A national language policy reflects how a state looks at the languages used by its people. It assigns certain roles to languages, and addresses the issues of language education and language of education. Pakistan, a multilingual country, has yet no language policy at national level. This absence of policy has caused many issues, including the…

Background: Pakistan inherits a multilingual heritage. Along with Urdu, 70 different languages are spoken. The 1973 Constitution officially recognizes Urdu as Pakistan's only national language. Purpose: Until today, the adoption and promotion of Urdu as a medium of educational instruction has remained a point of controversy. Existing research…

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…

The current research aimed at comparing the language attitude of the Pakistani youth towards English, Urdu and Punjabi in a linguistically competitive environment. These languages play significant role in the country and are important in their own way. The objectives of the current research were to explore the integrative and instrumental…

The study proposes that Critical Multilingual Language Awareness (CMLA) can be deployed as a productive theoretical construct for scholarly activism in a country such as Pakistan where multilingualism and linguistic diversity have historically been seen as problems than assets in education. We illustrate that such activism can transform…

The present study was designed to explore the situational variables and their interaction determining the willingness to communicate (WTC) in English (L2) of six postgraduate business students in a university classroom in Pakistan. While much research has been undertaken to examine trait-like psychological antecedents, only a few studies have…

This paper analyses some key historical developments (from early twentieth century to present) in Bangladesh from a socio-historical and language ideological perspective to explore the social injustice faced by the non-dominant and linguistically diverse population. These developments sparked language debates involving questions of identity,…

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents…

Children and young people from migrated families often learn host languages faster than their parents might do, and from very young ages they help their parents, families or community members by translating or interpreting, known as child language brokering (CLB). Language brokers need to mediate with different languages in different contexts and…

This study examines the language practices in educational settings in Pakistan, taking the multilingual groupings in society into account. In Pakistan, each province is linked to the single or multiple identities of its people and the languages spoken by the majority. The national language Urdu is limited to educational settings and its function…

The study aimed to explore the indigenous language of Gujjar and Bakerwal tribal communities of district Ganderbal of Jammu and Kashmir, India. The design of the study is qualitative in nature. The researcher employs purposive sampling in selecting the sample. The researcher surveyed 81 Gujjar and Bakerwal households and interviewed 22 (19 Male…

This qualitative case study was aimed to investigate the notions of power and hegemony in research consultations around the construct of language ideologies. The study employed purposive sampling by selecting two MS (Education) research supervisees with their supervisors. It identified a social wrong of power and hegemony in research supervision…

The question of script was paramount in the nineteenth-century debate over Hindi and Urdu, two closely related languages that are characterised by "extreme digraphia". Rather than rehearsing the well-known story of the culturally and politically charged process of differentiation in which the two sister languages became prime markers of…

In Pakistan where different languages co-exist, and where English has a high status as a second language (L2), the learners' attitudes toward English plays an important role in formulating effective language policies. It is essential that these policies reflect these attitudes and are in sync with the learners' orientations toward learning…

Pakistan is a multilingual and multiethnic country; however, this diversity stands unrecognized in the formal language-in-education policies. Estimates suggest that about 90% of children who speak over 60 indigenous languages do not have access to education in their mother tongues. Linguists estimate that exclusive teaching of Urdu and English…