{"title":"The ambivalent role of Urdu and English in multilingual Pakistan: a Bourdieusian study.","authors":"Hina Ashraf","doi":"10.1007/s10993-022-09623-6","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>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.</p>","PeriodicalId":46781,"journal":{"name":"Language Policy","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.4000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8939399/pdf/","citationCount":"5","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Language Policy","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s10993-022-09623-6","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"EDUCATION & EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 5
Abstract
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.
巴基斯坦是组成南亚的八个国家之一，拥有超过2.122亿人口，是仅次于中国、印度、美国和印度尼西亚的世界第五大人口大国。它还拥有世界上第二大穆斯林人口。Eberhard等人(Ethnologue: languages of world, SIL International, 2020)报告了巴基斯坦人使用的77种语言，尽管只有两种官方语言是乌尔都语和英语。1947年从英国殖民统治下独立后，该国在2009年从单一语言乌尔都语转向多语言教育政策时经过了深思熟虑。这需要从主流的乌尔都语政策(英语专门为精英机构保留)转变为一个渐进的、有希望的变化，以响应不断增长的社会对英语的需求，并将地区语言纳入课程。然而，英语和乌尔都语在目前的政策中占主导地位，在教育中排除了区域非主导语言，这些语言本身是动态的和不稳定的，并且由于该国事实上的多语言和多语言储备而不断重组。引用布迪厄的《实践理论大纲》，剑桥大学出版社，剑桥，1977a，《语言交流经济学》。《自然科学通报》16(2)，生境与场域概念的起源。社会批判(社会批判2:11-24,1985，语言与符号权力，剑桥，1991)的习惯概念化，本研究分析了2002-2009年和2018-2020年在巴基斯坦一家主要英语日报上发表的致编辑的信件。分析揭示了信件中讨论的语言倾向及其通过市场力量的重组，展示了语言政策话语与公众愿望之间的连续性。研究结果还表明，在民族主义意识形态、现代性和身份认同方面，人们对乌尔都语和英语的矛盾心理。
期刊介绍：
Language Policy is highly relevant to scholars, students, specialists and policy-makers working in the fields of applied linguistics, language policy, sociolinguistics, and language teaching and learning. The journal aims to contribute to the field by publishing high-quality studies that build a sound theoretical understanding of the field of language policy and cover a range of cases, situations and regions worldwide.
A distinguishing feature of this journal is its focus on various dimensions of language educational policy. Language education policy includes decisions about which languages are to be used as a medium of instruction and/or taught in schools, as well as analysis of these policies within their social, ethnic, religious, political, cultural and economic contexts.
The journal aims to continue its tradition of bringing together solid scholarship on language policy and language education policy from around the world but also to expand its direction into new areas. The editors are very interested in papers that explore language policy not only at national levels but also at the institutional levels of schools, workplaces, families, health services, media and other entities. In particular, we welcome theoretical and empirical papers with sound qualitative or quantitative bases that critically explore how language policies are developed at local and regional levels, as well as on how they are enacted, contested and negotiated by the targets of that policy themselves. We seek papers on the above topics as they are researched and informed through interdisciplinary work within related fields such as education, anthropology, politics, linguistics, economics, law, history, ecology, and geography. We particularly are interested in papers from lesser-covered parts of the world of Africa and Asia.
Specifically we encourage papers in the following areas:
Detailed accounts of promoting and managing language (education) policy (who, what, why, and how) in local, institutional, national and global contexts.
Research papers on the development, implementation and effects of language policies, including implications for minority and majority languages, endangered languages, lingua francas and linguistic human rights;
Accounts of language policy development and implementation by governments and governmental agencies, non-governmental organizations and business enterprises, with a critical perspective (not only descriptive).
Accounts of attempts made by ethnic, religious and minority groups to establish, resist, or modify language policies (language policies ''from below'');
Theoretically and empirically informed papers addressing the enactment of language policy in public spaces, cyberspace and the broader language ecology (e.g., linguistic landscapes, sociocultural and ethnographic perspectives on language policy);
Review pieces of theory or research that contribute broadly to our understanding of language policy, including of how individual interests and practices interact with policy.
We also welcome proposals for special guest-edited thematic issues on any of the topics above, and short commentaries on topical issues in language policy or reactions to papers published in the journal.
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