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Language Policy and Language Conflict

in Afghanistan and Its Neighbors


Brills Studies in South and
Southwest Asian Languages

Series Editors
John Peterson, University of Kiel
Anju Saxena, Uppsala University

Editorial Board
Anvita Abbi, Jawaharlal Nehru University
Balthasar Bickel, University of Zurich
George Cardona, University of Pennsylvania
Carol Genetti, University of California, Santa Barbara
Geoffrey Haig, University of Bamberg
Gilbert Lazard, CNRS & cole Pratique des Hautes tudes
Harold F. Schiffman, University of Pennsylvania
Udaya Narayana Singh, Visva-Bharati, Shantiniketan, India

VOLUME 2

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.nl/bssal


Language Policy and Language
Conflict in Afghanistan and
Its Neighbors
The Changing Politics of Language Choice

Edited by
Harold F. Schiffman

LEIDEN BOSTON
2012
Cover illustration: Afghanistan landscape and village, Band-e-Amir lakes and canyons, Bamyan
Province. Christophe Cerisier, 2010.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Language policy and language conflict in Afghanistan and its neighbors : the changing
politics of language choice / edited by Harold F. Schiffman.
p. cm. (Brills studies in south and southwest Asian languages; 2)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-90-04-20145-3 (hardback)
1. Asia, CentralLanguagesPolitical aspects. 2. AfghanistanLanguagesPolitical
aspects. 3. Language planningAsia, Central. 4. Language planningAfghanistan.
I. Schiffman, Harold F.

P119.32.A783L36 2012
306.44958dc23
2011037005

ISSN 1877-4083
ISBN 978 90 04 20145 3 (hardback)
ISBN 978 90 04 21765 2 (e-book)

Copyright 2012 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands.


Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Global Oriental, Hotei Publishing,
IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in
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Fees are subject to change.
CONTENTS

List of Maps ........................................................................................ vii


Preface ................................................................................................. ix
Acknowledgements ............................................................................ xi
List of Contributors ........................................................................... xiii

1. Afghan Languages in a Larger Context of Central and


South Asia ...................................................................................... 1
Harold F. Schiffman and Brian Spooner

SECTION I
AFGHANISTAN AND IRAN

2. Language Policy in Afghanistan: Linguistic Diversity and


National Unity .............................................................................. 31
Senzil Nawid

3. Locating Pashto in Afghanistan: A Survey of Secondary


Sources ........................................................................................... 53
Walter Hakala

4. Persian, Farsi, Dari, Tajiki: Language Names and Language


Policies ............................................................................................ 89
Brian Spooner

SECTION II
CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS OF THE
FORMER SOVIET UNION

5. Reversing Language Shift in Kazakhstan ................................. 121


William Fierman

6. Language Policy and Language Development in


Multilingual Uzbekistan .............................................................. 176
Birgit Schlyter
vi contents

7. The Fate of Uzbek Language in the Other Central Asian


Republics ...................................................................................... 208
William Fierman

SECTION III
THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER PROVINCE AND
PASHTO, PUNJABI, AND BALOCHI

8. Pashto Language Policy and Practice in the North West


Frontier Province ....................................................................... 263
Robert Nichols

9. A Vernacular for a New Generation? Historical


Perspectives about Urdu and Punjabi, and the Formation
of Language Policy in Colonial Northwest India ................. 282
Jeffrey M. Diamond

10. Balochi: Towards a Biography of the Language ................... 319


Brian Spooner

SECTION IV
PEDAGOGICAL RESOURCES AND CONCLUSION

11. Resources for the Study of Language Policies and


Languages of Afghanistan and Its Neighbors ....................... 339
Cynthia Groff

12. Conclusion ................................................................................... 354


Harold F. Schiffman

Index .................................................................................................... 359


LIST OF MAPS

Chapter 1 (Harold F. Schiffman and Brian Spooner)


1. Central and Southwest Asia ....................................................... 5

Chapter 3 (Walter Hakala)


1. Variations in the pronunciation of ...................................... 66
2. Distribution of major ethnic groups in Afghanistan ............. 67

Chapter 5 (William Fierman)


1. Kazakhstan and adjacent areas .................................................. 131

Chapter 7 (William Fierman)


1. Uzbekistan and adjacent areas ................................................... 211
2. The Ferghana Valley region ........................................................ 212

Chapter 10 (Brian Spooner)


1. South-Central and Central Asia where Balochi is spoken .... 333
PREFACE

In Afghanistan and the countries around it in Central Asia it is dif-


ficult to trace the historical process of language policy formulation,
or even events that suggest an awareness of relationships between
languages, back beyond the later decades of the 19th century at the
earliest. However, it is not possible to understand what has happened
since then without some knowledge of the earlier history. The situa-
tion is further complicated by the regime changes of the past three
decades: the Iranian revolution of 1978, the Afghan Putsch of 1978
and continuing warfare since then, the passage back and forth between
democracy and military rule in Pakistan, and the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991. As the result of a workshop held at the University of
Pennsylvania in December 2003, when a number of scholars presented
papers on language policy issues, focusing on topics as varied as 19th
century British policy in what is now Pakistan, Soviet and post-Soviet
policy in Central Asia and in Afghanistan, and Iran in the internet
age, a better picture is now available about what is official and explicit,
what is not official but is implicit or in general practice, and what
the likely future developments might be. Among these, orthographic
shift and reform is likely, as attempts to turn back the clock on Soviet
orthographic policy take various turns. What is very clear is that multi-
lingualism, whether it involves Persian, Russian, or English in addi-
tion to other languages, has always been a part of the scene, and will
probably continue to be.
The contribution of this collection of articles is an updated account
of language policy in the region, giving potential language learners a
clearer picture of the relative standing of various languages in relation
to each other, the resources that exist for learning them, and what is
still needed.
Finally, a note about fonts, scripts, place names and other nomen-
clature used by various authors in their contributions. Because of script
changes and orthography reforms, especially in the former Soviet Cen-
tral Asian republics, names used by one author may differ from usage
in that of another. This may occur because of having been transliter-
ated from one Central Asian script into Russian, then back into the
script (either Cyrillic, Arabic, or Roman) used in another. We have
made no attempt to standardize or reconcile these differences.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The editor of this volume is grateful to a number of sources for fund-


ing for a workshop held in December, 2003 devoted to the question
of languages and language policy in Afghanistan and its neighbors.
The South Asia Language and Area Center of the University of Penn-
sylvania provided the original funding, which was supplemented with
funding from the South Asia Language Resource Center, located at
the University of Chicago, and the Consortium for Language Teaching
and Learning, of New Haven, Connecticut, which helped pay for travel
support. The papers delivered at the workshop were eventually supple-
mented by other contributions from additional authors. It should be
noted that the material in the Introduction on the subject of diglossia
is based on earlier research by Schiffman entitled Diglossia as a Socio-
linguistic Situation. This appeared originally in Florian Coulmas (ed.),
The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1997,
and is used here with their permission. Funding for the preparation
of the index was provided by a grant from the Royal Swedish Acad-
emy of Letters. Also, the map of Central and Southwest Asia, and the
map of regions where Balochi is spoken were provided by Kimberly
Leaman of the University of Pennsylvania Museum.
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Harold F. Schiffman is Professor Emeritus of Dravidian Linguistics


and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests
focus on the linguistics of the Dravidian languages, especially Tamil,
and to a lesser extent, Kannada, and in the area of language policy.
He has published in these two areas where overlapping interests in
sociolinguistics (diglossia, language standardization, multilingualism)
intersect with language policy and the politics of language. He is
also director of the Consortium for Language Policy and Planning,
and recently finished a stint as Pedagogical Materials Director of the
National South Asia Language Resource Center. Recent publications
include Linguistic Culture and Language Policy (Routledge, 1996)
and A Reference Grammar of Spoken Tamil (Cambridge University
Press, 1999).

Jeffrey M. Diamonds research examines modern South Asian


social and intellectual history, including religious reform and Indian
responses to imperialism. He received his PhD from the School of
Oriental and African Studies (University of London) in 2002, and his
forthcoming book, Negotiating Muslim Identity: Education, Print and
Intellectuals in Nineteenth Century Colonial North India, examines
print, Islamic education, and religious identity in British India during
the later nineteenth century. Dr. Diamond has received grants and
awards from organizations that include the Fulbright Foundation, and
he held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Cornell University. Before
moving to his current position as Assistant Professor at the College of
St. Benedict/St. Johns University, he was Assistant Professor at the
College of Charleston, S. Carolina.

William Fierman, Professor of Central Eurasian Studies, Indiana Uni-


versity, is interested in questions of language policy and their relation
to broader political, social, economic, and social issues in the Soviet
Union and in the countries that emerged after 1991. He has published
on issues of corpus and status change in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan,
as well as other countries of Central Asia and Azerbaijan. Both in the
Soviet and post-Soviet eras he is interested in language and language
xiv list of contributors

policy as components of efforts to foster a sense of common identity.


For the post-Soviet era he views this as part of a broader set of poli-
cies in such areas as demography, religion, and land. He served for 11
years as the director of the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource
Center, and was founding director of the Center for the Languages of
the Central Asian Region.

Cynthia Groff completed her PhD in Educational Linguistics at


the University of Pennsylvanias Graduate School of Education. Her
dissertation, titled Language, Education, and Empowerment: Voices
of Kumauni Young Women in Multilingual India, is based on field
work conducted in North India. Her research interests include multi-
lingual education and language planning for linguistic minorities. She
is currently doing post-doctoral research with anglophone youth in
Qubec City through Universit Laval.

Walter N. Hakala, PhD (2010) in South Asia Studies, University


of Pennsylvania, is Assistant Professor of South Asian Languages and
Literature in the Department of English, University at Buffalo-SUNY.
His research is concerned primarily with the ways in which individuals
have participated in the Persianate literary cultures of northern India
during the later Mughal and early colonial periods. His current project
examines the long and complex history of Urdu lexicography and its
role in shaping and reflecting emerging forms of literary and political
discourse.

Senzil K. Nawid focuses her research on the political, social, and cul-
tural history of Afghanistan in the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Her book, Religious response to Social Change in Afghanistan: King
Aman-Allah and Afghan Ulama, 19191929 was published in 1999
and was recently translated into Dari. She has published a number of
articles and book chapters on Afghan history, language, and history
of Afghan women. Her most recent work, Afghan Women under
Marxism. was published as a book chapter in From Patriarchy to
Empowerment: Womens Paricipation, Movements, and Rights in the
Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia (ed. V. Moghadam) by
Syracuse University Press. She has taught courses on Persian language
and literature and the history of Central Asia at the University of
Arizona.
list of contributors xv

Robert Nichols is Professor of History at Richard Stockton College,


New Jersey. His research and teaching explore issues of interregional,
colonial, and modern history in South Asia and the Indian Ocean
world. His book Settling the Frontier: Land, Law and Society in the
Peshawar Valley, 15001900 (Oxford University Press) examines the
dynamic relationship between state-building empires and local com-
munities negotiating degrees of incorporation and autonomy. His book
A History of Pashtun Migration, 17752006 (OUP, 2008) follows Pash-
tuns from the Peshawar and Afghan border region as they circulate
and adapt to an expanding British Indian empire, nineteenth century
global economic forces, Pakistani national opportunities after 1947,
and global, especially Gulf, labor flows in the post-colonial period.
His other publications include the edited volume Colonial Reports on
Pakistans Frontier Tribal Areas (OUP, 2006) and the article Afghan
Historiography: Classical Study, Conventional Narrative, National
Polemic in History Compass, Oxford: Blackwell, 3 (2005) AS 141,
pp. 1-16.

Birgit N. Schlyter is Professor of Central Asian Studies at Stockholm


University, Research Fellow at the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters,
History and Antiquities, and Director of the Swedish Research Institute
in Istanbul. She lectures on Turkish (grammar, literature and transla-
tion), Central Asian Cultural History, and Central Asian Linguistics
including courses in Uzbek and other Turkic languages. Among her
works in Turkish linguistics are the monograph Case Marking Seman-
tics in Turkish (Stockholm, 1985) and the reference articles Turkish
Semantics Revisited, in Turkish Linguistics Today (Leiden, 1991) and
Turkey, on the language situation in Turkey and Turkish language
research, in An International Handbook of the Science of Language and
Society (Berlin, 2006). Her present main field of research is language
development and language policies in the Central Asian region; see,
e.g. works quoted in this volume. As Director in Istanbul Professor
Schlyter heads a research environment for studies in both the humani-
ties and social sciences related to territories comprising Central Asia,
the Caucasus and regions once included in the Ottoman Empire (www
.srii.org). Publications edited by her are among several others Return to
the Silk Routes: Current Scandinavian Research on Central Asia (Lon-
don, 1999) and Prospects for Democracy in Central Asia (Stockholm/
London, 2005).
xvi list of contributors

Brian Spooner teaches anthropology at the University of Pennsylva-


nia, where he is also Museum Curator for Near Eastern Ethnology and
Director of the Center for Globalization Studies in an Urban World.
He has done ethnographic research in Iran, Afghanistan and Paki-
stan, and published on traditional technologies and cultural ecology
(The Cultural Ecology of Pastoral Nomads (Addison Wesley, 1973);
and Ecology in Development (United Nations University Press, 1984),
as well as language and culture (Reading Nastaliq: Persian and Urdu
Hands from 1500 to the Present (Mazda Publications, 1995 and 2007),
with William L. Hanaway; and Persianate Literacy: Writing and the
Social Order, edited with William L. Hanaway (University of Pennsyl-
vanian Press, 2011 in press).
CHAPTER ONE

AFGHAN LANGUAGES IN A LARGER CONTEXT OF


CENTRAL AND SOUTH ASIA

Harold F. Schiffman and Brian Spooner

In a workshop held at the University of Pennsylvania in December


2003, a number of scholars presented papers on language policy issues
in Afghanistan and neighboring countries. They focused on topics as
varied as 19th century British policy in what is now Pakistan, Soviet
and post-Soviet policy in Central Asia, and in Afghanistan and Iran
in the internet age. Some of the papers presented at this workshop,
together with others commissioned or included since, have been
brought together in this volume in an attempt to provide a better pic-
ture of the current language situation in the area: what is official and
explicit, what is not official but implicit or general practice, and what
the future developments might be expected to entail. In editing this
collection we have adopted the position that language policy consists
not just in the official, explicit, de jure statements about language that
are found in constitutional provisions, laws, or administrative codes,
but also in the implicit, popular, unofficial, ad hoc usages and practices
that are empirically observable. That is, we are assuming there is always
some kind of language policy at workthe lack of official policy is not
the same as the absence of policy. The result is intended to provide an
updated picture of languages and language policy in the region, as well
as a clearer picture of what kinds of resources exist for those wishing
to acquire any of the languages, and what is still needed.
We also will attempt to determine which model of multilingual-
ism best characterizes the various multilinguistic relationships in the
area. The area in question is clearly multilingual, with no one language
exclusively dominating any of the polities; in Afghanistan in particu-
lar, none of the major languages are exclusive to that nation, but are
also used in various ways in other political units in the area.
In general, however, readers will find a clear focus on multi-lingual
conditions of the type that have been generally classified as diglossia
2 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

(Ferguson 1959). In this region, as a result of the accelerating speed of


sociolinguistic change over the past hundred years it might be more
useful to think in terms of shifting diglossias. The major languages
those that have acquired a tradition of literacyare in competition
with each other for cultural value, and the hierarchy of their differ-
ential evaluation continues to change. The H (high) and L (low)
varieties vie for preference, as political, religious and demographic
conditions change in the wake of British, Russian, and more recently
Soviet withdrawal, and capitalist, nationalist and Islamist encroach-
ment together with the progress of globalization.
Not only has the change in territorial borders, and in the tech-
nology of communication, with resulting change in communication
patterns, changed the way people think about their vernacular lan-
guages, but the underlying significance of various larger frameworks
of administrative and cultural literacy, in Persian (since the 9th cen-
tury), and in Russian and English (since the 19th), also continues to
change. Orthographic shift and reform1 is an issue that introduces an
additional complication. The prevalence of multilingualism and how
it is changing is another focus, whether it involves Persian, Russian,
or English in addition to local, or other emerging national languages.
In this introduction we review the history of Western and local think-
ing that continues to influence linguistic change in the region today,
at both the local and the international level. We ask readers not to be
too quick to translate the details into the terms they are familiar with
from linguistic study in other parts of the world, but to give priority
to developing a fuller regional picture.

