Why does the language issue seem intractable in so many parts of the world? The roots perhaps lie in the phenomenon of diversity, an undeniable fact of life that we don’t reconcile with. And we ever do, we do it grudgingly.

Interestingly, we all have experience of diversity in the world of nature we live surrounded by. We in fact flaunt the diversity around us as a natural gift, a priceless asset. The greater the diversity the bigger the sense of pride. Which region is projected as more richly attractive and attractively rich? That which offers a greater sight of diverse forms of life. If a region is a habitat of a large number of birds, it’s considered most livable. If a region is a wildlife sanctuary, it is most prized because of its organic links with nature. A large array of topographic features of a region makes it dazzlingly enchanting. In a nutshell, the diversity around us is an unmatchable source of material, emotional and spiritual richness without which healthy human life is hardly conceivable.

Frighteningly, such a significantly unique and all-encompassing experience of diversity fails to inspire us when it comes to the linguistic diversity found in the social domain. Linguistic diversity in the human world is as inescapable as bio-diversity in the natural world. But in the former, we treat it as unnatural while in the latter we take it for granted. The speakers of a language take a different language not spoken by them as unpleasant, odd, even weird. Each linguistic group treats the others in a similar manner resulting in an ugly spectacle of all against all.

We miserably fail to discern that linguistic diversity is an ad infinitum source of richness. This attitude largely stems from our failure to discover the structural commonality that underpins all human languages and the universality of the workings of the human mind shared by all humans belonging to separate races, cultures and regions.

What we fail to recognise even today with all our accumulated knowledge was clearly stated way back in time by the Bible but in a mythopoetic fashion. The linguistic diversity considered a source of power could threaten God. This is what the Book says about the Tower of Babel: “…As people moved eastward, they found a plain in Shinar and settled there… Then they said, ‘come, let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches the heavens, so that we make a name for ourselves; otherwise we will be scattered over the face of the whole earth’. The Lord came down to see the tower and the city the people were building. The Lord said, ‘if as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan to do will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other’. So the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth”.

It’s not we are totally unaware of the power language is a sign of. We generally conceive it using subterfuge motivated by our primeval urges to be hegemonic. Each language group recognises the power of its own language to an extent that it tends to treat other languages, alien to it, as less expressive and poor. But at the same time, it acknowledges but obliquely the power of other languages by harbouring a visceral fear of them which is found in an unfriendly and at times hostile reaction towards them.

In a retaliatory response a language group especially the one otherwise dominant tries to enforce its cultural hegemony over others either by imposing its language on them or relegating theirs to non-public spaces or by both. Take the example of Arabic. When Arabs appeared on the stage of history fired by their new faith Islam, the Arabic language, the epitome of their power, eliminated so many ancient languages spoken in Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Palestine. In recent history, Turks in their brutal repression of Kurds confined the use of Kurdish to the homes and inner spaces of its speakers.

The stance of the Pakistani state regarding its historical languages though less harsh isn’t qualitatively different; it takes, quite erroneously, the existence of peoples’ languages as a threat to its ill-conceived monolithic notion of national unity and social cohesion. In doing so it commits the folly of taking Pakistani society as an abstraction onto which it tries to graft languages imported from the West and the Gangetic plains of India in the colonial era in the 19th century.

Our intellectually underdeveloped ruling elite, a protégé of colonialism, has developed the habit of denigrating invaluable historical assets produced by our long history in the name of rootless nationalism. It thinks that regions that form Pakistan are “like rubbish bins waiting for something to be put into them”. No sir, they are not. They are living organisms with a glorious past. They gave birth to Pakistan. So treat them as what they are; parents. Their languages have a longer history than that of English and Urdu. When the elite denies the Pakistani languages their legitimate rights, it, in reality, denies itself what could make it literate and cultured. But with its philistine attitude, it seems incapable of realising the intellectual loss it has incurred due to its ill-founded hostility towards peoples’ languages and cultures that would make us a rooted society with a past as glorious as that of Egypt and Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq). But how can the alienated power wielders, slaves to the dictates of colonial legacy, realise the value of what is indigenous if they don’t feel weighed down by the bizarre hollowness of gratuitous borrowings? So the struggle must continue for the restoration of rights of peoples’ languages that have been denied for so long. The people have nothing to lose but their silence. Happy Mother Language Day!

— soofi01@hotmail.com [Concluded]