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"Language policy Pakistan."
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The ambivalent role of Urdu and English in multilingual Pakistan: a Bourdieusian study
Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by people in Pakistan, although the only two official languages are Urdu and English. After its Independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, it took much deliberation for the country to make a shift from its monolingual Urdu orientation to a multilingual language policy in education in 2009. This entailed a shift from the dominant Urdu language policy for the masses (and English exclusively reserved for elite institutions), to a gradual and promising change that responded to the increasing social demand for English and for including regional languages in the curriculum. Yet English and Urdu dominate the present policy and exclude regional non-dominant languages in education that themselves are dynamic and unstable, and restructured continually due to the de facto multilingual and plurilingual repertoire of the country. Using Bourdieu's (Outline of a theory of practice Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977a, The economics of linguistic exchanges. Soc Sci Inform 16:645-668, 1977b, The genesis of the concepts of habitus and field. Sociocriticism 2:11-24 1985, Language and symbolic power Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991) conceptualization of habitus, this study analyzes letters to the editor published between 2002-2009 and 2018-2020 in a leading English daily of Pakistan. The analysis unveils the linguistic dispositions that are discussed in the letters and their restructuring through market forces, demonstrating a continuity between the language policy discourse and public aspirations. The findings also indicate the ambivalences towards Urdu and English in relation to nationalistic ideologies, modernity and identity.
Journal Article
Multilingual Language Practices in Education in Pakistan: The Conflict Between Policy and Practice
This study examines the language practices in educational settings in Pakistan, taking the multilingual groupings in society into account. In Pakistan, each province is linked to the single or multiple identities of its people and the languages spoken by the majority. The national language Urdu is limited to educational settings and its function as a lingua franca. English serves people in authority, in offices, and in educational settings. Through discourse-ethnographic analysis, this study examines the individual and joint actions of policymakers and teachers to understand the role of language in educational policy and its practice in educational settings. The interview data identified issues regarding the relationship between language, identity, nation, region, religion, power, and personal attainment in regional, national, and international settings. Moreover, the power of national education policy to produce adequate results is limited by the regional discourses that policymakers ignore. This study concludes by arguing that policy practices for language-in-education in multilingual societies require thoughtful planning which should be informed by local conditions and requirements for its better implementation.
Journal Article
Community-Based Assessment of Knowledge, Attitude, Practices and Risk Factors Regarding COVID-19 Among Pakistanis Residents During a Recent Outbreak: A Cross-Sectional Survey
Exceptional precautionary measures have been adopted to stop the transmission and control of COVID-19 through the world and Pakistan is facing lockdown in this scenario. Public loyalty to precautionary measures is affected by their knowledge, attitude, risk factors and practices (KAP) towards COVID-19. The present study was conducted among the Pakistani residents to observe the knowledge, attitude, practices and risk factors towards COVID-19 outbreak in Pakistan. A questionnaire was designed, and a cross-sectional survey was conducted among participants of the study area. Participants were asked the questions regarding knowledge, attitude, practices and risk factors towards COVID-19. Data were analyzed by SPSS and
t
/
F
test and correlation was applied among the knowledge, attitude, risk factors and practices. A total of 1060 questionnaires were received. 1004 were included while 56 were excluded. The highest representation was from Punjab province (65.6%), female (63%) and age group of 21–30 years (62.1%). Most participants were single (85%), Muslim (99.4%), Urdu speaking (45.6%) and were graduates (51.5%). Most of the participants were students (52.9%) and were from economically middle-class families (40.8%). The knowledge was positively correlated with attitude and practices whereas negatively correlated with risk factors (P < 0.05). The attitude was negatively correlated with risk factor and positively correlated with practices. The risk factors and practices were positively correlated with each other. Health education program to improve the COVID-19 knowledge, attitude, practices and risk factors should be initiated to combat current health challenge.
