PESHAWAR, Feb 24: Literary organisations have expressed concern over the ‘step-motherly’ attitude towards the regional languages and asked the government to initiate measures to preserve and promote the languages spoken in the Frontier province.

“About 30 languages of the NWFP are not being paid due attention, which has brought them on the verge of extinction,” experts said while speaking at a news conference here on Sunday.

Dr Adnan Gul of the Gandhara Hindko Board (GHB) and Khawaja Yawar Naseer of the Frontier Languages Institute (FLI) expressed concern over the plunging condition of the regional languages and demanded steps for their promotion.

They said the NWFP was a multi-ethnic and multicultural province, which was home to more than two dozen languages and several cultures, but the government was not paying any attention to the unprivileged languages and cultures.

“It is a source of concern for all of us and we want an end to this discriminatory policy,” said representatives of different languages from various areas of the province. They called for setting up a government-run institute that should carry out organised research on the native languages and work for their preservation and promotion.

Pointing to the low literacy rate in the rural areas of the province, the speakers said lack of arrangements to impart education at primary level in mother languages was a major reason for low literacy rate.

The language activists said that the NWFP government should take steps for introducing regional languages at elementary schools as research had proved that children picked up things easily when taught in their mother languages.

Expressing dissatisfaction with the present cultural policy, they said that it was not contributing to flourishing of all languages and cultures of the country. “We demand an effective cultural policy that should ensure unbiased promotion of all languages and cultures of Pakistan,” they stressed.

Deploring the absence of proper official statistics about the speakers of different languages in the NWFP, representatives of the cultural bodies urged the government to introduce the regional languages in the census form, scheduled for October this year, so that exact tally of the people should be identified.

“Proper knowledge of the population count of various ethnic communities will make their cultural, social and political development easy,” they added.

The GHB representatives complained that successive governments had always given a raw deal to the Hindko that was the second largely spoken language of the NWFP. They demanded of the government to establish forthwith Hindko Academy and Department for Hindko Studies at the University of Peshawar as decisions in this regard had already been taken in 1987 and 1995 respectively.

Speakers welcomed the United Nations decision to declare 2008 as the year of languages and urged the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) to reach out to the bodies that were working for preservation and promotion of languages and cultures without any official backing.