1.1. The History of Afghan Language Study

The pioneer Western investigator of the languages of Afghanistan,


Georg Morgenstierne, who began his work in 1924, called Afghanistan
linguistically one of the most interesting countries on earth. Linguistic
work by local scholars began in the following generation. When one of
us [Spooner] first met Dr. A.G. Ravan Farhadi (the author of Le Persan
Parl en Afghanistan, 1953) in Kabul in 1972, he announced that in

1
For more on this issue, see the chapter by Schlyter, this volume.
afghan languages in a larger context 3

the latest count the number of languages known in Afghanistan had


reached 32 (see Farhadi 1970).
Any study of the languages of Afghanistan must take into account
a number of factors relating not only to the geography of the territory
itself, and the historical composition of Afghan society today, but also
to the way our knowledge of it has developed since the beginning of
the 19th century. These factors tend not only to color but to distort any
efforts to explain what is going on today. Our modern Western study
of Afghanistan began with the formal visit of Mountstuart Elphinstone
on behalf of the British East India Company to the then Afghan shah,
Shah Shoja, in Peshawar (now Pakistan) in 1809. The British inter-
est had been awakened by rumors of a possible collaboration between
Napoleon and the Russian czar (Alexander I) to invade India from the
northwestthe only feasible land entry to the Subcontinent. The Brit-
ish invaded Afghanistan in 1839, via the Bolan Pass and Quetta, and
despite significant and heavy reverses in two Afghan wars dominated
the government of Afghanistan from then until 1919 formally (though
indirectly, i.e., without attempting to install any administrative appa-
ratus). and informally until the British withdrawal from South Asia in
1947. During this period of over a hundred years Afghanistan became
relatively isolated from the rest of the Islamic world, and barely saw
any of the other wider contacts that formally administered territories
such as India enjoyed during the colonial period. However, because of
the strategic value of the frontier with Russia British agents and travel-
lers compiled a rich library of material concerning the contemporary
history and culture of Afghanistan, including the part that became
British Baluchistan and the North West Frontier Province, and is part
of Pakistan. A few scholars from other European countries, especially
Germany, contributed to this endeavour.
Although a number of prescriptive grammars of Persian and Pashto
appeared in the 19th century, the systematic study of the languages of
the area was launched by Morgenstierne with a series of publications,
beginning in 1928, based on his own field research. Both the histori-
cal and the linguistic study of the area since these foundations have
been conditioned by the efforts of the rulers of Afghanistan from 1880
onwards to build and maintain a viable and cohesive political identity
in the face not only of local centrifugal forces, but of first English,
then Russian and more recently American interests. The centripetal
force of an Afghan (or even, more narrowly, Pashtun) nationalism
did not begin to emerge until a century ago, and has never become
4 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

politically significant for all classes of the society throughout the coun-
try. As a result of the British interest in the area up to 1947, the Rus-
sian until 1917, the Soviet from 1917 to 1991 and American activities
in the region since 1948, and especially since 1979, there is consid-
erable variation among the various approaches of both Western and
local scholars.2

1.2. Geographical and Historical Factors

In the study of the languages in and around Afghanistan we are dealing


with language history and process on three scales: local communities;
Persianate (or eastern-Islamic) civilization; and colonial, which has
now merged into various post-colonial processes under the influence
of globalization. The ways in which various factors deriving from each
of these three scales of operation continue to interact makes Afghani-
stan a special case with regard to questions of language use. In what
follows we introduce these scales and the way they impinge on each
other. Readers without specialist knowledge of the area will find this
information important as an introduction to the papers that follow.
We hope that specialists will also find the statement useful.

1.2.1. The Issue of National and Local Identities


Behind the languages we are studying lie political identities, modern
states, and regional and international encumbrances that owe their
current form, if not their existence, to the activities of the British and
the Russians, or Soviets, since 1800. But whereas the boundaries and
language policies of the other states of Central and South Asia were
established entirely by the British and the Russians or Soviets, the
emergence of modern Afghanistan, and of its current hierarchy of lan-
guages, has a different history. (Only the history of Iran is comparable
in this regard, and it is introduced briefly below.) It is a history not
well understood, or easily accessible, and the experience of Afghani-
stan in the recent past has been seriously misunderstood as a result.
Although the city of Ghazni, in the southeast of Afghanistan, had
served as the base for a major imperial episode between 975 to 1187
ad, there was no historical precedent for a specifically local state of

2
See in particular the chapters by Nawid, and by Hakala, this volume.
ROMANIA RUSSIA MONGOLIA
BOSNIA
Sarajevo KAZAKHSTAN
AZERBAIJAN
BLACK SEA Khwarazm Shimkent
BULGARIA GEOR
GIA CASPIAN UZB
SEA EKI KYRGYZSTAN IEN
AR STA Khujand
T SHAN
M Bokhara N Osh
EN TUR
IA KM
EN Samarqand Konibodom
TURKEY IST
AN Dushanbe Kashgar XINJIANG
Tabriz Tursunzoda TAKLA MAKAN
Marv Khotan
ALB Esfarain CHINA
U RZ Mashhad TAJIKISTAN
SYRIA
MEDITERRANEAN
AFGHANISTAN Islamabad Amritsar Indus
SEA Isfahan Lahore
AN
IRAQ Ludhiana
IRAN

D
P U N J A B

ZA
G
Quetta

JOR
RO Kerman Multan
S Shiraz
BALUCHISTAN New Delhi
PE PAKISTAN
R NEPAL
GU SIA

DH
LYBIA LF N SISTAN Kalat

SIN
EGYPT Hyderabad BANGLADESH
SAUDI MAKRAN
Karachi
ARABIA Dacca
RED BENGAL
SEA Calcutta

AN
INDIA

DEC
OM
NCA BAY
YEMEN ARABIAN Hyderabad
CHAD SEA of
SUDAN BENGAL

ETHIOPIA
CENTRAL
AFRICAN REPUBLIC

IA
AL
M
SO
afghan languages in a larger context

DA
AN KENYA
UG
N

W E

0 500 1000 1500 km TANZANIA Zanzibar


5

Map 1. Central and Southwest Asia


6 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

Afghanistan when the current state was established by Ahmad Shah


Durrani in 1747. The appearance of a new political entity of this type,
with an ethnic or tribal identity, was without precedent in the Islamic
world. Although the Ottoman Empire emerged from a Turkish tribal
base at the end of the thirteenth century, the Ottomans claimed to be
leaders not of the Turks but of the Islamic world. Ahmad Shah claimed
the title King of the Afghans. (We shall return below to the question
of why he chose Afghan rather than Pashtun.) It is important to
note also that this was still more than half a century before the arrival
of any Western imperialist interests, let alone the influence of West-
ern nationalism. When Elphinstone visited Ahmad Shahs successor in
Peshawar in 1809, the Afghan state had for fifty years been the largest
empire in the region, having taken over the eastern territories of the
Safavid (Iranian) Empire, and including within its territory not only
Kashmir and most of what is now Pakistan, which it took from the
Mughal Empire, but also large parts of what are now the Central Asian
republics Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. Very soon after
this date, however, it imploded as a result of internecine strife among
dynastic rivals. British power, which became a major factor in the
area from 1840 onwards, complicated the situation. But British power
needed Afghanistan as a buffer to Russian imperial interests, and was
therefore careful to make sure that it did not finally disintegrate.
It appears to have been the British who began to call it Afghanistan,
probably in the upper corridors of the administration in Calcutta in
the 1830s. Before this time countries in the Islamic world did not
have names. Boundaries were undefined and areas that were culturally
seen as having some sort of natural identity had names such as Syria
(Sham), Transoxiana (Ma varaul-nahr), Sindh or Punjab, but politi-
cal divisions seldom matched such natural areas. (Iran is an exception.
Its origin lies with the Achaemenians. It came into use to identify a
high culture before Islam, under the Sasanians, but it did not take on
the narrower meaning of a political entity until the colonial period.)
Afghanistan has never been coterminous with any such natural areas.
Geographically, it is a quilted patchwork of mountain ranges, valleys
and desert plains populated by isolated settlements and fluctuating
populations of nomadic pastoralists, which had never experienced any
form of cultural, linguistic, or political integration beyond what con-
nected them to the trade routes (especially the Silk Route) that passed
through the peripheries of the area and connected it to the cities of the
afghan languages in a larger context 7

larger Islamic world, China and Indiato the north and south as well
as the east and west. What became Afghanistan in 1747 had been bor-
derland territory between the Safavid Empire in Isfahan to the west,
the Mughal Empire in Delhi, and the Uzbek Khanates to the north.
Qandahar, the first Afghan capital (17471776), had changed hands
more than once between the Safavids and the Mughals. Herat, still one
of Afghanistans four major cities, changed hands between the Safavids
and the Uzbeks, and was part of Iran as late as 1863. Before the advent
of Islam in the 7th century ad, the area had since the 6th century
bc formed the eastern marches of the Iranian world (i.e., the world
dominated by tribal populations speaking Iranian languages) contain-
ing the sites of much important Iranian cultural legend. What became
Afghanistan in the 18th century had been a shatter zone between the
major political centers of earlier history and sheltered refugee com-
munities from all sides, including Mongols.
In 1880 the British recruited a surviving collateral member of the
Afghan royal family, Abdul-Rahman Khan, from his exile north of the
Oxus, and placed him on the throne in Kabul. He ruled for 21 years,
and with the aid of methods that would have upstaged Draco (and cre-
ated trouble for the British Indian Government when they reached the
ears of Queen Victoria via her relatives in St. Petersburg) created the
basis for a unitary nation-state in which all inhabitants, whatever their
language, or cultural heritage, were persuaded to think of themselves
first not only as Muslim but as Afghan.
In 1893, just over half way through Abdul-Rahmans reign, the Brit-
ish drew the boundary which would divide British India from Afghan-
istan. It was known as the Durand Line after Sir Mortimer Durand
who was commissioned to draw it. The Durand Line ran through the
middle of the territories that were then and now inhabited by Pash-
tuns. Neither Abdul-Rahman nor any of his successors ever ratified
it, but they acquiesced in its imposition by the British. Since 1947 it
has been a source of serious disagreement between Afghanistan and
Pakistan.
Pashtuns (pronounced Pakhtun in eastern dialects) who in South
Asian countries are known as Pathans, were known by others as
Afghansbefore Abdul-Rahman reworked this word as the national
identity of all inhabitants of Afghanistan. Afghan is not a Pashto
word; it is probably Persian in origin (cf. Morgenstierne 1979:28).
This should not surprise us. Other tribal populations in the region
8 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

are similarly known by blanket terms that may not be native to them,
viz. Baluch, Kurd, which are Iranian in form, if not in origin.3 Over
the past millennium Persian has been the language of literacy, either
uniquely, or par excellence, throughout Central Asia and far beyond, in
all directions. The man who created the new empire in 1747 that has
now become the nation-state of Afghanistan, Ahmad Shah Durrani,
was Pashtun, as were all his successors (save one short-lived usurper
in 1929) down to the recently deceased Muhammad Zaher Shah. But
his administration, like the administration of all surrounding states,
was conducted in Persian. In 1776 his son and successor, Timur,
moved his capital from Qandahar (which shares with only one other
city, Ghazni, the distinction of being an entirely Pashtun city) out of
Pashtun territory to Kabul. Kabul is located in eastern Afghanistan
at the foot of a major pass that carries the historical trade route from
India to central Asia over the ranges that extend the Hindu Kush into
the Paropamisus and Koh-i Baba mountainsthe ranges that separate
the southern and northern halves of modern Afghanistan. From that
date onwards, relations between the Pashtun dynasty that continued
to rule and the plurality of Pashtun tribes has been ambivalent. Timur
imported a non-Pashtun, Persian-speaking bureaucracy, and both the
dynasty and its entourage became similarly Persian speaking.
Pashtun nationalistic sentiments began to influence national policy
in the 1930s. Starting around that time a small amount was added
to the salaries of civil servants who passed a (not very demanding)
examination in Pashto. In the constitution of 1964 Persian was named
the official language and Pashto the national language. The name of
the Persian language as used in Afghanistan was changed from farsi
(which means the language of the province of Fars in southwestern
Iran, and has been the name in most common use throughout the
eastern Islamic world over the past millennium) to dari (which also
has a long history, and means the language of the court). But not very
much progress was made in the advancement of Pashto as a language
of either speech or literacy outside the Pashto-speaking tribes of the
south and a few of the Pashtun colonies that Abdul-Rahman settled in
the north. Since 1978, language has been further politicized. All of the

3
In English, after all, we call the Deutsche Germans, the Hellenoi Greeks, and we
used to call the Iranians Persians.
afghan languages in a larger context 9

languages of Afghanistan continue to be conditioned by the historical


influence of Persian administrative and literary usage.4

1.3. Larger Perspectives

These historical trajectories illustrate some of the inter-ethnic prob-


lems behind the current language situation in Afghanistan and the
region, but do nothing to explain the cultural status of Persian (gener-
ally known in Persian as farsi, but in Afghanistan since the constitu-
tion of 1964 as dari, and in Tajikistan since 1928 as tojiki). For this we
must look at a much larger historical picture.
The Persian language became a language of administration under
the Achaemenian Empire between 559 bc and 321 bc, in the form of
Old Persian and written in cuneiform (Stolper and Tavernier 2007). It
went through a typical process of historical change and development
as the language of administration in the succeeding Iranian Empires
of the Parthians (247 bc224 ad) and the Sasanians (224651 ad),
during which time we know it as Middle Persian or Pahlavi and writ-
ten in a simplified form of the Aramaic script. It was then (in the
middle of the 7th century) eclipsed for a period of two centuries fol-
lowing the Arab conquest that gradually integrated the region into
a new Arab-Islamic empire. When it reemerged, as New Persian, in
the middle of the 9th century, it was written in the Arabic script, but
it continued to symbolize the culture (and perhaps the remembered
glory) of the pre-Islamic regal courts and administrations, especially
their pomp and circumstance. Significantly, Persian reemerged not in
what is now modern Iran, but in the cities in and around the northern
and western borders of what is now Afghanistan. The implication for
the modern non-Pashtun Afghan nationalist is to ask the question:
which is the real successor state to the empires of Cyrus and Darius,
of Ardashir and Anushirvan? Iran or Afghanistan? The state on the
western side of what in western geography we call the Iranian Plateau
has not been a strong empire with a great capital city since the Safa-
vid dynasty (15011722) ruled from Isfahan. The Safavid dynasty was
destroyed by an invasion of Afghans! If events had played out only
a little differently in the 19th century under the British (both in Iran