Journal Article
A Critical Analysis of the Language Planning and Policy (LPP) in Pakistan and its Impact on Indigenous Languages of Pakistan
A well-devised formulation of language planning and policy creates a sense of ownership among speakers of all languages. At the same time, its absence may lead to asymmetrical power relations among speakers of different languages. This article aims at presenting a critical analysis of language planning and policy (LPP) in Pakistan and its impact on the indigenous languages of Pakistan. The research draws on secondary sources of data such as the policy documents, the research articles written on language planning and policy in Pakistan and the views of the language critics. The data shows that the language policies devised at various times in Pakistan have failed to prove fruitful as the multilingual language profile of the country was not taken into deep consideration. Critics argue that the policy practices at the national level patronized the use of Urdu and English at the cost of indigenous languages. Language planning and policy (LPP) reflects an ambivalent attitude as some provinces paid attention to it as a sensitive matter; others ignored it altogether. Overall, language planning and policy (LPP) shows traces of colonial imprints. The promotion of the English language resulted in its emergence as a power and status symbol, while that of Urdu resulted in ethnolinguistic resistance. Therefore, there is a dire need to build solidarity with all the languages, acknowledge them, and provide them equal growth opportunities through effective LPP. The implications of the research highlight that equal growth opportunities must be provided in practice to all indigenous languages. It is recommended to overhaul language planning and policy in Pakistan. If the situation of unequal growth persists and the existing deep sense of deprivation suffered by local ethnolinguistic groups is not alleviated, it may lead to devastating consequences.
Journal Article
Publicly Available Online Tool Facilitates Real-Time Monitoring Of Vaccine Conversations And Sentiments
Real-time monitoring of mainstream and social media can inform public health practitioners and policy makers about vaccine sentiment and hesitancy. We describe a publicly available platform for monitoring vaccination-related content, called the Vaccine Sentimeter. With automated data collection from 100,000 mainstream media sources and Twitter, natural-language processing for automated filtering, and manual curation to ensure accuracy, the Vaccine Sentimeter offers a global real-time view of vaccination conversations online. To assess the system's utility, we followed two events: polio vaccination in Pakistan after a news story about a Central Intelligence Agency vaccination ruse and subsequent attacks on health care workers, and a controversial episode in a television program about adverse events following human papillomavirus vaccination. For both events, increased online activity was detected and characterized. For the first event, Twitter response to the attacks on health care workers decreased drastically after the first attack, in contrast to mainstream media coverage. For the second event, the mainstream and social media response was largely positive about the HPV vaccine, but antivaccine conversations persisted longer than the provaccine reaction. Using the Vaccine Sentimeter could enable public health professionals to detect increased online activity or sudden shifts in sentiment that could affect vaccination uptake.
Journal Article
Top-Down English Policy and Bottom-Up Teacher Take: An Interview-Based Insight from the Balochistan Province of Pakistan
Provinces in Pakistan have initiated teaching English as a compulsory subject in Grade 1 onwards in their government schools by following the latest National Education Policy (NEP) of 2009. The policy states that the measure shall develop the students’ English proficiency that would later help them compete. In this study we intended to understand whether the policy was implemented successfully in the province of Balochistan. By drawing upon the language planning framework proposed by Kaplan, Baldauf, and Kamwangamalu (2011) and applying convenient sampling technique, the researchers conducted thirty-one semi-structured interviews with urban and rural male and female teachers who teach in Grades 1 to 5. We found that issues such as limited teaching time for the English subject, lack of qualified teachers, inappropriate English textbooks, teachers’ customary teaching methodology, paucity of resources, and gap between policymakers and practitioners impacted the policy. The study offers recommendations that could help the Pakistani policymakers to align the policy with practice, research, and the teachers’ voices in order to achieve the desired outcomes.
