in the fact that 'computers' is now a part of the school curriculum but typing isn't!
As an example, you can visit the web sites of our popular urdu newspapers. But be warned, you will need a huge amount of patience. All the urdu script you see is actually contained in pictures that take a very long time to download. The making of urdu web pages is a very time consuming process too. One might ask why the government web sites aren't in urdu?
It is not that urdu can't be used on the Internet. The technology is available and very high quality urdu text can be displayed. Sindhi, Farsi and Pashto can also be used. It just isn't installed as standard on our computers. But then, the non-english speaking population doesn't use computers anyway so we have a chicken and egg type situation.
I believe that the government should stop wasting their time on this urdu nonsense and take steps to improve the quality of english in our educational system. In particular, much more could be done to encourage spoken english. How many people do you know who can read and write english well, but can't speak a word?
This is no doubt a controversial topic, so feel free to voice your views in the forums.