4
See in particular the chapters by Nawid and by Hakala, this volume.
10 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

and in Afghanistan) Afghanistan might now be known as Iran, and


Iran might now be known by some other term, perhaps Kurdistan,
or Baluchistan,5 or another name which, like Afghanistan, would be
derived from a tribal appellation.
It is important to remember that none of these terms had any
ethno-political significance before the late 19th centuryonly the
memories of past power and glory, and military prowess. The ethno-
political significance began to percolate into the area as a result of
contact with Europe in the middle of the 19th century, and began to
be important in Afghanistan in the 1920s. After the reemergence of
Persian as the language of diplomacy, administration, and belles lettres
in the courts of the power-centers that emerged in the early Islamic
period (whose incumbents were now known as sultan) over eleven
and a half centuries ago, and for trade between them, literacy became
equated with Persian for all functions except those directly related to
Islamic law and its interpretation. It did not matter what ones native
language was. All interaction that was for the record was either writ-
ten in Persian, or (if the occasion called for oral interaction) spoken in
Persian. This special function of Persian was facilitated by the memory
of the authority and protocols of the earlier empires and at its great-
est extent was valid in cities from as far west as Sarajevo under the
Ottomans to the Takla Makan Basin under the Uzbeks and from the
Turkic oases of Central Asia to the Nizams of Hyderabad in southern
India. There are even records of wealthy young Venetians being sent to
the Levant to study Persian in the 14th century. Persian was also used
along the trade routes deep into central and eastern China under the
Yuan dynasty, and has been taught at least intermittently in mosques
in central China down to the present.
Persian therefore worked as a koine (i.e., similar in function to Hel-
lenistic Greek a millennium earlier), and was remarkable for its lin-
guistic stability and standardization over a vast area from southeastern
Europe to central Chinawhich is obviously related to its high cul-
tural value as the language of literacy among people most of whom did
not speak it at home. Afghanistan was in the middle of this area. How-
ever, there was of course some change. Handwriting styles changed,
and there were changes in preferred literary genres and in rhetorical
style. Turkish, which in its Uzbek form had been a language of literacy

5
See the article by Spooner on Balochi, this volume.
afghan languages in a larger context 11

in various scripts in Central Asia before it gave way to Persian, as the


Saljuq Turks, the Mongols and later the Uzbeks converted to Islam
and became the rulers of major power centers in the eastern Persianate
world, finally in the 15th century began gradually to replace Persian
in the west. This replacement, however, occurred in a highly Persian-
ized form, known as Ottoman Turkish, in the Arabic script. The next
language to appear in writing was Pashto (again in the Arabic script)
in the 16th century, but only for belles lettres. Urdu followed in north
India, but had begun earlier in the Deccan. Then Sindhi began to be
written, facilitated by the British. In 1837 Urdu was formally adopted
by the British, in place of Persian, as the language of interaction
between the Government (which from then on conducted its affairs in
English) and the local population.6 Other languages, like Balochi7 and
the Dardic languages were still unwritten when Protestant Christian
missionaries arrived in the late 19th century. But even though much
has been written and printed in Balochi since the establishment of the
Balochi Academy in Quetta in 1957, Baloch in Iran who were fully lit-
erate and well educated in Persian claimed they could not read books
and newspapers printed in Balochi. For them, reading meant reading
Persian. In India Persian continued to be taught not only in traditional
madrasas, but in modern schools, with a status comparable to Latin
in England. It ceased to be a required subject in India and Pakistan in
the early 1960s, about the same time that Latin ceased to be required
for entrance into Oxbridge.
There is no evidence that it ever occurred to Ahmad Shah, when he
launched the new state in 1747, that his administration should be con-
ducted in the language of his own community, Pashto, even though
Pashto had been a language of literacy to at least some degree for at
least a century, probably more. When his son and successor Timur
moved the capital to Kabul in 1776 he developed his bureaucracy with
Persian-writing, Turkish-speaking Qizilbash left behind from Nader
Shahs Indian expedition in 1738, even though they were Shia. Both
the interest in Pashto literacy and the growth of Pashtun nationalism
were hampered by the political fragmentation of the Pashtuns that par-
adoxically had resulted from the establishment of a Pashtun dynasty.
But the idea that Pashto should be used at least on an equal basis with

6
The article by Diamond (this volume) is pertinent here.
7
Spooner, this volume.
12 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

Persian has been building since the 1920s, and it was included in the
constitutions of 1933 and 1964. In 1936 and in the constitution of
1964 it was reaffirmed that Pashto, alongside Dari, should function as
an official language (Miran 1977:1).

1.4. The Contribution of This Volume

The following chapters provide detail on each of the major languages


that are politically significant in the region. The first section focuses on
Afghanistan with special attention to the relationship between Pashto
and Persian, the language it shares with Iran and Tajikistan. In the
first chapter Senzil Nawid traces the history of the relationship among
the three major languagesPashto, Persian and Uzbekfrom the mid
18th century when Pashtun leaders launched the new Afghan state
(using Persian as the language of administration) through the period
of rising Pashtun and other nationalisms to the present. She shows
how despite modern Afghanistans ethnic and linguistic diversity and
the problems of reconstructing a sense of national identity in the wake
of thirty years of civil war, there are recognizable processes of change
in language use which map easily onto the political history. In the next
chapter Walter Hakala introduces the reader to the current state of
the literature on Pashto and its use in the Pashtun communities that
since 1893 have been divided between Afghanistan and India (later
Pakistan). He discusses the lack of a standard written or spoken form
in either country, the variety of its dialects and the difference in script
between Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the last chapter of this section
Brian Spooner discusses the differences among the various spoken
and written forms of Persian and the significance of its renaming in
Afghanistan and Tajikistan and the nature of the current relationship
between Persian and the other languages in the region.
Section Two deals with the Turkic languages in the northern part
of the region. William Fiermans chapter on Kazakhstan focuses on
attempts to reverse the shift from Kazakh to Russian, which occurred
under Soviet domination because of in-migration of Russian and other
non-Kazakh speakers and the Russification of the education system
and the administration. Birgit Schlyters chapter, on Uzbekistan, deals
with similar problems in a neighboring republic, complicated in this
case by an attempted reform of orthography. Finally, a second chapter
by Fierman takes up the fate of Uzbek minorities in the other Central
afghan languages in a larger context 13

Asian republics. Since the Central Asian republics were established


according to the Soviet nationalities policy in the 1920s, differences
between the various forms of spoken Turkic were standardized and
reified. Now those standards complicate the language policies of the
region and ethnic relations within and between the republics.
Section Three deals with the south of the region, especially with
Pashto and Urdu in Pakistan and the significance of Panjabi and
Balochi. First Robert Nichols traces the history of public decision-
making in relation to Pashto in Pakistans North West Frontier Prov-
ince (recently renamed Khyber Pushtunkhwa), where it once shared
functions with Persian, but now competes with Urdu. The following
chapter, by Jeffrey M. Diamond, deals with the historical background
to the modern relationship between Panjabi, which was historically
the majority language in the Panjab (now divided between India and
Pakistan), though without a standard spoken or written form, and
Urdu, which became the successor to Persian as the major language of
administration and literacy, boosted by a British administrative deci-
sion in 1835. In the last chapter in this section Brian Spooner takes
up the question of Balochi, a language spoken in four of the countries
of the area, and beyond, in the Persian Gulf, reviews its history and
current significance.
The book ends with a review of language teaching materials and
other resources on the issue of language policy in the area by Cynthia
Groff, and a brief concluding chapter by Harold F. Schiffman sum-
marizing the situation, and indicating where further research is most
needed.

1.5. Models of Multilingualism

When one contemplates the fact of multilingualism in this region, it


is useful to consider what models of multilingualism there exist that
this area can be compared to. Various possibilities come to mindthe
Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Russian Empire, the British empire. In
all of these, there has always been a superordinate language used by
the rulers, the courts, the educational system, and religious institu-
tions, but local languages found in restricted territories of the larger
union have also found their niche. We can refer to these different areas
of usage as domains. One of the most useful sociolinguistic models
that has been developed to categorize these kinds of situations is that
14 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

of diglossia (or even tri- or multiglossia), first elaborated by Ferguson


(1959)8 and then extended by Fishman (1967).9
Though some researchers of the area have expressed their reserva-
tions about the term diglossia, or feel that it is not extensive enough
within some of the languages of the area to characterize the variation
found there as such,10 no other model of multilingualism works as
well, given the fact that both the Fergusonian version and especially
the Fishman extension of the model capture many aspects of the
complexity of multilingualism in the area. Since a number of studies
in this volume attempt to deal with it in both practical and theoreti-
cal terms, it will be useful to review here the history of this analytical
concept. Charles Ferguson originally elaborated on the idea of diglos-
sia (1959, 435) in the following terms:
DIGLOSSIA is a relatively stable language situation in which, in addition
to the primary dialects of the language (which may include a standard
or regional standards), there is a very divergent, highly codified (often
grammatically more complex) superposed variety, the vehicle of a large
and respected body of written literature, either of an earlier period or in
another speech community, which is learned largely by formal education
and is used for most written and formal spoken purposes but is not used
by any section of the community for ordinary conversation.
The notion that diglossia could also be used to characterize other mul-
tilingual situations where the H and L varieties were not genetically
related, such as Hebrew (as H) and Yiddish (as L) in Europe, was
developed by Fishman (1967), and research on diglossias since have

8
The term diglossie was earlier used by Marais (1930) to characterize Arabic, but
the term did not gain currency until Ferguson elaborated on it.
9
This discussion of diglossia is based largely on Schiffmans 1997 chapter in Coul-
mas 1997 (The Handbook of Sociolinguistics) published by Blackwell, and used with
their permission.
10
Part of the reason that some researchers find only minimal diglossia in certain
languages is that the model they are influenced by is that of Arabic, where we find the
most extreme diglossia (between Classical Arabic and its spoken dialects) existing in
any language of the world. Compared to Arabic, therefore, other languages diglossia
is minimal, or certainly not as extensive. But diglossia is not an either-or situationit
is variable, and though it is hard to measure and quantify, it is clear that in any lan-
guage where the literary version is incomprehensible to illiterate speakers, who only
know the spoken variety, we clearly have a case of diglossia.
afghan languages in a larger context 15

focused to a great extent, though not entirely, on characterizing vari-


ous kinds of extended diglossias.11
Since 1959 research on diglossia has concentrated on a number of
variables and important questions relating to function, prestige, liter-
ary heritage, acquisition, standardization, stability, grammar, lexicon,
phonology, the difference between diglossia and standard-with-dia-
lects, extent of distribution in space, time, and in various language
families, and finally what engenders diglossia and what conditions
favor its development. This literature may be briefly summarised as
follows:

A. Function
The functional differentiation of discrepant varieties in a diglossia is
fundamental, thus distinguishing it from bilingualism. H and L are
used for different purposes, and native speakers of the community
would find it odd (even ludicrous, or outrageous) if anyone used H in
an L domain, or L in an H domain.

B. Prestige
In most diglossias examined, H was more highly valued (had greater
prestige) than was L. The H variety is that of great literature, canoni-
cal religious texts, ancient poetry, of public speaking, of pomp and
circumstance. The L-variety is felt to be less worthy, corrupt, broken,
vulgar, undignified, etc. A good example of this in this volume are the
articles by Nawid and by Hakala on the extended diglossia between
Persian (a.k.a. Dari) and Pashto in Afghanistan. The latter is clearly the
commonest spoken language, but lacks the prestige of Persian/Dari, so
has been relegated to lower status off and on throughout history.

C. Literary Heritage
In most diglossic languages, the literature is all in H-variety; no written
uses of L exist, except for dialect poetry, advertising, or low restricted
genres. In most diglossic languages, the H-variety is thought to be the
language; the L-variety is sometimes denied to exist, or claims are made
that it is only spoken by lesser mortals (servants, women, children).

11
In this volume, almost every chapter deals with a Fishman-type diglossia of some
sort, whether it is Uzbek or Kazakh and Russian, Persian and Urdu, Panjabi, or Balochi,
or some other combination, also involving English.
16 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

In some traditions (e.g., Shakespeares plays). L-variety would be used


to show certain characters as rustic, comical, uneducated, etc.

D. Acquisition
L-variety is the variety learned first; it is the mother tongue, the lan-
guage of the home. H-variety is acquired through schooling. Where
linguists would therefore insist that the L-variety is primary, native
scholars tend to see only the H-variety as the language.12

E. Standardization
H is strictly standardized; grammars, dictionaries, canonical texts, etc.
exist for it, written by native grammarians. L is rarely standardized
in the traditional sense, or if grammars exist, are written by outsid-
ers. The article in this collection by Hakala deals with the problem of
variability within Pashto, with no overarching standard that is clearly
accepted by all users.

F. Stability
Diglossias are generally stable, persisting for centuries or even millen-
nia. Occasionally L-varieties gain domains and displace the H-variety,
but H only displaces L if H is the mother tongue of an elite, usually
in a neighboring polity. The classic example of stable diglossias in this
part of the world is that of Arabic, with its H-variety the language
of the Quran and other great literature, while L-variety spoken dia-
lects are used for less prestigeful purposes. This situation has remained
stable for centuries, and will probably continue, given the high value
associated with Quranic Arabic, not a syllable of which can be altered
without dire consequences. L-varieties may expand their usage if they
can move into newer domains, such as popular journalism, the movies,
or talk-shows on television, but traditional domains of the H-variety
remain inviolable.

12
In the studies in this volume, Persian is the language that was dominant in almost
every situation until the late medieval/early modern period, then Russian in Central
Asia, and English in South Asia tended to replace it.
afghan languages in a larger context 17

G. Grammar
The grammars of H are usually more complex than the grammars of
the L-variety. They can have more complicated tense systems, gender
systems, agreement, and syntactic structures than the L-variety.

H. Lexicon
Vocabulary is often somewhat shared between H and L, but generally
there is differentiation; H has vocabulary that L lacks, and vice-versa.
The H-variety may exhibit large amounts of vocabulary borrowed
from another H-variety, such as Sanskrit or Arabic, which the L-variety
may lack.

I. Phonology
Two kinds of systems are discerned. One is where H and L share the
same phonological elements, but H may have more complicated mor-
phophonemics. Or, H is a special subset of the L-variety inventory.13 A
second type where H has contrasts that L lacks, systematically substitut-
ing some other phoneme for the lacking contrast; but L may borrow
elements as tatsamas (i.e., in the same form as the H-variety), using
the H-variety contrast in that particular item, but not in general.

J. Difference between Diglossia and Standard-with-Dialects


In diglossia, no one speaks the H-variety as a mother tongue, only
the L-variety. In the Standard-with-dialects situation, some speak-
ers speak H as a mother tongue, while others speak L-varieties as a
mother tongue and acquire H as a second system. Thus in Pakistan
(cf. Diamonds paper) Urdu is spoken as a mother-tongue by a small
percentage of the population, but all other citizens learn it as a second
language, and often do not learn to read their own language, even if
texts in it exist. This seems to be the case for Balochi as well.14

K. Distribution of Diglossia in Language Families, Space, and Time


Diglossia is not limited to any geographical area or language family,
and diglossias have existed for centuries or millennia (Arabic, West

13
But it is often possible to observe that speakers sometimes fail to keep the two
systems separate.
14
See Spooner chapter on Balochi, this volume.
18 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

Asia, South Asia). Most diglossias involve literacy, but oral diglossias
are also conceivable.

L. Development in Time
Diglossias usually do not spring up overnight; they take time to
develop. Diglossia emerges in the presence of an ancient or prestigious
literature, composed in the H-variety, which the more influential elites
of the society wish to preserve as such. Literacy is usually restricted to
a small elite. When conditions require universal literacy in H, peda-
gogical problems ensue. These three factors, especially if linked with
religion, make diglossia extremely stable in Arabic and other linguistic
cultures in South and West Asia.

1.5.1. Power and Prestige


Diglossic languages (and diglossic language situations) are usually
described as consisting of two (or more) varieties that coexist in a
speech community; the domains of linguistic behavior are parceled
out in a kind of complementary distribution. By domains what is
meant is socially-constructed speech situations, sometimes also associ-
ated with a particular kind of language, such as religious usage. These
domains are usually ranked in a kind of hierarchy, from highly valued
(H) to less valued (L).
Thus in South and Southwest Asia, English occupies the H-variety
niche because it has the greatest prestige in the area (and interna-
tionally as well), and the speech community that has been educated
in it is economically dominant, whether under British colonialism,
or in independent India or Pakistan. In Central Asia Russian filled
this niche, even though attempts may now be being made to replace
it, since before the Russian Empire established hegemony in Central
Asia, Persian was the H-variety, and in Tajikistan still is.

