A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF HEGEMONY OF LANGUAGES IN PAKISTAN

A SOCIAL CRITIQUE OF HEGEMONY OF LANGUAGES IN PAKISTAN Yusara Anwar University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia / Nor Liza Ali University Technology Malaysia, Malaysia (Presented at the International Conference on Education in Mathematics, Science and Technology (ICEMST)) which took place on April 1-4, 2021, Antalya, Turkey, https://www.2021.icemst.com/ organized by International Society for Technology, Education and Science (ISTES)-http://www.istes.org) The pyramid of languages in the post-colonial territories as propounded by Melchers and Shaw in 2003 aptly reflects on the status of different languages in Pakistan. At the top is English, with its heritage as a colonial language. Then is the ‘national’ language Urdu which has nationalist value and spoken by the majority, in all the provinces, as a lingua Franca. At the bottom of this hierarchy are the regional languages which have several dialects and variations as one travels from one part of the country to the other. This hierarchy of languages has deeper repercussions enrooting stratification on the basis of social class and commodification of languages. In this paper, this claim is substantiated by semiotic analysis of a social media text−a one-minute amateur video clip that went viral on the Facebook in January 2021− in which owners of a high-end cafe in Islamabad mock their manager’s English. This analysis is further pleaded by the literature on critical approach to Language policy and planning (LPP). This critical approach can be traced back to the 1980s and to Tollefson’s book Planning Language, Planning Inequality in 1991 that endeavours to situate LPP as a part of ongoing conflicts between the elites and the common masses. He regards that the evolution of critical approach has widened its scope rendering it primarily sociocultural in nature dealing with the dynamics of status and prestige. Recently in 2018, Pérez-Milans and Tollefson recommended critical approach as a useful heuristic for analysis of LPP processes: English under globalization and class and hegemony. Thus stated, this research attempts to carry out a critical review of the Language Policies in Pakistan−both overt and covert−and their role in perpetuating a class based social system on the basis of access to linguistic resources and capital.