Muhammad Ali Khan is an applied sociolinguist working as a senior instructor at the Centre of English Language, Institute for Educational Development, Aga Khan University. He works at the interface of language policy, textbook research, critical discourse analysis, globalisation and English language teaching in Pakistan. Besides this he is a member of a multilingual research group run by Professor Ingrid Piller and Dr Kimie Takahashi of Australia; a Language, Ideology and Power research group run by Professor Norman Fairclough and Professor Ruth Wodak at Lancaster University, UK; National Council of Academics; Irtiqa Institute for Social Sciences, Pakistan; and South Place Ethical Society, UK.

Q. Your PhD research is in the area of language policy. Please tell us about it.

A. I am looking at the lived experiences of the language policy in a high school in Karachi in order to understand how individuals learn to live with language ideologies, which get played out in everyday language practices in an institution. The research project is motivated by the works of Professor Piller and Dr Kimie Takahashi, Stephen May, etc.

Q. Could you briefly tell our readers some of the findings of the study?

A. As it is in progress, there are no final conclusions at this stage, to be honest. However, some of the initial findings are that there is a huge gap between the stated language policy of the school and the language practices that the school validates through its events, procedures and functions.

The school’s language policy claims multilingualism; it promotes and validates English only. On the contrary students’ and teachers’ language practices are complex. I won’t pin down their linguistic practices as elite Bilingualism or neocolonialism but rather a move toward linguistic pragmatism. They make use of different languages in different parts of the school and at different events, times and with different interlocutors.

There is a clear case of linguistic hybridisation: frequent code-mixing is the dominant linguistic practices despite all the efforts made by the school to stop it. The school administration tries hard to promote linguistic purism within its portals: English only in English class and Urdu only in Urdu class. Though a majority of the school’s population is bilinguals who are making use of different languages there, it is condemned through promoting monolingual norms. The textbooks validate the monolingual norms and misleadingly present to children a monolingual world.

The language norms of the school exert pressure on the speakers of indigenous languages to give up their languages. There is little institutional support for maintaining and drawing on the linguistic diversity students and teachers bring to the school.

Individuals don’t see or hear the languages spoken at home in schools and in the textbooks. Instead children who are less proficient in dominant languages get fewer chances in school’s functions and programmes and this seems to instill beliefs that some languages are better than others.

Q. You have touched upon an important issue here. Can you tell us what is the impact of promoting linguistic purism on a child’s learning?

A. People generally treat languages as pure, separate stable systems with solid, fixed boundaries. They usually treat the mixing of two or more languages as non-pure linguistic behavior. Practitioners of bilingualism in Pakistan and elsewhere are socially constructed as neither teeter nor batair and one finds surprising rancor against such practices.

In other words monolingualism is taken as normal and desirable despite the fact that bilinguals are the majority of Pakistans’ population. It is advocated that it is efficient and economical to maintain monolingualism and that there is cause and effect relationship between the wealth of monolingual societies (Germany, Japan, US) and their monolingualism. Professor Ingrid and Dr Kimie’s work in Korea, Japan and Germany reveals how multilingual these states are and how multilingualism is thriving in there and that there is no causal connection between monolingualism and poverty.

Q. Do other countries of the world use bilingual books for teaching English?

A. I see textbooks as the most regulatory form of communication in a school setting. They offer mostly politically motivated discourse to young learners. As bilingualisms actually disrupt the boundaries between cultures, ethnicities and nations, it is perceived as a threat to these categories and therefore discouraged. Although we have instances of bilingual dictionary, grammar books etc., when it comes to textbook, it has to follow the tradition of monolingualism. English textbooks should be in English only. Urdu textbook must have Urdu only. Bilingualism in textbooks is mostly discouraged on nonlinguistic grounds.

Q. How do you see the language learning context of Pakistan?

A. Our colonisers have long gone. Therefore understanding policy through the lens of our colonial past only would cover up many socio-economic and political struggles going on in different classes, groups and segments of society. The former colonies have been independent for a long time now (50 or 60 years) and so what is happening in these countries today can no longer accurately be called “post-colonial”.

I think it is too naive to blame the colonisers for causing all the present-day wrongs and problems in the developing world.

They may have left their language behind, but that has transformed into many different varieties which have blended with the local languages and cultures and, as a result, have re-emerged with their own identities, flavors, strengths and weaknesses.

Unfortunately language policy and planning scholarships have tended to stress too much on making cause and effect relationship between colonial language policy and present day language problems based on partial reading of colonial language policy.

Recent scholarship on colonial language policy does not construct colonised people as passive utilisers or followers of colonial language policy as Man Friday but that they always had their interest in supporting, negotiating language policies of the colonisers. There are evidences that suggest that colonial policy was largely the outcome of financial parsimony than any other considerations.

I think we need to see language issues in the present global economic and political situation and it is of little importance to see language ideology with the help of abstract notions, ideas and metaphors of killer language which often mask the central issues of accessibility of powerful languages in the present times and the presence of other languages from the linguistic landscape of the world.

We need new understanding of what happens in a multilingual context such as ours in a fast globalising world. We also need to realistically examine the actual agency local actors and government possess while negotiating language policy with international in the current global socio-economic and political conditions.

Q. What are your views on the current language policy of Pakistan?

A. I really am skeptical about the stated language policy which presents complex language issues with a broad brush of categorising language as local, regional and national. The basis of such categorisations needs to be evaluated. On what basis such statues have been given? Who gets the privilege and who gets marginalised by such artificial categories? It is greatly a reflection of nationalistic ideology which emerged as the dominant language policy approach post second World War.

Though it had been implemented in a top-down manner by restricting the individual and group rights, it has witnessed the political outcome of such an approach in losing its eastern wing. The ideology of one nation one language has come to a logical conclusion in Pakistan and elsewhere. Multiple languages have existed and thrived in countries like India, Switzerland, Singapore, etc., which are regarded as multilingual, and they have not weakened the foundations of the nation. People get language options to choose which has never been the case in Pakistan. I believe institutional support to multiple languages with wider access to quality English language teaching in Pakistan will strengthen Pakistan.

The interviewer teaches Applied Linguistics at the Department of English, University of Karachi.