1.5.2. Classical vs. Extended Diglossia


There are many attempts to propose terminologies for a taxonomy of
diglossias. Fergusons original (1959) proposal (also known sometimes
as classical) is contrasted with Fishmans extended (1967) diglossia.
Most researchers recognize important differences in the dynamics of
societies characterized by the (at least) two basic kinds of diglossia.
Fishman has also proposed a useful distinction between consensu-
afghan languages in a larger context 19

ally different languages and consensual dialects, since there are often
questions about whether the H-variety in a particular diglossia is in
fact the historical ancestor of the L-variety, unless the members of the
linguistic culture consent to the notion of ancestry, or at least do not
contest it.15 Fishmans 1980 taxonomy of kinds of linguistic relation-
ships between Hs and Ls is worth stating in full:
A. H as classical, L as vernacular, the two being genetically related, e.g.,
classical and vernacular Arabic (Marais 1930), classical or classicized
Greek (Katharevousa) and demotiki, Latin and French among fran-
cophone scholars and clergy in earlier centuries, classical and ver-
nacular Tamil, classical and vernacular Sinhalese, Sanskrit and Hindi,
classical Mandarin and modern Pekinese, etc.
B. H as classical, L as vernacular, the two not being genetically related,
e.g., Loshn koydesh (textual Hebrew/Aramaic) and Yiddish (Fishman,
1976) (or any one of the several dozen other non-semitic Jewish Ls,
as long as the latter operate in vernacular functions rather than in tra-
ditional literacy-related ones (Weinreich, 1980). The diglossia involv-
ing Pashto in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, with Persian (Dari) as
H and Pashto as L is another example.16
C. H as written/formal-spoken and L as vernacular, the two being genet-
ically unrelated to each other; e.g. Spanish and Guaran in Paraguay
(Rubin, 1972). English (or French) and various vernaculars in post-
colonial areas throughout the world.
D. H as written/formal-spoken and L as vernacular, the two being genet-
ically related to each other. Here only significantly discrepant written/
formal-spoken and informal-spoken varieties will be admitted, such
that without schooling the written/formal-spoken cannot even be
understood (otherwise every dialect-standard situation in the world
would qualify within this rubric), e.g., High German and Swiss Ger-
man, standard spoken Pekinese [Putonghua] and Cantonese, Stan-
dard English and Caribbean Creole. (Fishman 1980, 4).
These differences often have to do primarily with power relation-
ships in the societies characterized by them. Various scholars have
proposed that extended diglossia is usually unstable, unless certain

15
In South Asia, for example, we have L-varieties associated with H-varieties that
are not in fact their closest genetic ancestor; for example, eastern varieties of Hindi
(Bihari dialects, etc.) that have long been noted to have descended from eastern apabh-
ramsas but are treated by their speakers as being dialects of standard Hindi; one could
make the case that Sri Lanka Tamil may also be more closely related to Malayalam
than it is to Tamil, but not in the minds of its speakers.
16
See also Nichols article on Pashto in the Northwest Frontier Province here.
20 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

conditions having to do with power are not met. Classical diglossia,


usually thought to be more stable than extended diglossia, can also
be shown to be unstable under certain conditions. It may also be the
case that the type of diglossia in question may also itself change, i.e.
a narrow kind of diglossia may be replaced by a broad form without
much overt awareness on the part of the speech community. In the
area being dealt with in this volume, the diglossic situation can be seen
to have changed over time, as colonial languages have been superim-
posed on the region (English in South Asia, Russian in the former
Soviet Union), and now with the collapse of the latter (and of course
independence in South Asia) the domains controlled by English and
Russian are to some extent in flux, or at least being challenged. Other
languages also had H-variety status in the region, in particular Persian
and Urdu, and their status in the region may change, as contributors
to this volume such as Diamond, Fierman, Nichols and Schlyter have
attempted to show.

1.5.3. Diglossia, Language Shift, and Reversing Language Shift


Diglossia has often been noted as a factor in language shift, especially
in speech communities where a minority language is in a diglossic
relationship with a majority language. Fishman (1967, 36) had previ-
ously noted that
[B]ilingualism without diglossia tends to be transitional both in terms of
the linguistic repertoires of speech communities as well as in terms of
the speech varieties involved per se. Without separate though comple-
mentary norms and values to establish and maintain functional separat-
ism of the speech varieties, that language or variety which is fortunate
enough to be associated with the predominant drift of social forces tends
to displace the other(s).
As the region undergoes more changes, we may now see attempts to
reverse language shift, as both Schlyter and Fierman attempt to show
in their papers17where certain H-domains had been monopolized by
Russian during the Soviet period, such that Kazakhs, Uzbeks, or oth-
ers could not even imagine using any other language for purposes of
higher education, etc. we now see attempts to reverse this and recap-
ture these domains for titular languages.

17
Chapters 5 and 6, this volume.
afghan languages in a larger context 21

1.5.4. The Register Issue


When certain languages lack registers for scientific and technical
domains, and therefore attempt to create them, problems arise. Users
educated in an H-variety such as English, French, Russian or some
other LOWC (Language of Wider Communication) are loath to give
these up and adopt vocabulary from another source, even if it is their
mother tongue, since the vocabulary created for this in the mother
tongue may be as strange as that of a foreign language. This issue is
particularly pertinent in this volume for the former Soviet republics
(cf. the articles by Schlyter and by Fierman) as those republics attempt
to shake off the yoke of Russian and develop their own scientific and
technological registers, or switch to some other LOWC, such as English.

1.5.4.1. Definitions of Register


The concept of linguistic register has been described by Trudgill
(1983:101) as follows:
Linguistic varieties that are linked . . . to occupations, professions or top-
ics have been termed registers. The register of law, for example, is dif-
ferent from the register of medicine, which in turn is different from the
language of engineeringand so on. Registers are usually characterized
solely by vocabulary differences; either by the use of particular words, or
by the use of words in a particular sense.
Registers are simply a rather special case of a particular kind of lan-
guage being produced by the social situation. Halliday, McIntosh and
Strevens (1964) devote a long section to register in their 1964 work.
They also refer to register as distinguished by use.
Perhaps it would be an improvement on Trudgills definition if we
expand the definition of register to include, in many cases, a preference
(or even a dispreference) for particular syntactic patterns or rhetori-
cal devices. A close examination of many different kinds of registers
shows that they tend to prefer, or eschew:

The passive voice


Metaphors
Imperative verbs;
Sexist or racist language;
Short sentences, a preference for certain lexical devices (such as acro-
nyms or blends) and more established lexical items and resources,
such as Greco-Latin vocabulary (western European languages) or
other classical languages, e.g., Sanskrit or Chinese.
22 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

When we say registers prefer etc. we mean, of course, that decision-


makers who control the standards of the register prefer or disprefer,
and may explicitly state these preferences in style-manuals for vari-
ous journals, etc. Some researchers have noted that register is related
to uses rather than users. Scherer and Giles (1979, 51-3) devote two
pages to a description of both differences in lexicon and the complex,
unusual semantic relations amongst perfectly commonplace words
found in certain registers.
Let us tentatively propose the following re-definition of Register:
A set of specialized vocabulary and preferred (or dispreferred) syntactic and
rhetorical devices/structures, used by specific socio-professional groups for
special purposes. A register is a property or characteristic of a language,
and not of an individual or a class of speakers. Crucial for our discus-
sion of register in the context of multilingualism and language policy is
the fact that some languages lack certain registers: in western industrial
societies they may lack ethno-scientific registers (folk taxonomies for
classifying plants, animals or natural phenomena), or specialized poetic
registers, specialized politeness systems, or registers for speaking in a
trance.
In pre-industrial societies languages lack legal, technical, scientific,
and medical registers and subvarieties of these (for example, the reg-
ister that airline pilots use to communicate with air traffic controllers).
Such languages either function without such registers, which relegates
them to a marginal status within a larger multilingual society, or the
members of such linguistic cultures acquire proficiency in these regis-
ters in other languages. In many postcolonial societies, of course, the
registers they acquire proficiency in are registers of English or another
ex-colonial language.
What this illustrates, of course, is that registers for a particular
language may be di- or even tri-glossic: certain registers are in the
domain of the H variety (religion, literature, ethno-history), some in
the domain of the L-variety (conversation, jokes/stories, intimacy/
courtship, auto-mechanical, building/construction trades etc.) and
certain registers (high-tech, higher-education) may be in the domain
of a totally different language.

1.5.4.2. Development of New Registers


As we have already noted, users educated in an H-variety such as
English, French, Russian (or another LOWC) are reluctant to give
these up and adopt vocabulary from another source, for the kinds of
afghan languages in a larger context 23

reasons noted above. Aside from this, however, there is also the issue
that increasingly, the discourse of science is a global one, and those
scientists who do not work in an established international language
such as Russian, French, German, or English, will find themselves out-
side the discourse, and unable to keep up with developments being
described in one of these languages. In fact, even in France, where
the government tries to shore up the prestige of French and encour-
age its use as widely as possible, some scientists prefer to publish in
English. In 1989, the editors of the various journals published by the
Institut Pasteur, one of the oldest and most prestigious scientific insti-
tutes in the world, decided to publish henceforward in English only.
The French government was not happy, but the editors noted that
only about 5% of the articles submitted to them were in French, so
switching to English exclusively seemed to be the realistic thing to do
(Markham 1989).
Another issue in creating new registers is that, as we noted above,
new registers are created by the users and developers of the particular
discipline or subdiscipline that they are working in. Language pur-
ists always want to show that their language is capable of being used
for scientific purposes (i.e., it is sophisticated enough and intellec-
tual enough to serve this purpose) but what this entails is creating
vocabulary for everything that has already been developed in another
language. This is a daunting task, not only for the committees tasked
with the job of translating (usually) the vocabulary and terminology of
another language, but also a daunting task for the users, who must now
become comfortable with terminology provided to them, not by users
or scientific researchers in their field, but by language pundits intent
on creating vocabulary that is wholly based on indigenous sources.
Earlier in the industrial revolution, this was less difficult, and nations
like Japan that decided in modernize beginning in the 19th century
were able to adapt by borrowing much of the vocabulary already in
use in other, more modern languages. But late modernizers often
resist borrowing since their languages are already swamped with loan-
words and loan-translations, so they are faced with an almost insur-
mountable taskcreate totally new terminology, and convince their
own people to adopt and use it. But those scientists already trained
in a LOWC such as English or French often do not see the utility of
disconnecting themselves from a global discourse in their discipline, in
order to further the agenda of language purists. In this volume, we find
that attempts to create scientific and technical registers for languages
24 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

like Persian, Urdu and Pashto are facing an uphill battle, as they must
compete with already established languages of wider communication
such as Russian and English.
But of course the reliance on English for science and technology
means that diglossia is maintained and reinforced, and will prob-
ably continue to be maintained, and not just in India. English is also
important in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the world
of science. For Central Asia and the former republics of the USSR, the
struggle to replace Russian in science and technology will therefore
not be easy, for the same reasons that eliminating English in South
Asia has not been successful.

1.5.5. Diglossia and the Linguistic Culture That Maintains It


Speech communities have belief systems about their languageorigin
myths, beliefs about good and bad language, taboos, shibboleths,
and so on. These beliefs are part of the social conditions that affect the
maintenance and transmission of that language. Thus, the fact that a
language is diglossic may actually be a feature of the linguistic culture
of the area where that language is used, rather than of the language
per se. The fact that diglossia (of the classical Fergusonian type) is
widespread in South, Southwest, and Central Asia may then be attrib-
uted to general cultural attitudes about language, rather than just an
accidental feature due to some quirk of history. The introduction of
another variety that dominates the H domains makes the situation
more complex, i.e., we may then be dealing with what we should per-
haps refer to as triglossia. The situation in Pakistan now involves local
languages (e.g., Brahui and Siraiki, as well as Pashto, Punjabi, Sindhi,
and Balochi), and superordinate H-varieties such as Urdu, and Eng-
lish. The working of linguistic culture is also obvious in the attitudes
the British brought to their South Asian colonies, as Diamond shows
in the way they dealt with Punjabi (this volume), which they did not
consider to be a language of literacy, so they instead chose to replace
Persian with Urdu in India and what is now Pakistan.

1.5.5.1. Diglossia and Literacy


In a society where literacy is not universal, not all speakers control
the use of the school-imparted H-variety. This does not mean that
illiterates have the option of using the L variety in H-variety domains;
rather, the expectation is that they will remain silent rather than
afghan languages in a larger context 25

exhibit inappropriate linguistic norms. Their linguistic behavior is in


fact restricted to the L domains, and use of H domains is de facto the
monopoly of the educated few.18
In the area in question, the H-variety may be so poorly understood,
both by students and teachers, that an L-variety language may in fact
be used as a language of explanation, because without it, the students
would not understand anything. This phenomenon is also well-known
in the region under study in this volume; one example is the Taliban
schools of the Deobandi movement, where Arabic is the language of
study, but where explanation by the teacher will be made in Pashto
or other local languages. Other examples where English, Urdu, or
Russian is the H-variety in question can probably be adduced. This
phenomenon is often ignored, since the use of an L-variety for expla-
nation is not officially sanctioned, and teachers may actually deny that
they do this.

1.5.5.2. Shifting Domains and Diglossia


While diglossia as a fact of linguistic culture may be stable, the distri-
bution of domains reserved for one variety or other can vary; the dom-
inance of a particular domain by a particular variety can shift, with
one variety encroaching on domains previously restricted to another.
In journalism, especially in political cartoons, etc. one also sees a shift
from H to L in many linguistic cultures. In many of them, the devel-
opment of television has opened up a domain that has become almost
exclusively that of the L variety, especially in live interviews, talk
shows, game shows, sports reporting, etc. where use of H would seem
stilted and unnatural. The same may be true in the language of the film
and in other journalistic domains. Cartoons and humor in general, for
example, may sound unnatural if not written in the L-variety.

1.5.5.3. Diglossia and Power and Solidarity


Brown and Gilman (1960) introduced the notion that the use of cer-
tain pronouns (epitomized as T and V) can be an expression of power
and/or solidarity. Rubin (1972) extended the analogy of T and V
pronouns to the use of L and H varieties in Paraguay, a supposedly
bilingual linguistic culture in which the two languages, Spanish and

18
See the chapters by Diamond and Nichols, this volume, especially for the treat-
ment of Pashto and Punjabi.
26 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

Guaran, are in an extended diglossic relationship. In many of the lin-


guistic cultures discussed here, the use (or misuse) of L and H varieties
also can raise some of these same issues. Certainly the use of L where
H is expected (or vice versa), constitutes a violation of communicative
competence rules. If an outsider addresses a hotel clerk in Quetta in
Sindhi, or begins a conversation with a well-dressed stranger in Pesha-
war in Pashto, these are violations of social norms that stem from an
inadequate understanding of the linguistic culture and what consti-
tutes communicative competence in the area.
Brown and Gilman (1960) established the notion that use of T pro-
nouns (the familiar, non-respect form) can have several social mean-
ings. Reciprocal use of T by equals expresses solidarity, but between
non-equals the giver of T is putting him/herself in a position of power,
and the receiver is expected to respond with V. Similarly, reciprocal V
usage implies mutual respect and social distance; any non-reciprocal
use of these pronouns is an expression of a differential of power.
As Rubin demonstrated, in diglossic situations the use of H or L
varieties in a given social exchange (as distinguished from societal pat-
terned usage as a whole) may be seen as expressions of the same kind
of T/V situation. The use of L may be an expression of solidarity and
may not be offered to speakers whose social position is superior or dis-
tant. Similarly H may be the only variety appropriate in a given situa-
tion because the use of L would imply a solidarity that is only reserved
for members of a particular in-group. In-group members may then
feel insulted because the use of an L-variety implies that they are not
educated, and therefore do not know and control the H-variety.