Journal Article
Scaling value: transnationalism and the Aga Khan’s English as a “second language” policy
Against the backdrop of growing sociolinguistic interest in transnationalism, this paper uses the notion of “scale” as an “ideological project” (Irvine in Scale. Discourse and dimensions of social life, University of California Press, California,
2016
: 214) to study situated discursive performances of transnationalism amongst Shia Ismaili Muslims in a village in Hunza, Northern Pakistan and the city of Khorog, Eastern Tajikistan. By virtue of the ideological importance granted to English by the Ismaili community’s spiritual leader, the Aga Khan IV, transnational scaling is studied through the window of discourse on English. Specifically, the paper analyses how Ismailis in these two localities appropriate the Aga Khan’s English as a “second language” policy. Drawing on data collected during ethnographic fieldwork, the paper demonstrates how Ismailis make English into an economic and symbolic resource, which is simultaneously used to underscore community-internal sameness and index Ismaili progress. In bringing together an analysis of the discursive construction of local policy appropriation with reflections on transnational scaling practices, the paper makes a novel contribution to both current debates on the spatialisation of language policy discourse (Canagarajah in Reclaming the local in language policy and practice (xiii–xxx), Routledge, London and New York,
2005
; Hult in Int J Sociol Lang 202:7–24, Hult
2010
; Mortimer and Wortham in Annu Rev Appl Linguist 35:160–172,
2015
) and language commodification and value (Heller in J Sociolinguist 7(4):473–492,
2003
, Heller in Annu Rev Anthropol 39:101–114,
2010
; Tan and Rubdy in Language as commodity: global structures, local market places, Continuum, London,
2008
; Duchêne and Heller in Language in late capitalism: pride and profit, Routledge, London and New York,
2012
; Park and Wee in Markets of English. Linguistic capital and language policy in a globalizing world, Routledge, London and New York,
2012
).
Journal Article
Multilingualism and Education in South Asia: Resolving Policy/Practice Dilemmas
This article focuses on the multilingual educational policies in India and Pakistan in the light of challenges in implementation and everyday communicative practices. The challenges these countries face in the context of the contrasting forces of globalization and nationalism are common to those of the other communities in this region. Both India and Pakistan have adopted versions of a tripartite language formula, in which the dominant national language—Urdu in Pakistan, and Hindi in India—along with a regional language and English are to be taught in primary and secondary schools. Such a policy is aimed at accommodating diverse imperatives, such as providing access to schooling to everyone regardless of their mother tongues, developing national identity through competence in a common language, and tapping into transnational economic resources through English. However, this well-intentioned policy has generated other tensions. There are inadequate resources for teaching all three languages in all regions and social levels. Certain dominant languages enjoy more currency and upset the multilingual balance. Furthermore, as people integrate English into their repertoires in recognition of the better-paid employment opportunities and communication media associated with globalization, language practices are becoming more hybrid. To resolve such tensions between policy and practice, some scholars propose a plurilingual model indigenous to the region. Rather than compartmentalizing languages and demanding equal competencies in each of them, such a model would allow for functional competencies in complementary languages for different purposes and social domains, without neglecting mother-tongue maintenance.
Journal Article
Impacts of livelihood assets on adaptation strategies in response to climate change: evidence from Pakistan
This article explores the impact of farmers' livelihood assets and adaptation approaches on livelihoods. We proposed a new paradigm for the sustainable livelihoods of smallholders based on the grounded theory, to exploit seven household assets and used mixed methodological approaches of growers' livelihood assets and climatic adaptation strategies based on farmers' livelihood concerns in Sindh province of Pakistan and to better understand smallholder farmers' sustainable livelihoods and applied a partial least square path modeling. Considering central critical paths, psychological assets (PsyA) entail mediational factors into the sustainable livelihoods index. The findings show that the essential support of the livelihood of farmers' social, cultural, economic, and human assets positively impacts sustainable livelihoods, though physical and natural assets depict a nonsignificant impact on SLI. However, human and financial assets show comparatively substantial effects on smallholders' adaptation strategies; consequently, physical, social, and natural assets reveal significant impacts on farmers’ livelihoods. The study further indicates that PsyA can, directly and indirectly, boost the human and physical assets and exploit the farmers’ sustainable livelihoods index successfully. Lastly, this research proposed policy suggestions for poverty reduction and sustainable livelihoods of small-scale growers.
Journal Article