Bilingualism and The World

Mankind’s uniqueness in the animal kingdom boils down to one attribute: his ability to transmit from generation to generation everything that his species has learned in its entire existence on earth – that is, he has culture, the cumulative experience of his past. And there is nothing else the culture is more dependent on than our capacity for language: the ability to communicate ideas and thoughts through verbal and written gestures.

But more importantly, while animals roam in herds unconnected with other of their own kind, man has developed a system whereby he can adapt in a totally alien culture by continuing to communicate in the language of that culture. Not only has natural selection has conferred us with the ability to speak; we can do so in as many linguistic systems as we want to.

As was said explained in the beginning of his report, more than two thirds of the world’s population is bilingual. The prevalence of multilingualism in a society or nation is unrelated to its economic ranking. Clearly, the myths and fears that exist in this world with regards to bilingualism (and multilingualism) are worth shattering: as has been demonstrated in this paper, the goods of bilingualism clearly outweigh all possible costs.

While Pakistan is a developing country, the level of linguistic diversity here is astonishing. As the economy continues to modernize with major population shifts from rural to urban areas, people from remarkably different ethnic backgrounds (Punjabi, Sindhi, Balochi, Pashto etc) adopt Urdu, the national lingua franca, in order to assimilate with the burgeoning classes. Yet in Pakistan, the language spoken by a person has become his class identity marker: provincial languages are spoken by peasants in rural areas, urban middle  and working classes speak Urdu, while the elite has hung on to English, the language of their former colonial masters. So rather than becoming bilingual, people let go off their mother tongues as they move up the social ladder. Forgoing one’s mother tongue to indicate a change in economic status is of course a display of inferior complexes.

Fortunately, in recent years this trend has taken a change for the better. Although class divides have remained un bridged with the increase in poverty, linguistic differences have begun to subside, at least among the urban elite and the middle classes, if not in the entire population. The advent of globalization, the flourishing network of private English medium schools, the internet boom, the expansion of cable TV, establishment of free private media enterprises and the social media has led to the unconscious nurturing of a new lingua franca that is amalgamating the vocabulary of English with that of Urdu. Code switching has not only become common but also very popular. Although what has been witnessed in the past 15 to 20 years is only the tip of the iceberg, Pakistan will soon turn into a melting pot for the ethnic & national languages and the international language, namely English.

Researchers argue that as rural areas will continue to industrialize at a faster pace in the future, the prosperity of industrialization will also bring with itself a hodge-podge of English and Urdu. This mixed language is expected to take in vocabularies and structure of the local languages, and over time, may develop in to a completely new language all together.