The Language Of Power And The Language Of Respect

Capstone. Think of the languages you switch between in a normal Pakistani day. Punjabi or Pashto or Sindhi or Balochi at home with a grandparent. Urdu with a sibling. English with a teacher who insists on it. A mix of Urdu and English, what we call Roman Urdu, with friends on WhatsApp. Maybe Arabic in prayer. The average young Pakistani is fluent in three to four languages, half-fluent in another, and completely unaware that this makes her unusual. In London or Boston this would be a celebrated CV line. In Lahore, it is invisible because everyone has it.

Each language opens a door and closes another. English with a Karachi tech client opens the door to a hundred thousand rupee project. The same English at a wedding in Faisalabad will close the door to a real conversation with a great-uncle who mistakes it for arrogance. Punjabi at the same wedding opens his heart immediately. The skill is not picking the strongest language; it is picking the right one for the room. This is called code-switching. Linguists have studied it for fifty years. Pakistani aunties have been doing it on the phone since 1972.

Roman Urdu is its own beast. It is the lingua franca of Pakistani twenty-somethings on WhatsApp, on Instagram comments, on company Slack channels. It is fast, intimate, and very flexible. It is also a trap, because it is fine for friends and unprofessional for clients. Train your thumbs on a simple rule. Friends and family, Roman Urdu is welcome. Anyone you want to charge money or work for, real Urdu in nastaliq if it is an Urdu speaker, real English if it is an English speaker. Mixing the two on the same screen is a habit that can cost you a contract.

There is a deeper question under all of this. When does English become the language of power and when does it stay just a tool. The answer is never simple, but here is a useful guide. English is the language of power when it is used to make others feel small. English is just a tool when it is used to get a piece of work done with a person across an ocean. Iqbal could read Goethe in German and Hafiz in Persian. He never used a foreign language to make a Punjabi farmer feel less. The mark of a real polymath is not how many languages they collect; it is how few people they make small with them.

Closing of the track. The first lesson asked you to count the English words you already knew. The last lesson asks you to count the languages your tongue carries. Both lists are bigger than you think. The work is not to add a new language; it is to use the languages you have with care, with respect, and with the right ear for the room. A man who can welcome a Karachi client in clean English at noon and his nani in Punjabi at the door at six is not impressive because he speaks two languages. He is impressive because he keeps both rooms intact. That is the goal. Khudi in many tongues, mahaul in every room.