The Language Nobody Priced

Punjabi is not being murdered. It is being marked down.
Sit for two hours in any Punjabi living room and you can watch three languages settle their accounts. The grandmother, parked by the stove, calms a fretful child in Punjabi. Her son, the moment talk drifts toward a government office, slips into Urdu like a man buttoning a pressed shirt. And the grandson, thumbs flickering, fishes English phrases out of his phone and lays them in his mother’s lap like small, shiny catches. One room, three tongues, three eras stacked on top of one another.
We usually narrate this scene as a funeral. The language is dying, mothers have grown careless, the young no longer care. It is a comfortable story because it comes with culprits, and every culprit is sitting at the dinner table. It is also wrong. Nobody marched against Punjabi. It was simply never given a price.
The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu argued that every language trades in a market. A tongue that unlocks jobs, courtrooms and classrooms accumulates capital. A tongue that unlocks only affection stays poor, however fiercely it is loved. The cruellest feature is the consent. Nobody has to be forced. The speaker of the cheaper language learns to discount it herself. Bourdieu called this symbolic violence, and its signature is that the victim signs the receipt.
The market was not born; it was built, and we inherited the building. Ranjit Singh’s court ran on Persian while Punjabi lived in bazaars, at wells and in shrines. When the British annexed the province in 1849, administration and the courts moved, over the following decades, into Urdu. Punjabi got no official seat and no place on the school slate. Macaulay’s famous minute of 1835 had asked for a class of interpreters to stand between the rulers and the ruled. The rulers sailed home. The interpreting economy stayed, and the new state renewed the lease.
Which raises an uncomfortable question. In 1952, Bengalis died for their mother tongue. Punjabi is the mother tongue of nearly four in ten Pakistanis; Urdu, in the 2017 census, of about seven in a hundred. Why did the larger language raise no storm? Because the Bengali middle class saw its livelihood threatened by Urdu, while the Punjabi middle class found its livelihood sheltered by it. Tariq Rahman’s Language and Politics in Pakistan makes the case that Punjabi elites tied their fortunes to the state’s language, so Punjabi never became a political cause. It stayed a literary hobby, cherished in poetry circles and ignored in cabinet rooms.
Rahman’s Denizens of Alien Worlds maps the schooling that grew on top of this arrangement: English-medium for the elite, Urdu-medium for the middle, the madrasa for the poor. Punjabi is the language of instruction in none of them. It is the language you go home to, and the toll on a home language is always collected at the school gate.
So here is the shape of it. English is the key: it opens boardrooms, universities and departure lounges. Urdu is the uniform: it gets you through the door of the office, the court, the civil service. Punjabi is the hearth: the place where the tenant farmer, the labourer and the mother say what hurts. All of it stays by the fire and never travels to a desk. The picture is not airtight, since doors are forced and exceptions are plentiful, but the current runs one way.
Now to the question that matters: why do mothers stop speaking Punjabi to their children? Not out of betrayal. Out of arithmetic. Take one mother. She knows the admission interview will be in English. She has heard of a boy mocked for his village accent. The homework diary arrives in Urdu. So she does the sums, and moves her child to the side of the ledger that pays. The linguist Joshua Fishman observed that a language does not die when its last dictionary closes; it dies on the day the handover between generations breaks. The mother’s sums are correct. What is wrong is the market that forced her to do them.
Nor does the evidence favour the market. UNESCO concluded in 1953 that children learn best in their mother tongue, and seven decades later policymakers still receive the finding as news. The Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o called language a people’s collective memory bank, and took the consequences: he began writing his novels in Gikuyu. No one is asking Punjabis to abandon English or Urdu. The demand is smaller and harder: stop treating the mother tongue as something a child must be graduated out of.
And this is no thin language that deserves its fate. In the eighteenth century Waris Shah wrote Heer, a love story in which the cleric, the magistrate, the village council and the family all stand in the dock. Bulleh Shah and Shah Hussain asked questions about piety, identity and power that still sting. Filing a tradition that deep under “dialect” and keeping it out of the classroom is neglect wearing the mask of modesty.
The remedy lies in price, not sentiment. Article 251(3) of the Constitution already empowers provincial assemblies to legislate for the teaching, promotion and use of a provincial language alongside the national language. The power has sat in the Constitution like an uncashed cheque. Cash it. Let the first years of schooling happen in Punjabi, with Urdu and English introduced in careful stages. Let Punjabi reach the electricity bill, the land record and the government form, not just the poetry reading. Let a Punjabi novel, film or research paper earn a prize, a salary and a translator. None of this is cheap or quick. It needs textbooks that do not yet exist, teachers who were never trained, and an agreed teaching standard for the Shahmukhi script. But a language that cannot earn a living will not survive on devotion. Devotion is what we give to the dead.
Back in the living room, the grandmother is still talking. The boy listens, understands, and answers in English. On the day he answers in Punjabi, nobody will chant a slogan and nobody will recite an elegy. The price will simply have changed.
Languages do not need an enemy to die. It is enough that nobody will pay for them.