1.6. The Issue of Implementation

The question of language policy implementation is one that is typi-


cally thought of as problematical in some waysometimes referred
to as the Achilles heel of language policy (Schiffman 1996)since
the failure of a language policy to have the outcomes that language
planners wish can often be attributed to poor implementation of the
policy. Frequently, language policy makers are novices at language
planning, and tend to view it as something that can be, or should be,
easily implementeda few broad strokes to give the basic outlines of
afghan languages in a larger context 27

the policy, and the matter is settled.19 We, however, tend to see imple-
mentation as the most problematical area of language planning, since
it involves many details and variables, and it may also involve taking a
long view of the process that may not outlast the impatience of poli-
ticians seeking quick fixes for a problem. As far as the implementa-
tion of language policy in Afghanistan and its neighbors is concerned,
it seems quite clear that many of the problems with language policy
in the area are problems of implementation, especially if policies are
handed down from above (so-called top-down language policy)
rather than designed to meet local needs, as determined by consulta-
tion with users at the grass-roots level.20 The recent move to prioritize
Kazakh as the official language of Kazakhstan, and to demote Russian
to secondary status illustrates the fragility of implementation plans
that are not carefully thought out (Fierman Chapter 4).

References

Brown, Roger and A. Gilman. (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity, repr.
in Fishman, J. (ed.), 1968, 1970, pp. 252-75.
Coulmas, Florian. (1997). The Handbook of Sociolinguistics. London: Basil Blackwell,
Ltd.
Farhadi, A.G. Ravan. (1970). Languages of Afghanistan, in The Kabul Times Annual,
pp. 121-4.
Ferguson, Charles F. (1959). Diglossia, WORD, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 325-40. Repr. in
Hymes (1964) pp. 429-39.
. (1991). Diglossia revisited, in A. Hudson (ed.), 1991.
Fierman, William. (1995). Problems of Language Law Implementation in Uzbeki-
stan, in William Fierman (ed.), Nationalities Papers 23/3 (September 1995).
Fishman, Joshua (ed.) (1966). Language loyalty in the United States. The Hague: Mouton.
. (1967). Bilingualism With and Without Diglossia; Diglossia With and With-
out Bilingualism. Journal of Social Issues, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 29-38. Revised and
reprinted as Societal Bilingualism: Stable and Transitional, in Sociolinguistics: A
Brief Introduction. pp. 78-89. Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, 1970.
(ed.) (1968, repr. 1972). Readings in the Sociology of Language. The Hague: Mouton.
. (1972). Advances in the Sociology of Language, vol. II. The Hague: Mouton.
ed. 1986. The Fergusonian Impact, vol. 2: Sociolinguistics and the Sociology of
Language. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
. 1991. Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assis-
tance to Threatened Languages. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.

19
This issue is particularly pertinent when attempts are made to substitute one
language for another, as we see in the chapters by Diamond, Fierman, Nichols, and
Schlyter.
20
This issue as it applies to Malaysia is illustrated in great detail by Mead in his
1988 work.
28 harold f. schiffman and brian spooner

Halliday, M.A.K., McIntosh, Angus and Strevens, Peter. (1964). The Linguistic Sciences
and Language Teaching. Longmans, London.
Hudson, Alan, (ed.) (1991). Studies in Diglossia. Linguistic Association of the South-
west, Denton, TX.
Mackey, William F. (1983). U.S. Language Policy and the Canadian Experience, in
Cobarrubias and Fishman, pp. 173-206.
Marais, W. (1930). La diglossie arabe, LEnseignement public, 97, 20-39.
Markham, James. 1989. Paris Journal; Pardon My English, But Did Someone Say
1992? New York Times [archives], May 12, 1989. http://select.nytimes.com/search
/restricted/article?res= FA0715FF345E0C718DDDAC0894D1484D8
Mead, Richard. (1988). Malaysias National Language Policy and the Legal System.
Technical report 30. Yale Center for International and Area Studies, New Haven.
Miran, M. Alam. (1977). The Functions of National Languages in Afghanistan. New
York: Afghanistan Council, Asia Society.
Morgenstierne, Georg. (1927). An etymological vocabulary of Pashto. Utgitt for Fridtjof
Nansens fond. Oslo, I kommisjon J. Dybwad.
. (1929). Indo-Iranian frontier languages. Oslo, H. Aschehoug Co.
. (1979). The Linguistic Stratification of Afghanistan,Afghan Studies vol. 2, 1979,
pp. 23-33.
Rubin, Joan. (1972). Bilingual usage in Paraguay, in Fishman, (ed.), pp. 512-30.
Scherer K. and Giles, Howard. (1979). Social Markers in Speech. European Studies in
Social Psychology Series. Cambridge University Press and Editions de la Maison des
Sciences de lHomme, Cambridge, London and Paris.
Schiffman, Harold F. (1974). Language, Linguistics and Politics in Tamilnad, in
Edwin Gerow and Margery Lang, (eds.), Studies in the language and culture of South
Asia. University of Washington Press, and Publications on Asia, no. 23, of the Insti-
tute for Comparative and Foreign Area Studies, pp. 125-34.
. (1997). Diglossia as a Sociolinguistic Situation, In F. Coulmas (ed.), The Hand-
book of Sociolinguistics. London: Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1997.
. (1991). Swiss-German diglossia, in A. Hudson (ed.), Studies in Diglossia,
Southwest Journal of Linguistics, vol. 10, no. 1 (1991), pp. 173-88.
. (1996). Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. London: Routledge.
Trudgill, Peter. (1983). Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society. Pen-
guin: Harmondsworth.
Weinreich, Max. (1980). History of the Yiddish language, trans. by Shlomo Noble, with
the assistance of Joshua A. Fishman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SECTION I

AFGHANISTAN AND IRAN


CHAPTER TWO

LANGUAGE POLICY IN AFGHANISTAN:


LINGUISTIC DIVERSITY AND NATIONAL UNITY

Senzil Nawid

2.1. Introduction

Afghanistan is a heterogeneous, multilingual nation comprised of


diverse ethnic groupsPashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Hazaras, Nuristanis,
Aimaqs, Baluchis and other smaller ethnicities. Several languages have
co-existed in Afghanistan for a very long time, each of which was orig-
inally associated with a specific geographic region. This chapter pro-
vides an overview of the policies of successive regimes with regard to
the use and official status of the diverse languages. It focuses primarily
on Dari, the official term for Afghan Persian, and on Pashto, the two
most important and official languages of the country.
Language policy in Afghanistan was frequently altered in the course
of the twentieth century in response to social and political condi-
tions and to efforts to promote the political objectives of the regime
in power. The objectives were promotion of national unity, national
identity, ethnic aspirations, and political ideologies. Afghanistans tur-
bulent history in the twentieth century occasioned frequent changes in
Afghan language policy.

2.2. Linguistic Diversity

The three major languages, based on the number of people speaking


them, are Pashto, Dari, and Uzbek.

2.2.1. Pashto
Pashto, also rendered Pakhtu, and sometimes Afghani, is a member of
the southeastern group of the Iranian branch of Indo-European lan-
guages and is spoken by the Pashtuns in Afghanistan and in north-
western and western Pakistan. Its dialects fall into two main divisions:
32 senzil nawid

southern and eastern. Although Pashto literature exists from the 7th
century, the Pashto language did not gain prominence until the 18th
century when Ahmad Shah Durrani (17471773) established the Dur-
rani Empire, which became known as Afghanistan in the 19th century.
Pashtuns make up the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, com-
prising from 38 to 44 percent of the population. The Durrani tribe
is the largest and most important Pashtun tribe. The Durranis ruled
Afghanistan from 1747 to 1978. Their original homeland is the region
west and southwest of Qandahar. The second largest Pashtun tribe
is the Ghilzai tribe. The Ghilzais live in regions between Ghazni and
Qandahar. Other important Pashtun tribes are the frontier tribes, the
Waziris, Khattaks, Mohmands, Shinwaris, Yusufzais, and the Afridis
who are known as the guardians of the Khyber Pass. The delineation
of the Durand Line as the southern and eastern border of Afghani-
stan by the British in 1893 divided the frontier Pashtun tribes between
Afghanistan and British India. According to Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, the
Durand Line greatly lessened the power of Pashtuns in Afghanistan.
However, this loss was reversed in some measure when Amir Abdur
Rahman forced resettlement of large numbers of Pashtun tribes from
the frontier to the northern regions of Afghanistan.1

2.2.2. Dari
Dari is the name for the Persian language as used in Afghanistan.
Various dialects of it are spoken natively in the north and west by the
Tajiks, who comprise more than one-third of the Afghan population.
Dari is the lingua franca of most other Afghans. Various Dari dialects
are spoken in Herat, Hazarajat, Balkh, Ghor, Ghazni, Badakhshan,
Panjsher, and in Kabul. The dialect of Kabul has become the standard,
which is broadcast and popularized by Kabul Radio.
Spoken Dari takes its root from its archaic phonetic characteristics.
The pronunciation of literary Dari is based on the traditional old dic-
tion of the northern regions of present-day Afghanistan. Literary Dari
was the language of administration and the judiciary from the time
of the Ghaznavids in the tenth and eleventh centuries. As the lingua
franca, Dari was also the language of commerce. With the formation
of the modern state of Afghanistan by Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747,

1
Anwar ul-Haq, 1995, p. 632.
language policy in afghanistan 33

Dari retained its position as the language of administration notwith-


standing the domination by Pashtuns of all levels of government.
Competence in Dari was a condition of employment and a require-
ment for advancement in the civil service. As a consequence, Pash-
tuns learned Dari, as did Uzbeks, and other minority groups. But very
few non-Pashtuns learned Pashto. According to a report prepared by
the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, 50 percent of the population of
Afghanistan speaks Dari, and 35 percent speaks Pashto.2

2.2.3. Uzbek
The Uzbeks and Turkman of Afghanistan are ethnically and linguisti-
cally of Turkic origin. They occupy the northern agricultural region of
Afghanistan from the Faryab Province to Badakhshan Province and
constitute about eight percent of the population. They moved into the
area in the sixteenth century from Central Asia. As a result, there are
many mixed Uzbek and Tajik villages in northern Afghanistan. At
the end of the nineteenth century, Amir Abdur Rahman consolidated
the Uzbek principalities (khanates) under his rule and, as mentioned
above, enforced a resettlement policy that resulted in Pashtun inroads
into traditionally Uzbek areas. His intention was to promote national
unity by intermingling people of different linguistic backgrounds in
the north.
Despite the fact that a new wave of Uzbek and Turkman immi-
gration took place in the north of Afghanistan as a result of Czarist
Russian conquest of their native lands and subsequent local uprisings
in Central Asia against the Bolsheviks, later immigrations of Pashtun
tribes in the 1920s and 1930s relegated Uzbeks to a minority in the
area they once dominated.3

2.3. Historical Development

In view of the large number of people who spoke Pashto and because
of the political power of the Pashtuns, Pashto was held in high regard.

2
Tajikam Portal-Secret Documents Reveal Afghan Language Policy, http://tajikam
.com/index.
3
University of MarylandMinorities at Risk: Background Information (Assess-
ment for Uzbeks in Afghanistan) [#30498], [ID 1199] http://www.ecoi.net/188769
::afghanistan/314494.313281.7999 . . . eth.565382/background-information.htm.
34 senzil nawid

However, it was second in prestige to Persian. Sporadic attempts were


made by Afghan rulers at different times to elevate the official status
of Pashto. (It must be remembered that they were themselves Pash-
tun, but had become Persian-speaking.) An initial step in this direc-
tion was taken in the mid-nineteenth century by Amir Shir Ali Khan
(18631879), who rendered all military titles in Pashto and ordered at
the same time that all military commands be delivered in Pashto. Amir
Shir Ali also introduced the title Loynab (the grand deputy or prime
minister). The latter title was later dropped, but the military designa-
tions and the series of Pashto military commands introduced by Amir
Shir Ali continued to be a part of Afghanistans military language.
During the reign of Amir Habibullah (19011919) the issue of lan-
guage became important. In 1911, Mahmud Tarzi, a famous Afghan
essayist who was the ideologue of the nascent Afghan modernist-
nationalist movement, published a series of articles on the importance
of language in Seraj al-Akhbar, the newspaper he edited. In one of his
articles he claimed that Afghani (Pashto) was the ancestor to all aryan
(Indo-Iranian) languages. He admitted, however, that his attitude
could have been biased by nationalist fervor.4 Shortly afterwards, Tarzi
devoted a column in Seraj al-Akhbar to Persian and Pashto literature
under the epigram A nation will not survive without its language
and a language will not survive without its literature. Four years later
in the issue of September 12, 1915, of Seraj al-Akhbar, Tarzi printed
another article under the title Language and its Importance in which
he declared that Persian (Dari) was the official language of Afghani-
stan and Pashto its national language.5 Although Tarzi himself wrote
exclusively in Dari, he urged readers to make a concerted effort to raise
the status of Pashto.6 For Tarzi and his associates, Gregorian points
out, Islam, Afghan history, and Pashto together formed the mortar
that would permit the countrys ethnic mosaic to be molded into a
single nation.7 Tarzi was aware of the cultural importance of Persian
and its political significance as an international language, spoken in
Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. He ranked Persian the second

4
Seraj al-Akhbar, vol. 2, no. 9, Dalw 3, 1291/Jan. 23, 1912.
5
Ibid., vol. 5, no. 2, Sonbola 20, 1294 (Sept. 12, 1915).
6
Ibid., vol. 5, no. 1, Sonbola 4, 1294 (August 27, 1915, pp. 2, 19, 5; vol. ii, no. 9,
pp. 9-12, cited in Gregorian, 1969, p. 175.
7
Gregorian, 1969, p. 175.
language policy in afghanistan 35

most important Middle Eastern language after Arabic and strongly


supported its designation as the official language of the state.8
The promulgation of new regulations relating to freedom of the
press during the reign of King Amanullah (19191929) stimulated a
rapid growth of literary activities. Several newspapers were started in
Qandahar and in the Eastern and Southern Provinces with articles in
Pashto. In 1927, a group of Pashtun scholars of Qandahar founded
the Pashto Maraka, or Pashto Society, with the support and encour-
agement of the government. The Associations main objective was to
promote Pashto language and literature. The Loya-Jirga of 1924 which
ratified Afghanistans first constitution, granted King Amanullah the
Pashto title Tolwak (the Sole Authority). By direction of the Loya-Jirga
of 1924, the text of the Constitution and all government regulations
were translated into Pashto. The Constitution, however, did not des-
ignate either of the languages as the national or the official language
of Afghanistan.
King Nadir Shah (19301933), who assumed power in the wake of
the chaos that resulted in King Amanullahs abdication in 1929, took
measures to promote Persian (Dari) and Pashto language and litera-
ture. During his years in France as the Afghan ambassador and later
as a private citizen in self-exile in France, Nadir Shah had become
acquainted with the work of the Acadmie Franaise and was inspired
by it. Using the Acadmie Franaise as his model, he established the
Anjoman-i-Adabi (Literary Society) in 1931 under the supervision of
the Royal Secretariat. The Societys most important achievement was
the publication of an historical and literary journal, Majalla-i Kabul
(Kabul Gazette), along with a yearbook, Salnama-i-Kabul, which was
identified on the back cover as LAlmanach de Kaboul. Gregorian notes
that the Anjoman (Literary Society) . . . pursued four aims: to study and
clarify the Afghan historical heritage; to study and promote Afghan lit-
erature and folklore; to study and promote the Pashto language; and to
spread knowledge about Afghanistan and its culture.9 The contribu-
tors included eminent scholars, writers and poets. These writers were
pioneers of the modern Afghan press and literary intelligentsia.10 The

8
Seraj al-Akhbar, vol. 5, no. 2, Sonbola 20, 1294 (Sept. 12, 1915).
9
Gregorian, 1969, p. 348.
10
Schinasi, forthcoming. Among the main contributors were imminent writers
and scholars, such as Sarwar Guya, Fikri Saljuqi, Muhammad Ali Kohzad, Gholam
Muhammad Ghobar, Sayyid Qasim Rishtiya, Ahmad Ali Durrani, Qari Abdullah,
36 senzil nawid

press continued to grow under Zahir Shah (19331973). Nadir Shahs


son and successor. During the first years of his reign, the two major
Kabul papers, Anis (Comrade) and Islah (Reform), which began as bi-
weeklies during the reign of King Amanullah, became daily, bilingual
publications. Other publications in the capital and in the provinces
also began to publish articles in Pashto.

