Pakistan - An unwelcome decision

By Dr Tariq Rahman

Newspapers and emails from Quaid-i-Azam University (QAU) inform me that the department of linguistics I established after twenty years of effort is being closed down. I do not know on what grounds the Syndicate of the University took this decision but the decision is wrong no matter what excuses were used to justify it. Let me tell the readers why so that the public may raise its voice against this attempt to kill linguistics at QAU.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is not the learning of any one or more than one language. This means that it should not be confused with literature, speculative myth-making and popular, unexamined views about language.

The British left us with a rich heritage of modern subjects but linguistics was not one of them since, by the 1940s, it had not entered the British universities. By the 1960s it was an established subject. India too introduced the new subject and now every Indian university worth the name has linguistics in some form or the other. Sri Lanka and Nepal too established departments of linguistics. The only prominent South Asian country which did not was Pakistan.

It was not for lack of trying though. Even in the 1960s Dr Anwar Dil and his wife Afia Dil set up a linguistics group and published articles on the subject. Unfortunately, no university paid any heed to their impassioned appeals to set up a department of linguistics. I returned with a PhD in English literature in 1985 and entered the University of Peshawar as an associate professor. Within one year I lost interest in the British novel, the subject of my doctorate, and started teaching the history of the English language. That is when my interest in linguistics developed.

In 1987, as professor and head in the newly established University of Azad Jammu and Kashmir at Muzaffarabad where I moved to for personal reasons, I had the chance of completely discarding literature and starting a new MA in Linguistics and English Language Teaching (ELT). The British Council happened to be promoting ELT so my colleagues were given scholarships to get degrees in that emerging subject from British universities. I myself was given the chance to obtain an MLitt in Linguistics from Scotland though I already had a Ph.D. Thus the first MA in linguistics started.

Though linguistics had been established, it was on a weak footing. First, most people thought it was nothing but a fancy name for English literature. Second, it was not recognised by the Public Service Commission which hired lecturers for colleges. As most of our graduates went for college lectureships they had to pose that they were qualified in English and not linguistics. Third, linguistics was still not part of any other university so far. No wonder that when I left AJK for Quaid-i-Azam University in 1990 they re-introduced some literary courses and put more emphasis on ELT. This diluted the component of linguistics but it helped place graduates in jobs.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It is not the learning of any one or more than one language. This means that it should not be confused with literature, speculative myth-making and popular, unexamined views about language.

Meanwhile, I made a proposal complete with course outlines and tentative budgets to establish a department of linguistics at QAU. Since the university is strong in biological, computer and social sciences, I thought it would be an ideal place for linguistics. My dream was that our students and faculty would do research on speech defects, probe the areas of the brain which control language and study animal communication systems. They would collaborate with the computer experts to create Urdu fonts, Urdu email and speech recognition programmes. After all, in MIT, Chomsky’s work was used in the fields of artificial intelligence and robotics.

In the social sciences there would be sociolinguistics, anthropological linguistics and the history of language etc.  But the road to the department was strewn with unexpected impediments. First, for some odd reason the university sent my proposal to the federal secretary of education though, in theory, he had no role in the affairs of QAU. He said that he agreed but a department was not to be established. Instead, a course should be introduced. The idea was that if the course became popular then more courses could be introduced. I pointed out that students do not take difficult courses if they can avoid them since they do not want to decrease their CGPA. Nobody agreed and the course, as I had predicted, failed to attract students.

At times there would be unregistered students but nobody wanted to risk failure by actually enrolling in the subject. At last, in 2010, the department of linguistics was finally established in QAU. I was not given the chance to run it though I offered my services free of charge but at least the department saw the light of the day and in a central, prestigious university.

By 2010, however, most universities introduced ELT and students shifted from English literature to this subject. It was a paying subject since everybody knew that students’ language skills were very deficient and the ELT people promised to improve them. Moreover, people went for TOEFL, GRE and British English proficiency examinations and these needed skills of writing and understanding English. Hence ELT was the rage of the day. What was most inexcusable was that some universities started calling their ELT programmes applied linguistics. Because of this legerdemain, nobody opted to start a genuine linguistics programme in our universities.

There were, however, some programmes with more linguistic components than others and individual academics, who did specialise in the subject, did supervise students in purely linguistic subjects. However, the kind of rigour one expects in the core linguistic disciplines i.e phonetics and phonology (how sounds are made and how they combine in different languages), morphology (how word are made), syntax (how sentences are made) and semantics (what is meaning) was missing.

It is not that there were no linguists in Pakistan at all. I know that from the 1990s onwards there were people like Drs Anjum Saleemi ( language acquisition), Raja Naseem (syntax), Babar S. Khan (syntax) and Sarmad Hussain (computational linguistics) to name a few. However, most of them only succeeded in teaching individual courses and supervising a few students. They did not get the chance to disseminate linguistics as a major university subject. Dr Sarmad did, however, get the chance to train many students in the practical field of creating Urdu fonts, emails and other computer applications. He is at the Al-Khwarizmi Centre of Language Engineering at the University of Engineering and Technology at Lahore and is probably the only example of a successful linguist doing research and teaching computational linguistics to students.

I am aware that there are other younger people but, since I have moved to other fields, I have not read their works and I cannot pass judgment on them. Note that I have not mentioned my name among linguists. This is not because of any false modesty. It is because I do not work on the core areas of linguistics mentioned above. I am a historian of language and a historian, whether of political events or language or ideas, uses the historical methods of research. Thus, my work should be counted in history not linguistics proper, though I have published some work on sociolinguistics, language planning and language politics.

My not being a linguist in my own eyes did not stop me from promoting the subject. My latest attempt was to set up an MA in it at the Beaconhouse National University in Lahore in 2012. Unfortunately, we got only two students and simply could not afford it any longer. Then, in 2014, we upgraded it to an M.Phil though I feel that linguistics is a new and difficult subject so students need a rigorous introduction to it of two years at least (our M.A in Pakistan is the nearest thing to a British BA degree). This continues and I hope it produces young people who are ready to study linguistics further.

But what will our graduates do for a living? First, they can join academia. If our universities establish departments of linguistics there will be openings for them. Second, there is need to teach linguistics in colleges and high schools. These will require convincing public service commissions and school authorities. This is a difficult task since these worthies are against such established subjects as history, literature, philosophy and sociology so one does not expect them to warm up to yet another social science.

Perhaps the idea that Pakistan needs developers of computer applications of languages, that we need language-planners, that we need surveys of language (the only ones we have are by foreigners) may work. The crucial point is that linguists have as many job opportunities, possibly more, than the graduates of any other social science. Moreover, in time we could also shift to the linguistic aspects of the biological sciences as we already have to the computational ones. But my personal reason for studying the subject — any subject for that matter — is intellectual curiosity. That is the intangible quality which creates new research and has brought progress to the world. To close down a department is like killing unborn research; one cannot think of greater harm to the cause of higher education. I hope the syndicate of QAU changes its decision and provides enhanced support to the department of linguistics instead of killing it.