Language Research

Pakistan is, generally speaking, linguistically heterogeneous and no single language can be said to be common to the whole population.

Urdu is the youngest of the nation's languages and is not indigenous to Pakistan; it is very similar to Hindi, an official language of India. Although the two languages have a common base, in its literary form Urdu emphasizes words of Persian and Arabic origin, whereas Hindi emphasizes words of Sanskrit origin. Urdu is written in a modified version of the Persian script (written from right to left), whereas Hindi is written in the Devanagari script from left to right.

The 1956 Constitution prescribed the use of English for official purposes for 20 years, and the 1962 Constitution made the period indefinite. The 1973 Constitution, however, designated a 15-year transition period to the Urdu language, after which English would no longer be used for official purposes. Urdu is the mother tongue of only a small percentage of the population of Pakistan; however, it is taught in the schools along with the respective regional language. It originated during the Mughal period (1526- 1858) and it literally means “a camp language”, because it was spoken by the imperial Mughal troops from Central Asia as they mixed with speakers of the local dialects of northern India. Increasingly, elements of Persian, the official language of the Mughal administration, were incorporated. Ultimately Urdu attained its stylized, literary form in the 17th and 18th centuries. The Devanagari script (used for Sanskrit and contemporary Hindi) was never adopted; instead Urdu has always been written using the Persian script. These two literary languages, Urdu and Hindi, arose from colloquial Hindustani, the lingua franca of modern India before partition.

Although Urdu is the official national language, it is spoken as a native tongue by only 8% of the population. Urdu symbolizes Muslim's shared identity and serves as a link among the people of Pakistan. After independence, the Muslim League (as the All-India Muslim League was usually referred to) promoted Urdu as the national language to help a new Pakistan state develop an identity, even though few people actually spoke it. However, because many of the elite were fluent in English, English became the de facto national language. The pressure to elevate Urdu was unpopular in East Pakistan, where most of the population speaks Bengali (officially referred to as Bangla in Bangladesh since 1971). Language riots in Dhaka occurred in the early 1950s, leading to the elevation of Bengali as a second national language with Urdu until the secession of East Pakistan in 1971, when Bangladesh became independent and Bangla was designated the official language of the new country.

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