2.4. The Official Language Problem

The choice of official languages became a vexing issue during the 1930s
and early 40s. In 1936, Pashto was declared the official language of
Afghanistan. Its use and promulgation were encouraged. A year later,
the Advisory Board of Education adopted regulations making Pashto
the medium of instruction at the elementary school level in all parts
of Afghanistan.11 The Literary Society, now under the jurisdiction of
the Ministry of Education, changed its name to Pashto Tolena (The
Pashto Academy) and was expanded to include several divisions.12 The
Academys main tasks were to produce Pashto dictionaries and stan-
dardize Pashto grammar and pronunciation. The Persian title of the
literary journal, Majalla-i-Kabul, was changed to De Kabul Mojalla, in
Pashto. The title of the yearbook was also changed to Pashto, De Kabul
Kalanai (The Kabul Annual). Later in 1941, the yearbook was changed
in Pashto to De Afghanistan Kalanai (The Afghanistan Annual ). How-
ever, despite the Pashto titles, the language of the content of the jour-
nal and yearbook remained predominantly Persian.
According to Sayyid Qasim Rishtya, the Minister of Press at a later
date, the intention of the ruling elite at the time in making Pashto
both the national and the official language was to strengthen national
unity and create a strong Afghan national identity through the pro-
motion of a single state language.13 The change was hailed by Pashtun
nationalists and intellectuals, who always aspired to a Pashtun, ethnic-

and Gholam Hazrat Bitab. The famous Pashto scholars who contributed to the new
literary and historical journal included Abdul Rauf Binawa, Gul Pacha Olfat, Sed-
diqullah Reshtin, Zemiryalai, and later Abdul Haiy Habibi, the well-known Afghan
scholar and historian.
11
Afghanistan dar Pinjah Sal-i-Akhir (Afghanistan in the Past Fifty Years). 1347/
1968, p. 61; Payinda M. Zahir and M Yusuf Ilmi, 1339/1960, p. 52.
12
Sayyid Qasim Rishtiya, 1992, 25.
13
Ibid.
language policy in afghanistan 37

based national identity. However, the effort to promote Pashto as the


official language of Afghanistan produced immediate problems. For
centuries, Dari had been the language of bureaucracy, instruction, and
commerce. As the lingua franca, it had been accepted over time by all
non-Dari speaking ethnic groups. Other ethnic groups, some Uzbeks,
for example, who were conversant in Persian (Dari), resented having
to learn Pashto as a third language.14 The shortage of trained Pashto
teachers in non-Pashtun speaking areas created an enormous chal-
lenge. The adverse effects of the policy on the countrys administrative,
economic, and educational infrastructure soon forced decision-makers
to reverse the policy and declare both Dari Persian and Pashto as offi-
cial languages of Afghanistan.
In 1946, Muhammad Hashim, King Zahir Shahs uncle and a pow-
erful force behind the throne, stepped down as Prime Minister to be
replaced by his liberal-leaning younger brother, Shah Mahmud Khan.
The new government restored Persian (Dari) as an official language.15
Rishtiya, newly-appointed Minister of Press, writes in his memoir
that the new Minister of Education (Najibullah Torwayana, himself a
Durrani Pashtun) believed that the change of medium of instruction
from Persian (Dari) to Pashto had been a big mistake and was caus-
ing irreparable harm to Afghanistans educational system.16 It was on
the basis of his recommendation that educational instruction became
bilingual. In Pashto-speaking areas, Pashto remained the medium of
instruction with students required to study Persian (Dari) as a second
language. In all other regions, instruction was in Persian with students
required to study Pashto as a second language.17
In the 1940s and 1950s, the government attempted to popular-
ize Pashto and promote its status as an official language. The Minis-
try of Information and Culture was charged with promoting Pashto
through the media. The Pashto Academy took the initiative to expand
the vocabulary of the language, to create an official orthography for
Pashto, and to promote research on Pashto language and literature.
One of the initial challenges of the Academy was to create honorif-
ics and courtesy titles in Pashto for official correspondence. The Per-
sian courtesy titles aqa (Sir or Mr.), khanom (Mrs.), and bigom (Miss,

14
This sentiment has been recently expressed by Nazif Shahrani, 1984, p. 55.
15
http://www.khyberwatch.com/forums/showthread.php?t=595&page=10
16
Rishtiya, op. cit.
17
Afghanistan dar Pinjah Sal-i Akhir, p. 52.
38 senzil nawid

which is actually a Turkish word) were changed to shaghilai, mirmon,


and pighla, Pashto equivalents. The Academy also created Pashto
equivalents for Arabic and Persian terms for use in official government
communications. Public and academic institutions, as well as hospi-
tals, clinics, drugstores, theaters, associations and organizations like
the Afghan Red Crescent, received Pashto designations. The Pashto
Academy also created academic titles in Pashto: pohand (professor),
pohanwal (associate professor), and pohanyar (assistant professor).
Academic institutions were given Pashto names, as well: pohantun
(university), pohanzai (college), etc.

2.4.1. Pashto and the Issue of Pashtunistan


The creation of Pakistan following the British withdrawal from the sub-
continent of India in 1947 prompted Afghanistan to raise the question
of the Durand Line and self-determination for Pashtunistan (British
occupied Pashtun territory), now claimed by Pakistan. These develop-
ments coincided with the birth of a Pashtun nationalist movement led
by Pashtun intellectuals. In 1947, the leaders of the movement which
included 22 young writers from Qandahar, Nangarhar and Kabul, pub-
lished a manifesto under the Pashto slogan weishzalmian ghwaru, We
want Awakened Youth and became known as the Weish Zalmian, The
Awakened Youth. By 1948, they were able to form . . . a political orga-
nization with a program, regular meetings and membership that advo-
cated a constitutional monarchy, separation of powers, free elections
and civil liberties.18 Their program concentrated on the issue of Pash-
tunistan and the promotion of the Pashto language vis--vis Persian.
In 1950, important members of the organization included Gul Pacha
Olfat, Muhammad Rasul Pashtun, Faiz Muhammad Angar, Abdul Rauf
Binawa, and Nur Muhammad Taraki, who later became the leader of
the Khalq division of the Afghan Marxist-Leninist Party.
With the rise to power of Muhammad Daoud, King Zahir Shahs
first cousin, as Prime Minister, the issue of Pashtunistan entered a new
phase. A staunch nationalist, Daoud took an unyielding position on
the issue of Pashtunistan and demanded the separation of Pashtun

18
Thomas Ruttig, Islamists, Leftistsand a Void in the Center: Afghanistans
Political Parties and where they come from (19022006). http://72.14.205.104
/search?q=cache:skD-zjg8hYcJ:www.kas.de/wf/doc/kas_9674-544-2-30.pdf+Wesh
+Dzalmian&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a.
language policy in afghanistan 39

territory from Pakistan. By the late 1950s, the issue of Pashtunistan


erupted into a serious political conflict between Afghanistan and Paki-
stan. In September 1961, Kabul and Islamabad severed diplomatic
relations and Pakistan sealed its border with Afghanistan. Closure
of the border had a disastrous impact on trade and on the Afghan
economy.
With the escalation of tension with Pakistan, Pashto became the
vehicle of radio propaganda against Pakistan. The number of Pashto
programs on Kabul Radio and the use of Pashto in the Afghan press
significantly increased during this period. However, in spite of govern-
ments concerted efforts to promote Pashto, Dari continued to domi-
nate business transactions, remained the medium of instruction of the
educational system and the official language for public administration
and the professions.

2.4.2. Official Bilingualism under Constitutional Monarchy


In March of 1963, when the issue of Pashtunistan turned into a
real crisis, Daoud was obliged to resign his post as Prime Minister.
Two months later, with mediation by the Shah of Iran, Pakistan and
Afghanistan reestablished diplomatic relations.
The resignation of Daoud, as the last member of the royal family to
share power with King Zahir Shah, and the normalization of relations
with Pakistan resulted in a change of course in Afghan politics. In
1963, King Zahir Shah chose Dr. Muhammad Yusuf, a non-Pashtun to
be Prime Minister. In 1964, with the support of King Zahir Shah, a new
constitution was promulgated establishing a constitutional monarchy.
Pashtun nationalists feared that reestablishment of diplomatic rela-
tions would lessen the governments interest in the issue of Pashtuni-
stan and reduce its commitment to propaganda against Pakistan and,
in turn, its commitment to promote Pashto language and culture. Dur-
ing the process of drafting and ratifying the new constitution, the issue
of language policy generated several days of heated debate.19 A report
prepared by the US Embassy in Kabul on May 23, 1964, states:
Differences over language, which are closely correlated to differences
between the dominant Pashtuns and the subordinate Farsi-speaking
ethnic groups, came to a head within the Commission during March

19
Rishtiya, p. 203.
40 senzil nawid

when a Pashtun member of the Commission suggested that the draft


Constitution employ phraseology which would commit the government
to support the purity of Pashto and emphasize its use as a national lan-
guage. An Uzbek member of the Commission reportedly stormed out of
the meeting concerning the sincerity of the professions of the Kings and
cabinet for the need to create a new Afghan national consciousness.20
The Pashtun nationalists continued to demand that Pashto be declared
the national and official language of Afghanistan, because the state
of Afghanistan had been established by Pashtuns and because Pashto
speakers constituted the largest ethnic group in the country. They
argued that, unlike Persian, which was spoken in other countries,
Pashto was spoken only in Afghanistan.21 The partisans of Persian
maintained that Persian had been Afghanistans literary language since
its origins in Balkh, Herat, and Ghazni in the 10th century and that
the spoken and literary language of Afghanistan was, in fact, Dari Per-
sian, which was quite different from the Persian spoken in Iran and
Tajikistan.
In a statement made prior to the announcement of the constitution,
Dr. Abd al-Zahir, President of the National Assembly and Chairman
of the Constitutional Advisory Commission, explained the final deci-
sion in the matter of language policy. He told reporters that Pashto
and Farsi would continue to be the two official languages of Afghani-
stan, as before, but that the latter would henceforth be called Dari
and not Farsi. Equal status would be accorded Dari as one of the two
indigenous languages of Afghanistan.22
At a subsequent press conference, Prime Minister Muhammad
Yusuf declared that Pashto had always been the national language,
because it was imbedded in Afghanistans cultural and political history
and because of the large number of people who speak it. He stressed
that notwithstanding the importance of Pashto, sufficient attention
had not been given its development and promotion. He announced
that the new Constitution would include a provision for the adoption
of effective measures to promote Pashto and remedy the negligence
of the previous governments in this area, because it is essential for all

20
US Embassy Report, Airgram, May 23, 1964, Kabul, US Department of State, Pol.
15-5 AFG, 95900. Afghanistan-Pakistan Documents by Paul Wolf. http://www.icdc
.com/~paulwolf/pakistan/ashford23may1964.htm.
21
These sentiments have been expressed by Nazif Shahrani.
22
Afghanistan: Experiment in Democracy, Documents from the U.S. National
Archives, 19611973, http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/pakistan/afghanistan.htm.
language policy in afghanistan 41

the people of Afghanistan to learn their national language and become


proficient in it.23
Article 3 of the Constitution stated that from amongst the lan-
guages of Afghanistan, Pashto and Dari shall be the official languages.
It declared Pashto as the national language of Afghanistan. Article 35
announced that the state was responsible to prepare and implement an
effective program for the strengthening of the national language.
Subsequent to the announcement of the constitution, the govern-
ment introduced specific measures to achieve this objective. The Min-
istries of Education and Press were instructed to work out a practicable
plan for promotion of the Pashto language in cooperation with other
governmental departments. New regulations were passed requiring
Dari-speaking civil servants to attend after-hour Pashto classes. Failure
to attend resulted in the reduction of monthly pay.
In 1968, a literacy campaign was launched under the guidance of the
Ministry of Education and The Pashto Academy with assistance from
UNESCO.24 These efforts were not very successful, and the American
embassy reported
. . . moves to strengthen the badly faltering Pashto language program
might help to allay the fears of those Pashtuns who are reported appre-
hensive that the downgrading of Pashtunistan, specially as signaled in
recent reduction of propaganda, may foreshadow a further decline in
the [governments] interest in the promotion of Pashto language and
culture. There are some indications that the RGA may intend to place
more emphasis on Pushtu (sic), but it is doubted that a really serious
effort in this direction will be made. . . .25
Not all measures adopted by the government failed. The Pashto Acad-
emy achieved visible success in promoting Pashto literature. The
Department of Pashto Language and Literature at Kabul University
also made big strides. Other languages spoken in Afghanistan also
received attention. Research was conducted on different languages by

23
Muhammad Yusuf s press conference dated June 17, 1964, cited in Afghanistan
dar Dawra-i-Inteqali (Afghanistan during the Period of Transition). Kabul: Govern-
ment Press, 1965, p. 102.
24
Torpekai Sultani (Representative of Kibou no Gakko, Japan). The Current
Situation of Basic Education in Afghanistan, http://72.14.205.104/search?q=cache:
AlqhRGRHhbEJ:www.criced.tsukuba.ac.jp/pdf/04_Afghanistan_Sultani.pdf+Pashto
+tolena&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us&client=firefox-a.
25
Herbert B. Leggett report, US Embassy in Kabul, Embassys A-546, July 13, 1963,
http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/pakistan/leggett13july1963.htm.
42 senzil nawid

Afghan scholars in the Department of Linguistics at Kabul University


and by non-Afghan scholars elsewhere.

2.4.3. Democracy and Ethno-Linguistic Awareness


Following ratification of the Constitution and restoration of freedom
of the press, which had been suspended during Daouds government,
several political organizations emerged: the Pashtun socialist-nation-
alist Afghan Millat (Afghan Nation); the pro-Soviet Marxist-Leninist
Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (the PDPA); the Maoist
Shola-i-Jawid (Eternal Flame), and the anti-Pashtun organization,
Setam-i-Milli (National Oppression). This latter party was formed in
the late 1960s by Taher Badakhshi, a Tajik who had been a member of
the PDPA Central Committee. The Setam-i-Milli bore a resemblance
to the Shola-i-Jawid in its emphasis on militant class struggle and
mass mobilization of peasants. It recruited members from minority
communities in Kabul and gained support in the northeastern prov-
inces from Tajiks, Uzbek and other minorities.
In 1967, the PDPA divided into two factions: the Khalq (Masses),
under the leadership of Nur Muhammad Taraki; and Parcham (Ban-
ner), led by Babrak Karmal, a former president of the Afghan Student
Union. The leaders of the two factions of the PDPA were both Pash-
tuns. Taraki and his close collaborator, Hafizullah Amin, came from
rural Ghilzai Pashtun backgrounds and the membership of the Khalq
faction was composed predominantly of Pashtuns from rural areas.26
Karmal, on the other hand, was a Dari-speaker of Kashmiri descent
and came from an urban background.27 His father, a former governor
of Paktia Province, had close ties with the ruling family. The Parcham
constituency was mostly urban, composed of middle or upper middle
class people of Kabul, Dari-speaking Pashtuns, Hazaras, and Tajiks.
In the late 1960s a group of university students and professors in
the Department of Theology at Kabul University formed the Afghan
Muslim Youth Organization, which later became known as Jamiat-
i-Islami-i Afghanistan (The Islamic Organization of Afghanistan).
The organizers were Borhanuddin Rabbani, a professor of theology
at Kabul University and a Tajik from Badakhshan, and Golbudin

26
Edwards, 2002, pp. 46-8.
27
Ruben, 1995, p. 126.
language policy in afghanistan 43

Hekmatyar, an engineering student and a Pashtun from Qunduz in


northern Afghanistan. The Islamic Organization later split into two
parties.
The political organizations that emerged during the period of con-
stitutional monarchy dominated Afghan politics for years to come.
Ethnicity and language were important dimensions of the politics of
most of these groups.

