Ashraf Hina
Department of Linguistics, Georgetown University, Washington, DC USA.
Lang Policy. 2023;22(1):25-48. doi: 10.1007/s10993-022-09623-6. Epub 2022 Mar 22.
Pakistan, one of the eight countries comprising South Asia, has more than 212.2 million people, making it the world's fifth most populous country after China, India, USA, and Indonesia. It has also the world's second-largest Muslim population. Eberhard et al. (Ethnologue: languages of the world, SIL International, 2020) report 77 languages used by people in Pakistan, although the only two official languages are Urdu and English. After its Independence from the British colonial rule in 1947, it took much deliberation for the country to make a shift from its monolingual Urdu orientation to a multilingual language policy in education in 2009. This entailed a shift from the dominant Urdu language policy for the masses (and English exclusively reserved for elite institutions), to a gradual and promising change that responded to the increasing social demand for English and for including regional languages in the curriculum. Yet English and Urdu dominate the present policy and exclude regional non-dominant languages in education that themselves are dynamic and unstable, and restructured continually due to the de facto multilingual and plurilingual repertoire of the country. Using Bourdieu's (Outline of a theory of practice Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1977a, The economics of linguistic exchanges. Soc Sci Inform 16:645-668, 1977b, The genesis of the concepts of habitus and field. Sociocriticism 2:11-24 1985, Language and symbolic power Polity Press, Cambridge, 1991) conceptualization of habitus, this study analyzes letters to the editor published between 2002-2009 and 2018-2020 in a leading English daily of Pakistan. The analysis unveils the linguistic dispositions that are discussed in the letters and their restructuring through market forces, demonstrating a continuity between the language policy discourse and public aspirations. The findings also indicate the ambivalences towards Urdu and English in relation to nationalistic ideologies, modernity and identity.
巴基斯坦是构成南亚的八个国家之一，人口超过2.122亿，是仅次于中国、印度、美国和印度尼西亚的世界第五人口大国。它也是世界上穆斯林人口第二多的国家。埃伯哈德等人（《民族语：世界语言》，国际语言学会，2020年）报告称，巴基斯坦人使用77种语言，尽管仅有的两种官方语言是乌尔都语和英语。1947年从英国殖民统治下独立后，该国经过深思熟虑，于2009年从单语乌尔都语导向转向教育领域的多语言政策。这意味着从面向大众的主导乌尔都语政策（英语仅保留给精英机构），转向一种渐进且有前景的变化，以回应社会对英语以及将地区语言纳入课程的日益增长的需求。然而，英语和乌尔都语在当前政策中占据主导地位，在教育中排除了地区非主导语言，而这些语言本身具有动态性和不稳定性，并且由于该国事实上的多语言和多语能力储备而不断重构。本研究运用布迪厄（《实践理论大纲》，剑桥大学出版社，剑桥，1977年a；《语言交流的经济学》，《社会科学信息》16：645 - 668，1977年b；《惯习与场域概念的起源》，《社会批评》2：11 - 24，1985年；《语言与象征权力》，政体出版社，剑桥，1991年）的惯习概念，分析了2002 - 2009年以及2018 - 2020年期间在巴基斯坦一家主要英文日报上发表的读者来信。该分析揭示了信件中讨论的语言倾向以及它们通过市场力量进行的重构，展示了语言政策话语与公众期望之间的连续性。研究结果还表明了在民族主义意识形态、现代性和身份认同方面对乌尔都语和英语的矛盾态度。
