— Arif Waqar, linguist and broadcaster

January 5, 2014

The News on Sunday: In a recent column, Zia Mohyeddin wrote, “Language is the only reality I have…” that “I believe strongly that language enables people to become ‘humanised’: I am quite sure that one way of softening a society is to make it aware of its own language and the nuances of that language.” Do you agree with him? How is the language we use reflective of our culture?

Arif Waqar: The fact that you have asked me this question in a certain language, and I’m using the same tool of communication to answer it, shows that the importance of language cannot be overemphasised in any community or culture; but to say that language is the only reality around us, would be treading into the realm of philosophy, which may lead to highly abstract and, in the present context, useless theoretical discussion. For all practical purposes, however, language is a human product, created to communicate ideas to fellow humans.

The power of language to reflect culture and influence thinking is beyond doubt. It has long been established that the way we think and view the world is determined by our language. Some languages have one fixed expression to describe a concept; others have several words to express one specific concept or phenomenon. The famous Balochi poet (late) Ata Shad once told me that there are as many as 13 different expressions to describe a “cloud” in Balochi language, depending on the shape, size, colour and thickness of the cloud. Arabic language has famously countless words to describe a camel, a horse, or a sword. When we face the challenge of translating such compact expressions into English, we have to insert certain adjectives before the nouns: an aged camel, a battle horse, a double-edged sword, etc.

TNS: Is it true that the distance between high culture and that of common people is shrinking as a fruit of democracy and that is what we see happening to language all over? In that sense, would it be realistic to expect communities to hold onto words and expressions they no longer want?

Pakistan Film Censor Board has been quite strict, and with the recent exception of Waar, it has never allowed indecent language or vulgar gestures in a U certificate movie (suitable for all). Indian Censor Board has lately been quite liberal in this regard.

AW: Yes, the old division of high culture, middle culture, and low culture does not exist in its original form. Thanks to democratic processes and free media, all three cultures seem to be merging into one, all encompassing, pop culture. A popular television serial is watched with the same enthusiasm in Defence Colony and Mohalla Kaachupura. The language used in our TV plays is not textbook Urdu; it is highly influenced by local dialects on the one hand, and by the international lingua franca on the other.

TNS: Do you clearly see the language taking a direction of a certain kind after the invention of computer and then internet?

AW: Language is a social phenomenon and it does not develop in isolation. When technology imposes certain changes on the communication channels, language is directly affected. If we look at the present day teenage language, we see strange new terminology and telegraphic abbreviations, like 2 for to or two, btw for by the way, etc. The sentence structure is less than satisfactory and there is a general disregard for grammatical accuracy and stylistic finesse. Unfortunately, this casual attitude is now seeping into our everyday writing. Our emails are full of misspelled words and we hardly care about punctuation.

TNS: The language spoken in cinema has become bold and also bilingual/multilingual. Nowhere in the history of cinema did we ever find the use of swear words/expletives as freely as it is being done today. What could be the reason for this shift? Are we letting the language slip away or simply adopting the popular idiom?

AW: Realism is the real culprit. The debate of bad language in movies started with the advent of talking pictures in the late 1920s and the argument still goes on.

Pakistan Film Censor Board has been quite strict in this regard and, with the recent exception of Waar, it has never allowed indecent language or vulgar gestures in a U certificate movie (suitable for all). Indian Censor Board has lately been quite liberal in this regard, and swearing is rampant in all commercial ventures.

When Krishan Chandar, used the Urdu expression for “sister fu****” in one of his stories, or when Manto used some swear words in Thanda Gosht, there was a loud hue and cry in the press. Half a century on, these words have been accepted as natural and realistic. With the passage of time, movie critics will also take a lenient view of this language.

TNS: How has literature accepted the influences of the times in terms of language? Is Urdu literature free of influences?

AW: Pakistani Urdu happily embraced the local idiom and, interestingly enough, the pioneers in this field were two Punjabi journalists — Munnu bhai and Mansur Qaiser. They freely used Punjabi expressions in their Urdu columns and other semi-fictional writings. Ashfaq Ahmed meanwhile was doing the same linguistic experiment in radio, and later on, in TV plays. Mansha Yaad, Younas Javed, Hussain Shahid and others followed suite, and created wonderful fictional characters with regional flavour.

Abdullah Hussain is also from the province of Punjab but his literary training was all in English. His first novel Udaas Naslain is an interesting combination of English and Punjabi expression. No critic has come up with the linguistic analysis of this masterpiece yet.

Linguistically speaking, Mirza Athar Baig’s fiction is a unique experiment in Urdu literature, where highly sophisticated modern European ideas are described in the rustic idiom of Punjab, creating a distinct dialectic of its own.

TNS: Texting, twitter, Facebook, etc, has made the transfer of information speedy. Teenagers often use acronyms (ttyl, lol, tbh among the more popular ones) and in the process create a secret language understood by their circle of friends, most times leaving their parents agape! Has language become more casual than ever before? Your comment on this use of quick/slang/secret language as a consequence of social networking.

AW: We have a 7000-year-old legacy of the written word and a 700-year-old tradition of the printed word. Languages like Sanskrit, Latin, Greek and Hebrew had developed their grammatical structures and idiomatic regimes centuries ago. These classical languages served as authentic models for all modern languages in their development phases, but in the last years of the 20th century, we were face-to-face with a different kind development — old models were questioned in all fields of knowledge, classical descriptions of phenomena were declared lacking and, for a more accurate description of reality, radical theories like “relativity” and “quantum mechanics” were considered essential.

It was in this background that the structure, phenomenon, and purpose of human language were all challenged.

In fact, there is a reciprocal relationship between the human condition and language both in its descriptive and emergent sense. Language in its descriptive mode very often encounters unprecedented changes in human condition and tends to fail in its function. These are precisely the phases in cultural evolution when new linguistic forms and practices emerge. These unorthodox discourses in their turn further reshape the human condition, creating new problems for the ubiquitous relation between world and the word. This interesting situation has, however, become understandably quite dramatic through the ‘communication revolution’ of the 20th century; a remarkable result of the so called digital/computational revolution. The ‘how to say’ and ‘what to say’ have become strangely messed up. The new cyber space lingo, however, is not only going to survive but ultimately respectable literature will also be adopting it, though in a far more creative manner.

Today, the young generation is least bothered about any sanctity associated with the language structure. They have hardly any interest in the syntax or morphology of their language, all they want is to communicate with fellow humans, and if this purpose is achieved through their ungrammatical text messages, they are more than happy.

TNS: An increasing number of Pakistanis are giving up their language, say Urdu, by choice; believing that it has no future and that they will acquire little if they learn and write in local languages. English is all popular. You think this is an ominous sign, that we are abandoning our language? What’s the future of Urdu?

AW: The future of Urdu is bleak. It will survive as a cultural language. We will see it on television and in movies, but as a medium of instruction it has no future. The same is true about our regional languages, but we must not forget that our variety of English will be different from British or American English. It will derive vocabulary from Urdu, as well as from our provincial dialects. ‘Indian English’ is already a recognised category among linguists and pedagogues, but it is mainly influenced by the Bengali idiom, whereas the future Pakistani English will draw heavily on Punjabi linguistic ethos.