2.4.4. Language Policy of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan


(DRA), 19871992
In 1973, King Zahir Shah, who had ruled the country since 1933, was
ousted in a coup led by his cousin Muhammad Daoud. In 1977, dur-
ing Daouds presidency the factions of the PDPA re-united through
the good offices of the Soviet Embassy in Kabul. In April of the next
year, the PDPA came to power when President Daoud was killed in
a bloody military coup led by army officers affiliated with the party.
Once in power, the PDPA established the Democratic Republic of
Afghanistan (DRA).
Positions in the initial cabinet, formed following the April coup,
were carefully apportioned between the Khalq and Parcham factions.
Taraki was named Premier and Chair of the Revolutionary Coun-
cil (RC). Karmal was named Senior Deputy Premier, and Hafizullah
Amin was named Foreign Minister.
In his first radio talk broadcast on May 5, 1978, Taraki asserted
that the PDPA had no association whatsoever with Communism and
called allegations to the contrary seditious fabrications.28 In fact, the
government that emerged from the coup dtat in 1978 was Marxist-
Leninist, based on the Soviet model.
In April and May of 1978, the PDPA Revolutionary Council issued
a series of decrees setting forth the goals of the new regime. Decree
Number 4 issued on May 15 declared the regimes commitment to
the equality of all ethno-linguistic groups. It asserted that the lan-
guages spoken by seven ethnic groups of Afghanistan are the national
languages of the country. These are Pashto, Dari, Uzbeki, Turkmani,

28
Amin Tarzi, Lessons from the Past: The Saur Putsch, Afghanistan Report. 1 May
2003, vol. 2, no. 15, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2003/05/15-
010503.htm.
44 senzil nawid

Nuristani, Pashai and Baluchi. This PDPA language policy conformed


to Lenins egalitarian view regarding the equality of nations and
languages and his declaration that full equality includes the negation
of any privileges for one of the languages.29 The PDPAs language
policy was hailed in 2003 in The Weekly Worker of the Communist
Party of Great Britain:
Oppressed language groups heard their mother tongue on Kabul Radio
for the first time. Pushtan (sic) domination officially ended. Constitu-
tionally, the country became a multinational state. A secular state too.
Islam was not subjected to any attacks, but the state promised neither to
promote nor interfere with any religion.30
The PDPA regime introduced several measures to demonstrate its
commitment to the development of various languages and the eth-
nic groups speaking them. As pointed out above, the majority of the
Khalqis were Ghilzai Pashtuns from rural areas with strong tribal alle-
giances. Karmal and his close associates came from urbanized Pash-
tun families, who according to the Khalqis lacked traditional Pashtun
values. Notwithstanding their socialist ideology, Taraki and his fol-
lowers were Pashtun nationalists. Taraki himself was once a member
of the Pashtun nationalist Awakened Youth. According to Ahady, the
Khalqis stealthily harbored the dream of making Pashto Afghanistans
predominant language.
Interethnic relations received primary attention when the communists
came to power in 1978. During their reign the Khalq faction (19781979)
of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA), the communist
authorities, in addition to Pashto and Dari (Persian), recognized Uzbeki,
Turkmani, Baluchi, and Nuristani as official languages. Although this
seemed like an attempt by the Khalq faction to weaken the dominance
of the Pashtuns, in reality the policy was intended to weaken the status
of Dari and eventually promote Pashto as the language of interethnic
communication.31

29
Cited in Michael Bruchis The Effect of the USSRs Language Policy on the
National Languages of Its Turkic Population. In Yaacov Roi, ed., The USSR and
the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy. London: George Allen and
Unwin, 1984, 129.
30
James Marshall, Fight reaction on all fronts, Weekly Worker, 408, Thursday
November 15, 2001.
31
Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, Decline of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan. Asian Survey,
vol. 35, no. 7, July 1995, 622.
language policy in afghanistan 45

This plan conformed to the MarxistLeninist tenet of sliyaniye (the


eventual merger of all languages and cultures into one).32
An important component of the DRA language policy was a cam-
paign against illiteracy. Mass illiteracy presented a major obstacle to
the PDPAs goal to build a socialist society. Lenin claimed that it is
impossible to build a Communist society in a country where people
are illiterate.33 Following the model of Soviet policy in Central Asia,
the PDPA launched an aggressive adult literacy campaign, targeting
women in particular due to the high percentage of illiterate women
in Afghan society. However, as a result of widespread revolt against
many of the policies the PDPA and the Soviet military presence in
Afghanistan, the campaign against illiteracy was ultimately confined
to areas surrounding the capital under the regimes control.
Opposition to the DRA emerged almost immediately after the
announcement of Revolutionary Councils radical new policies. Insur-
gence broke out in Herat a few months after the PDPA takeover and
soon spread to the other parts of the country. By the end of 1978, the
PDPA declared four groups to be enemies of the regime: the Islamic
Organization of Afghanistan, the Millat organized by Pashtun nation-
alists, the Shola-i-Jawid Maoists, and the Setam i-Milli (a group with
Maoist leanings that advocated Tajik and Uzbek separatism). The
PDPAs endorsement of all minority languages as national languages
and its commitment to promote them contributed little to the effort
to win support from ethnically-based political groups.
The regime was weakened further by bitter in-fighting between the
Khalq and Parcham factions of the PDPA. The two factions differed
in their strategies for implementing Marxist-Leninist ideology. Taraki
advocated revolutionary change and was in favor of building a tightly
disciplined working-class in the classical Leninist fashion in order
to realize the goals of the PDPA revolution. Karmal, on the other
hand, believed that Afghanistan was not ready for full-scale adoption
of Leninist strategy. He thought that a national democratic front of
patriotic and anti-imperialist forces had to be fostered in order to

32
Kreindler, Isabelle. Lenin, Russian, and Soviet Language Policy. International
Journal of the Sociology of Language, 33, 1982, pp. 129-35.
33
John McLeish, The Soviet Conquest of Illiteracy. The Alberta Journal of Educa-
tional Research, vol. 18, 1972, p. 310.
46 senzil nawid

bring the country a step closer to socialist revolution.34 The two fac-
tions were also deeply divided by ethnic and tribal rivalries.35

2.5. Ascendance of the Parcham and Draft of a


New Constitution

The merger of the Khalq and Parcham, facilitated and mediated by


the Soviet embassy in Kabul in 1976, did not eliminate deep-seated
social, ethnic, ideological, and often personal differences between the
two factions. Rivalry between the two re-emerged almost immediately
after the PDPA assumed power in the spring of 1978. The Khalqis,
who benefited from the loyalty of most of the officer corps, conspired
to remove Parchamis from power by sending the top Parcham leaders
as ambassadors into exile and by dismissing or arresting others.
Intense rivalry within the Khalq leadership emerged shortly there-
after resulting in the mysterious death of Taraki and the usurpation
of power by Amin. The continuing factional in-fighting and growing
strength of the resistance to the PDPA regime in the following year
eventually led to military intervention by the Soviet Union. In Decem-
ber 1979, Soviet troops entered Kabul to prevent the fall of the PDPA
Marxist regime. Amin was killed and Babrak Karmal, the Parcham
leader, was placed in power by the Soviets. Karmal quickly formed
a new coalition of Parchamis and anti-Amin Khalqis. By 1984, eight
of the thirteen members of the PDPA Politburo were Parchamis. The
remaining five were Khalqis.
Following the Soviet intervention, civil war broke out across the
country, with mujahedin freedom fighters battling the government
army and more than 100,000 Soviet soldiers. Despite the backing of
an expeditionary force that grew as large as 120,000 Soviet troops,
the PDPA was unable to maintain authority in the face of widespread
opposition to their rule. In 1986, Karmal was pressured by the Soviets
to step down in favor of yet another Pashtun Najibullah, a former
head of KHAD, the Afghan security organization. Najibullah declared
a program of National Reconciliation, signaling the PDPAs willing-
ness to back away from radical Marxist-Leninist policies.

34
A Revolution Backfires, Government Publication Access, Afghanistan Country
Study, www.gl.iit.edu/govdocs/afghanistan/ARevolutionBackfires.html.
35
Edwards, pp. 46-7.
language policy in afghanistan 47

In 1987, Najibullah introduced another constitution. Article 13 of


the new constitution declared Afghanistan a multi-national state that
would promote growth, understanding, friendship, and cooperation
between all nationalities, tribes and clans of the country to ensure
political, economic, social, and cultural equality and rapid growth of
regions. Article 13 stipulated further that the state would gradually
prepare the grounds for the creation of administrative units based on
national characteristics.
Article 14 declared that the state would adopt the necessary mea-
sures for the growth of culture, language and literature of the people
of Afghanistan and would preserve and develop the worthy cultural,
traditional, linguistic, literary and folkloric legacy of all nationalities,
clans, and tribes.
Article 90 affirmed that the laws and resolutions of the National
Assembly would be published in the Pashto and Dari languages and
could also be published in the languages of other nationalities. Article
98 declared that trial and judgment in the courts would be conducted
in Pashto and Dari, or the language of the majority of the residents of
the place. If a party to a case did not understand the language in which
the trial was conducted, he would have the right to become acquainted
with the materials and documents of the case through an interpreter
and the right to address the court in his mother language.36
The Marxists reaffirmed the status of Pashto, along with Dari, as an
official language of Afghanistan and recognized all of the languages of
the seven major ethnic groups of Afghanistan as national languages.
In the long run, this regionally and ethnically-based language policy
accentuated the ethnic and linguistic divisions of the country and pro-
vided a platform for the ethnic and linguistic groupings of the muja-
hedin and the eventual rise of regional warlords.

2.6. Ethnic and Linguistic Rivalry in the Islamic


Republic of Afghanistan

Ethnic and linguistic rivalry worsened after the fall of the PDPA in
1992. Najibullahs attempts to moderate the PDPAs reforms and bring
about national reconciliation (ashti-milli) did not diminish resistance

36
Constitution of Republic of Afghanistan. Kabul: Albiruni Publishing House, June,
1990.
48 senzil nawid

to the regime. Even though the Soviet Union had withdrawn its troops
from Afghanistan in 1989, resistance to the Soviet-backed government
continued, and the regime collapsed with the takeover of Kabul by
mujahedin forces in April 1992.
Following the mujahedin victory, a Loya-Jirga, or grand council of
Afghan elders, was supposed to be convened to designate an interim
administration that would hold power for up to a year, pending elec-
tions. Instead, in May 1992, a religious leadership council (ahl-i-hal
wa al-aql) elected Burhanudin Rabbani to form the Islamic Republic
of Afghanistan. Intense factional warfare erupted after the selection of
Rabbani as president by the religious leadership council, and Kabul
was quickly ravaged by civil war. Outside the capital, local warlords
took power over their regions.
The Rabbani government lacked sufficient administrative capacity
to enforce any kind of language policy. Inasmuch as his organiza-
tion, Jamiat-i-Islami, derived most of its support from the Dari- and
Turkic-speaking minorities in the northern part of Afghanistan, con-
certed efforts were made during his four-years presidency to diminish
the use and weaken the influence of Pashto. In 1995 Ahady wrote:
The Pashto language has also lost status in the government controlled
media, radio, television, and newspapers. Since the 1920s and before the
downfall of the Najibullah regime, the development and popularization
of Pashto received preferential treatment in the governments cultural
policy, or at least equality with Dari, and 50% or more of radio-tv pro-
grams were in Pashto. Since April 1992 Pashto-language programs have
decreased drastically, and the official print media allocates even less
space to Pashto.37
A notable additional measure was the change of the language of the
national anthem from Pashto into Dari.

2.7. Resurgence of Pashto under the Taliban

In 1996, after four years of civil war, Taliban forces took over Kabul
and toppled the Rabbani regime. The rise of the Taliban, who were
primarily Pashtuns, resulted in a resurgence of Pashtun nationalism.

37
Anwar ul-Haq Ahady, p. 624.
language policy in afghanistan 49

The issue of Pashtunistan was sidelined with the establishment of


the Soviet-backed regime in 1987 and the emigration of large num-
bers of Pashtun refugees from Afghanistan to the North-West Fron-
tier Province in Pakistan. In the 1980s, Pakistans position regarding
the issue of Pashtunistan was strengthened with the formation in the
North-West Frontier Province of seven anti-Marxist Afghan resistant
groups, making the region the center of resistance against the Soviet-
backed regime in Kabul. The issue of Pashtunistan, however, did
not die. Notwithstanding continuing support from Pakistan, Mullah
Umar, the Taliban leader, refused to give in to pressure from Pakistan
to accept the Durand Line as the official boundary between Aghani-
stan and Pakistan.
The Taliban did not announce an official language policy, but
Pashto was the de facto official language of their government. During
their five-year rule, Pashto became, for the first time in Afghan history,
the sole language of interdepartmental correspondence. As the result,
many non-Pashtun Afghans found themselves disadvantaged and dis-
criminated against in dealing with government authorities. One of the
reasons for the stringent imposition of Pashto during the Taliban era
was the Taliban leaders lack of knowledge of Dari. Unlike most edu-
cated urban Pashtuns, the Taliban were trained in local madrasas in
tribal areas and had very little or no training in Dari.

2.8. Language Policy in the Post Taliban Era

Following the removal of the Taliban from power by coalition forces in


October 2001, a new Afghan constitution was promulgated three years
later in 2004. Unlike previous Afghan constitutions, the new constitu-
tion did not designate any languages of Afghanistan as the national
language. Article 4 of the 2004 constitution reads in part: The nation
of Afghanistan is composed of all individuals who possess the citi-
zenship of Afghanistan. The nation of Afghanistan shall be comprised
of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmans, Baluchis, Pachaies,
Nuristanis, Aymaqs, Arabs, Qirghizs, Qizilbashs, Gujurs, and Brah-
wuis. However, Article 16 states,
From amongst Pashto, Dari, Uzbeki, Turkmani, Baluchi, Pachaie,
Nuristani, Pamiri and other current languages in the country, Pashto
and Dari shall be the official languages of the state. In areas where the
majority of the people speak in any one of Uzbeki, Turkmani, Pachaie,
50 senzil nawid

Nuristani, Baluchi or Pamiri languages, any of the aforementioned lan-


guages, in addition to Pashto and Dari, shall be the third official language,
the usage of which shall be regulated by law. The state shall design and
apply effective programs to foster and develop all languages of Afghani-
stan. Usage of all current languages in the country shall be permissible in
press publications and mass media. Past academic and national adminis-
trative terminology and usage in the country shall be preserved.
Unlike the Constitution of 1964 under King Zahir Shah, the Constitu-
tion of 2004 does not designate Pashto as Afghanistans national lan-
guage. However, in Article 20 it designates an Afghan national anthem
in Pashto that declares that God is Great and names all of the tribes
of Afghanistan.
The new anthem in Pashto, which was introduced shortly after rati-
fication of the Constitution of 2004, portrays unity among the various
ethnic groups that call Afghanistan their home, and it ends with an
Islamic phrase in Arabic declaring Afghanistans allegiance to Islam.
This land is Afghanistan. It is the pride of every Afghan. The land of
peace, the land of the sword. Its sons are all brave. This is the country of
every tribe. Land of Baluchis and Uzbeks, Pashtuns and Hazaras, Turk-
mans and Tajiks. With them Arabs and Gojars, Pamiris, Nuristanis, Bar-
ahawis and Qizilbashs. Also Aimaqs and Pashaies. This Land will shine
forever. Like the sun in the blue sky. In the chest of Asia. It will remain
its heart forever. We will follow the One God. We all say, God is Great.
We all say, God is Great.

