Pakistan: Language Situation

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Pakistan shares with India great internal linguistic diversity coupled with a prominent role for English as the elite language inherited from the colonial period. The establishment of Urdu as an authentic national language in keeping with the country's Islamic identity (which initially caused conflict with Bengali before the secession of Bangladesh) has been complicated by the continuing prestige of English, giving rise to a widespread hierarchical triglossia of English, Urdu, and local languages. In Sindh, the identification of Urdu as the mother tongue only of Muslim immigrants from India has caused local conflict with Sindhi, the best established of the several regional languages.

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Christopher Shackle (b. 1942) has been Professor of Modern Languages of South Asia at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, since 1985, and was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1990. He has published extensively on the modern languages and literatures of Pakistan and northwest India. His books that deal with language include The Siraiki language of Pakistan: a reference grammar (London: SOAS, 1976), An introduction to the sacred language of the Sikhs (London: SOAS, 1983), Hindi and Urdu since 1800: a common reader (London: SOAS, 1990, with R. Snell), and A Guru Nanak glossary (New Delhi: Heritage, 1995).
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