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Languages facing new threat URDU is passing through difficult times today. Usually it is nations, groups and economies etc. which invite such comments. Thanks to our apathy towards languages and ‘globalization’ our fears are not misplaced. How strange that so long as the colonial rulers were lording our destiny our languages did not appear to be snapping their ties with their ‘classical’ mainspring. Quite a good number of students were encouraged to take Persian or Arabic as one of the optional languages in the post-primary stage of their education. Most of my seniors took delight in registering themselves as the students of Persian or Arabic. The names of Rudaki, Hafiz, Saadi, Maulana Rume, Iraqi and Omar Khayam were on their lips as the hard-earned acquisitions — and not as the crumbs of the left-over ‘feast’ of culturally well-groomed elders of today. Alas, this feast is also going to be over. It is already finished in many areas. As regards the western inputs into our upbringing the story is not also very different. Of late the Humanities have suffered a horrible retreat in our country and the students joining Engineering, Medicine, Information Technology and Sciences have been made to feel as if there is nothing worthwhile in Humanities for them. How could a young man being cast in the image of a robot, completely insulated against the liberal culture. Read the names of the giants of liberal culture, with a nod of respectful familiarity. Instead there is always a yell when the icons of liberal culture are invoked in: “God save us from this ‘heavy’ stuff. When noise replaces music and variety shows usurp the place of ‘drama’ anything is possible. ALL LANGUAGES Almost all the Pakistani languages, because of the severance of their ties with their support language — that being Persian in our case — are not being well taught. It is becoming difficult for our students to pronounce words with correct accent for loss of familiarity — let alone proficiency — with the classical mainspring. Those who are teaching languages and literatures — don’t know what to do. All the words having Persian or Arabic roots are on the verge of acquiring comic intonations. For me and all those who are interested in the health of our languages and literature it is a dangerous situation. The day before I saw students of the Post-Graduate level being made fun of. They were not able to read any of the couplets of Ghalib simply because they had not learnt to pronounce words with Izafats (Vowels). This made the demonstration so hilarious that it could be treated a slapstick comedy scene in which students were bowing and rising with intermittent jerks because there was in their psyche an alarm like buzzer suggesting them in confidence that they were torturing Ghalib. Now what should a teacher do — lecture on the poetry of Ghalib — or teach his students basics — the foremost being the recitation of a couplet correctly. I believe that the situation should not be different in the departments of other Pakistani literatures. There is hardly any Pakistani language which does not require a good working knowledge of Persian as a pre-requisite. Perhaps the situation is not going to improve because the new breed of teachers is not going to be very different from their students. The scene is so grim that may be in ten years time our educational institutions will not be teaching languages altogether and the language teaching which we knew to be a fact of life in our childhood days will, perhaps, be left to parents, but what about parents whose knowledge of their languages will be suspect. The deluge! I believe that our country is going to score yet another ‘first’ — a country where indigenous languages will be dying of apathy sooner or later. Perhaps the principle of selection will take its toll here as well. We will not be subjected to marginalization of our languages by the international market forces; rather we will have killed our languages ourselves. Isn’t it worthwhile to note that the West underwent a great intellectual commotion in the 60s when Sir Charles Snow set the great Culture Debate with his book The Two Cultures. What a great battle it was on both sides of the Atlantic. Lionel Trilling took it up in the USA and F.R. Leavis and many others in the UK. The heated discussions took place and the consensus emerged that science without Liberal Arts and the Liberal Arts without Science would ruin the western culture. Now slowly and gradually the harvest of this dialogue is before us. We see a slow revolution taking place. Humanities and sciences — along with technologies — are jostling together. Now one is amazed to find that an electronics students in an American university is required to take a course of a foreign language and literature in each semester. The purpose is to prevent a professional from being a robot. What appears to be conceptually good has also turned out to be a wholesome product and The Two Cultures Debate has saved the West from turning culturally barren in the stampede for science and technology. In our country one Education Commission after another went on increasing lip service to the ideology — proving that this is to be a man-made stratagem along with accent on science and technology while ensuring that liberal education would turn us the proverbial idlers — poets and artists only. From the recommendations of the November 1947 Educational Conference to the latest — Higher Education Task Force deliberations it appears that we are, perhaps, already a country in the universal Literacy Club and that’s not the case, for sure. Alas we are turning our guns towards Higher Education forgetting that the base of the Primary Education is so weak that it could not bear the load of higher stories of the educations structure we are seeking to build for ourselves. Not only this we are a nation which has not been able to ensure the teaching of languages properly. This area needs utmost attention to say. The question is, therefore, posed to Federal and Provincial Ministries of Education and our legislators: Do we have any crash programme for saving our languages and the primary education programme saving our language? SLA’s SEMINAR ON LANGUAGES Prof Qasim Bughio, Chairman of the Sindh Language Authority arranged a seminar on the state of affairs obtaining in Sindhi and other languages of Pakistan in Hyderabad last week. I believe that the very idea of holding this seminar by a very important language authority of Pakistan should be applauded. Well before the globalization bogey surfaced its head a few years ago it was very much on the agenda of the lovers of languages — that quite a good number of languages were facing the danger of eventual marginalization. The market forces have their own plans for promoting languages which serve the market needs. It is, therefore, incumbent on the lovers of all languages to motivate the market forces within their regions to promote the languages of their market areas it should be a part of their overall advertisement revenue to lend a helping hand in promoting the languages. It is about time that the lovers of Urdu and the other languages of Pakistan should insist upon a slice of advertisement revenue from the advertisement agencies so that a joint forum be formed to save our languages on the futuristic lines. Let us hope that writers and linguists will be discussing the impending danger of marginalization. There is nothing to lose except some of our lethargy. 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