Lost in Translation: How Language Policy Is Eroding Pakistan’s Mother Tongues

Ask a Pakistani child which language her grandmother sings to her in, then ask which language she reads at school. For millions of children the answers differ, and that gap owes more to language policy than to any single document.

Seventy languages, two in the system

Pakistan has between seventy and eighty languages, depending on how they are counted. In practice the state behaves as though it has two. Urdu is the national language and English is the language of power, while Punjabi, Sindhi, Pashto, Saraiki, Balochi, Shina and the rest are treated as languages for the home, to be spoken in the kitchen and rarely taken into the classroom, the court or the office.

This was not an accident. Soon after independence, Urdu was chosen to bind a new and diverse state, although it was the mother tongue of only a small part of the population, and it still is: fewer than one in ten Pakistanis speak it first, according to recent census figures. English remained the language of the courts, the bureaucracy and the elite. The cost of that choice appeared early. On 21 February 1952, police fired on demonstrators in Dhaka who were demanding that Bengali be recognised as a state language, and the language movement became one of the first fractures between the country’s two wings. Pakistan’s own history had already shown that a state cannot secure loyalty by sidelining the language its citizens speak. The lesson has been slow to sink in.

Promises on paper

Article 251 of the Constitution declares Urdu the national language and required arrangements for its official use within fifteen years of the Constitution coming into force in 1973. It also allows a provincial assembly to legislate for the teaching, promotion and use of a provincial language alongside the national one. Neither promise has been fully kept. In 2015 the Supreme Court, in Kowkab Iqbal v. Government of Pakistan, directed federal and provincial governments to implement Article 251 without further delay, yet English still dominates examinations, courts and boardrooms. Regional languages, meanwhile, receive festivals, poetry evenings and the occasional speech on Mother Language Day. What they rarely receive is a place in the classroom.

Where the damage is done

The classroom is where the policy turns into a personal cost. A six-year-old who speaks Punjabi or Pashto at home arrives at school and is handed a book in a language she barely follows. She learns to memorise instead of to think, falls behind, and in too many cases leaves. Estimates of how many Pakistani children are out of school are disputed, running from roughly five million on recent household survey data to the 25 to 26 million long cited by officials, but every estimate is in the millions, and a school that does not speak a child’s language is poorly designed to keep her.

UNESCO has made this argument for decades. Its Global Education Monitoring team reported in 2025 that about 40 per cent of the world’s population lacks access to education in a language they speak or understand, and that the gap in reading between learners who do and do not speak the language of instruction at home widened from 12 to 18 percentage points between 2010 and 2022. International Mother Language Day, which UNESCO proclaimed in 1999 and which is observed every 21 February, commemorates the very movement that began in what was then East Pakistan. We mark the day, yet we have not absorbed its message.

The state is not the only actor

It would be unfair to place the whole burden on the state. Parents make difficult but rational choices. If English means a better school and a better job, why keep speaking Burushaski or Khowar at home? The trouble is that a language can be lost between one generation and the next, first from the kitchen and then from memory. UNESCO classes Burushaski and Khowar as vulnerable, and several other languages of the northern valleys, including Gawar-Bati, Torwali, Domaaki and Kalasha, as definitely or severely endangered.

A language carries a way of seeing the world, and when it disappears that view goes with it. A system that recognises only two languages also sends a quiet message to millions of citizens: who you are matters less than who you may become.

A better model

None of this is an argument against Urdu or English. Both are essential. The workable path is mother-tongue-based multilingual education, in which a child begins learning in the language she speaks at home and Urdu and English are added gradually rather than imposed at once. Versions of the approach have been adopted in Nepal, India, the Philippines and South Africa, with results that depend heavily on teacher training and learning materials, which is precisely why those must come first.

For Pakistan, that means four practical steps: training teachers in local languages, printing early-grade reading materials in them, giving provinces the means to use the authority Article 251 already grants them, and supporting communities to document their languages while the last fluent speakers are alive.

Unity and diversity are not in conflict. Making people feel identical breeds resentment, while making them feel respected builds belonging. The mother tongue is not a problem to be solved. It is the place from which a child can begin to learn, and the means by which a heritage is passed on. A child taught in the language of her grandmother’s songs should not have to choose between belonging and learning.

Opinion pieces reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily an institutional position of PIVRA.