The Supreme Court ordered on Tuesday the implementation of Urdu as the official language at all government departments, Express Newsreported.A three-member bench of the apex court headed by Chief Justice Jawwad S Khawaja announced its judgment over petitions seeking to adopt Urdu as the official language.Calling for an immediate implementation of Article 251, the Supreme Court issued nine guidelines for making Urdu the official language. According to Article 251, the national language of Pakistan is Urdu and arrangements shall be made for it being used for official and other purposes within fifteen years from the commencing day. In July this year, Pakistan confirmed a long-running rumour of dropping English as its official language and switching to its mother tongue, Urdu. The Court posits that the majority of the people don’t speak English, and to conduct business of the state they have to learn a foreign language, which causes difficulty. A valid point, but the fact remains that the majority of the people don’t speak Urdu either. Apart from a small urban minority and portions of Karachi, no one speaks Urdu as their native language. Balochi, Sindhi, Seraiki, Pushto, Punjabi and countless other languages are natively spoken by the majority of the people- are these going to now be imposed provincially too? Urdu is ill-suited to be an official language; there are simply no appropriate words to convey vast amounts of technical knowledge to another person. Adopting it now will cause delays in the normal functioning of the government. Think of all the keyboards that have to be converted to Urdu, the software requirements, the new terms that need to be translated, and the learning process of typing in Urdu. Just because we speak a language, does not mean it can lend itself to technical use. Translating advanced legal, scientific and medical terms into a language not designed for this purpose will lead to endless confusion, mis-translations and inefficiency. What is the Urdu translation of Random Access Memory (RAM)? What is the translation of ‘bypass surgery’? The world’s legal, medical and scientific journals are written in English, world leaders communicate in it, universities all over the world teach in it, and technological activities, such as coding, are carried out exclusively in it. Whether we like it or not, English is here to stay.
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