2.9. Summary

Language policy in Afghanistan from the 1930s until the establish-


ment of the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan by the PDPA in 1978
emphasized the importance of Pashto as the national language, because
Pashto was spoken by the largest ethno-linguistic community, and also
because it reflected the Pashtun character of the Afghan state from its
establishment by Ahmad Shah in 1747. In spite of government efforts
during the 1930s to gradually phase out Dari in favor of Pashto, Dari
retained its status as the language of administration, the medium of
instruction, and the lingua franca. A combination of internal social
dynamics and external factors contributed to the development of
Pashto during the 1950s and 60s. Until the announcement of consti-
tutional monarchy in 1964, language policy as a whole was dictated by
the ruling elite. The Constitution of 1964 was the first constitutional
language policy in afghanistan 51

document to actually address language policy. It reinstated Pashto as


Afghanistans national language but designated Dari and Pashto both
as official languages of the state.
The establishment of the Marxist regime by the PDPA in 1978
brought a major change in Afghan language policy. The PDPA adopted
an egalitarian language policy, recognizing all the languages of the
seven major ethnic groups as national languages of Afghanistan. As
a result, Pashto lost its status as Afghanistans national language but
remained one of the official languages of the state.
The Constitution of 2004, which was ratified after the fall of the
Taliban, recognizes all ethnic groups of Afghanistan, without men-
tioning the language of any particular ethnic group as Afghanistans
national language.38 The status of Pashto as the language of the largest
ethnic group is recognized only in the fact that the language of the
national anthem is Pashto. As with all other Afghan constitutions, it
accords equal, official status to Pashto and Dari. However, the use and
influence of Dari remains pervasive.
As in all other periods of Afghan history, language policy at the end
of the first decade of the twenty-first century is not being implemented
to the satisfaction of the Pashtuns. According to a report of Radio
Free Europe, the language most commonly in use in schools and in
administration is Dari, and many Pashtuns feel that their language
suffers discrimination, because Dari persists as the dominant language
in Afghan government offices, at official meetings, in the courts, in
publications and on radio and television programs.39

References

Afghanistan dar Dawra-i-Inteqali (Afghanistan during the Period of Transition).


(1965). Kabul: Government Press.
Afghanistan dar Pinjah Sal-i-Akhir (Afghanistan in the Past Fifty Years). Kabul: Gov-
ernment Press, 1347/1968.

38
Although other polities recognize a distinction between national and official
language, the distinction is often unclear. In the case of Afghanistan, the distinction
marks the status of the language of the community that played the leading role in the
establishment of the Afghan polity, as distinct from Persian, which has always been
the language of administration.
39
Copyright (c) 2003. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free
Europe. /www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2003/11/mil-031103-rferl-
154117.htm.
52 senzil nawid

Anwar ul-Haq Ahady. (1995). Decline of the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, Asian Survey,
vol. 35, no. 7, July 1995.
Bruchis, Michael. (1984). The Effect of the USSRs Language Policy on the National
Languages of Its Turkic Population, in Yaacov Roi, ed., The USSR and the Muslim
World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Constitution of Republic of Afghanistan. 1990. Kabul: Albiruni Publishing House, June,
1990.
Edwards, David B. (2002). Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Gregorian, Vartan. (1969). The Emergence of Modern Afghanistan. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Kreindler, Isabelle. (1982). Lenin, Russian, and Soviet Language Policy, Interna-
tional Journal of the Sociology of Language, 33.
Marshall, James. (2001). Fight reaction on all fronts, Weekly Worker, 408, Thursday
November 15, 2001.
McLeish, John. (1972). The Soviet Conquest of Illiteracy, The Alberta Journal of
Educational Research, 18.
Rishtiya, Sayyid Qasim. (1992). Khaterat-i-Siyasi-i- (Political Memoirs). Peshawar:
Markaz-i- Mutaliat-i-Afghani.
Ro I, Yaacov, (ed.) (1984). The USSR and the Muslim World: Issues in Domestic and
Foreign Policy. London: George Allen and Unwin.
Ruben, Barnet. (1994). The Fragmentation of Afghanistan. New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press.
Ruttig, Thomas. Islamists, Leftistsand a Void in the Center: Afghanistans Political
Parties and Where They Come From (19022006).
Schinasi, May. Sal-nama-i-Mojalla-i-Kabul, Encyclopedia Iranica (forthcoming).
Seraj al-Akhbar-I Afghaniya, Kabul, 19111918.
Shahrani, Nazif. (1984). Marxist Revolution and Islamic Resistance in Afghanistan,
in Sharani, N. and Canfield, R. Revolutions and Rebellions in Afghanistan: Anthro-
pological Perspectives. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Tarzi, Amin. (2003). Lessons from the Past: The Saur Putsch, Afghanistan Report.
1 May 2003, vol. 2, no. 15.
Zahir, Payinda M. and M. Yusuf Ilmi. (1339/1960). De Afghanistan de Maarif Tarikh
Bilingual. Kabul: the Ministry of Education Press.
CHAPTER THREE

LOCATING PASHTO IN AFGHANISTAN:


A SURVEY OF SECONDARY SOURCES

Walter Hakala

3.1. Introduction

Writing about the state of Pashto in Afghanistan is not an easy task,


and doing so without reference to Pashto (or pakhto, as might be
argued) in Pakistan is quite impossible.1 From the outset, then, there
are essentially two difficulties in this task: first, in isolating from the
broader Pashto universe a purely (or even partially) Afghan experi-
ence, and second, in delimiting what Pashto is as a language or set
of dialects, whether confined to Afghanistan or located more broadly
in Pakistan.2 This chapter attempts to draw out some of the issues
inherent in such a project through a primarily derivative discussion of
mostly English-language material describing the Pashto language as it

1
I have benefited immensely from the extensive comments of Harold Schiffman
and James Caron, both of the Department of South Asia Studies at the University
of Pennsylvania, and I am grateful to them for steering me away from a number
of errors in interpretation. Responsibility for the errors that remain, however, rests
entirely with me. The reader of this study will likely note two great shortcomings,
one for which I may beg some indulgence, and the other clearly less excusable. The
first is the dearth of references to Soviet scholarship on Pashto, due mostly to my
unfamiliarity with Russian. The second absence is that of references to scholarship
on Pashto produced in Pashto, Farsi, and Urdu, for which I cannot wholly claim
the excuse of linguistic incompetence. All translations (from the Pashto, French, and
German) and responsibility for mistranslations are, of course, entirely mine. I am
particularly dissatisfied with the incomplete and inconsistent historical narrative that
emerges from this survey. A more complete historical account of the languageone
that takes into consideration not just the literature but the sociology of Pashto writing
and reading in past centuries and combines this with recent fieldwork among Pashto
speakers from a variety of backgrounds (such as has been carried out by Rzehak and
others)is a great desideratum. Filling part of the historical gap is Carons PhD dis-
sertation (2009), which is a significant contribution to our understanding of the period
from approximately 1915 to 1960. Following the preponderance of source materials
included here, years are given as Anno Domini and dates are written according to the
Gregorian calendar.
2
I have since discovered that Dunning Wilson (1969) was grappling with the same
issues in his attempt to define an Afghan Literature.
54 walter hakala

exists (more or less) in Afghanistan. Attempting to identify Pashtos


place within a putative diglossic sociolinguistic situation presents a
number of challenges. As will be clear from the discussions below,
there exists no single written standard Pashto, and this situation has
only been underscored, it would seem, by the political instability of the
Pashto-speaking region in the past century. Moreover, to the extent
that a written record of Pashto may be traced, we observe that it has
been influenced by contact with several languages of administration
and statecraft, and that the socio-political prestige of these languages
has shiftedoften dramaticallyover time. Indeed, because of both
the political instability and the historical involvement of Pashto-
speaking peoples in long-distance overland trade and military labor
(see Gommans 1995; Wink 1990; Wink 1997) where Pashto itself has
been privileged,3 it becomes apparent that the sociolinguistic situation
of the Pashtun people is perhaps too complex to be reduced to a neat
classical diglossic formula, either of the Fergusonian or Fishman type.
When viewed as a whole, the research currently available suggests that
indexing the sociolinguistic situation of Pashto to shifts in political
policy over time would prove less fruitful than models focused on
individual language use and life experiences. To produce a convincing
historical account of individual language use, however, would require
extensive and diverse ethnographic data from the modern period, as
well as a combination of literary analysis and studies of the modes of
Pashto education and diplomatics for the earlier periods.

3.2. Review of Literature

The front matter accompanying the several better-known Pashto gram-


mars (Lorenz 1982; Meyer-Ingwersen 1966; Penzl 1955; Raverty 1987
[1860]; Shafeev and Paper 1964) provides one with a good historical
picture of the development of our understanding of Pashto over the
course of the last one and a half centuries. Several articles have also been
written specifically discussing the variation in pronunciation one finds
amongst speakers of Pashto for certain corresponding orthographic
symbols (Morgenstierne and Lloyd-James 1928; Penzl 1954). On the
basis of perceived degrees of phonemic adherence or non-adherence to

3
Evocative and exotic descriptions of which may be found in the fiction of Rudyard
Kipling and in Rabindranath Tagores short story The Cabuliwallah.
locating pashto in afghanistan 55

Pashto orthography, new attempts were made to enumerate and cata-


logue dialects of Pashto, and, in particular, to identify from among
them a standard Pashto (MacKenzie 1959; Dupree 1984; Henderson
1983). By focusing instead upon morphological and morphosyntactic
traits, and through a study of other languages whose speakers live more
or less coextensively with those of Pashto, some French-language work
has been able to avoid this debate (Fussman 1972; Kieffer 1973; Kieffer
1975; Kieffer 2003; Septfonds 1994). Recently, sociolinguistic studies of
Pashto (inspired by the work of Fishman and others) have been made
diachronically connecting language use with disparate socio-political
realities, including the development of Pashtun civil society (Caron
2009), Dari bilingualism (Miran 1974; Cannon 1963), language policy
in the 1970s (Dupree 1978; Miran 1977a; Miran 1977b), the large scale
refugee displacements caused by the Soviet war (Pstrusiska 1992),
and Taliban rule (Rzehak 2008).

3.3. Defining Afghan and Pashtun

As is well known, the Pashtun people place a great deal of pride upon
their language as an identifier of their distinct ethnic and historical
identity. While it is clear that not all those who self-identify as ethni-
cally Pashtun themselves use Pashto as their primary language, lan-
guage does seem to be one of the primary markers of ethnic identity
in contemporary Afghanistan. As Crews and Tarzi (2008: 21) note,
the boundary separating Pashtuns from others has been fluid in a
variety of contexts. Some self-identified Pashtuns speak only Dari (the
dialect of Persian spoken in Afghanistan), while some Tajiks speak
only Pashto, though they are not regarded by surrounding Pashtuns as
members of their community because they do not own land or belong
to the Pashtun tribal structure. In the case of a Pashtun tribe residing
in the southwestern province of Nimroz, the western border of which
is with Iran and whose southern border is adjacent to the Pakistani
province of Baluchistan, a recent observer notes that while
Nurzi are Pashtuns by origin [. . . and m]embers of this tribe still regard
themselves as Pashtuns in regions with a predominantly Pashtun popu-
lation. In regions like Nimroz, where the majority is Baluch, however,
most Nurzi switched over to the Baluch language and even adopted a
Baluch identity. Here only elderly Nurzi still use Pashto as their primary
language and will specify their ethnicity as Pashtun if they are asked
(Rzehak 2008: 383n2).
56 walter hakala

Barfield (2007: 11) depicts Pashtun identity as a sort of Venn diagram


where those claiming Pashtun descent belong to the largest circle,
those using the Pashto language appear as a smaller subset, and those
adhering to the Pashtun code of conduct are the most authentic
Pashtuns of all.4 The Pashtun reputation for fierce independence and
cultural insularity has led one observer to comment that they are per-
haps the largest tribal community living in the world today (Heston
and Nasir 1989: 11; cf. Barfield 2007: 1). While this cultural pride is
by no means unique in the South Asian context,5 as a large, highly
self-aware ethnic group it must be said that this emphasis on a shared
language comes in spite of several political and geographic factors that
might have otherwise served to produce cultural fissures (Barth 1969:
117). The supposed homeland of the Pashtuns, Pastnkhw (
Urdu: pakhtnkhwh, lit. Pashtun side/quarter/locality), is
itself divided by significant mountains, the Sulaiman Range, to which
the international border between the modern nations of Pakistan and
Afghanistan more or less corresponds. This division was established
when, in 1879, following the Second Anglo-Afghan War, the Afghan
government conceded control of all the passes into India to the Brit-
ish and in 1893 the Durand Line was established (Ahmed and Titus
1992; Hopkins 2009).

4
It would seem to go without saying that Pashtuns adhere to the Islamic faith,
overwhelmingly as Sunnis of the Hanafi school. This, rather than language, is a central
marker of identity for Barth (1969: 119). The Pashto language for him is a neces-
sary and diacritical feature, but in itself not sufficient: we are not dealing simply with
a linguistic group. Insofar as it is necessary to do Pashto, not just speak Pashto,
the bar for authentic belonging within this ethnic group is set quite high relative to
other proximal identities. With regard to their interactions with Baluchis in southern
Afghanistan, Barth notes that there is a flow of personnel from Pathan groups to
Baluch groups, and not vice versa. Indeed, large parts of some Baluch tribes acknowl-
edge Pathan origin. However, the incorporation of Pathans into Baluch type political
structures goes hand in hand with a loss of Pathan ethnic identity, so the categorical
dichotomy of Pathan tribes and Baluch tribes remains (124-5). As such, maintain-
ing Pashtun identity is a matter of some social distinction, though no study to my
knowledge considers Pashtun identity through an application of Bourdieus theories
of a market of symbolic goods (see, e.g., Bourdieu 1985, 1991, 1993). By contrast,
in regions where Pashtuns enjoy unrivaled political hegemony, non-Pashtun groups
tend to adopt a Pashtun style of life, causing the term Pashtn (or Pakhtn as it may
be) increasingly in those regions to designate the whole population in contrast to the
population of other, non-Pashto-speaking areas (Barth 1969: 128).
5
The classic study of this is, of course, Paul Brass work (1974), whose main focus is
on language and identity in North India (in particular Uttar Pradesh) following Inde-
pendence. Titus (1998) gives an excellent treatment of colonial stereotypes of Pashtun
and Baloch ethnic types, demonstrating how these notions have in themselves become
central in the formation of contemporary Pashtun and Baluch identity.
locating pashto in afghanistan 57

The terms ( afhn) and ( pastn, Persian: , pashtn,


Urdu: pakhtn), or the more commonly rendered Afghan
and Pashtun, have somewhat more complicated connotations than
the paragraph above might suggest. Although the political terms
Pakhtnistn and Afhnistn are unlikely to be confused with the
other, the terms afhn and pastn often are conflated (see, e.g., a dis-
cussion of this in Ahmadi 2008: 46, Barfield 2010: 24). Dupree, writ-
ing in 1976, described the common identification of the two terms in
Afghanistan, where
Rural non-Pushtuns, villagers and nomads, always refer to the Pushtun
as Afghan, and consider themselves to be separate breeds of ethnic cat.
The pure Pashtun or pure Afghan, according to all, is a person born of
Pushtun parents (both father and mother) speaking Pashto as a mother
tongue (Dupree 1978: 139).
Outside Afghanistan, and especially within present-day Pakistan and
North India, one sees a similar conflation of terms whereby Kabul
comes to stand synecdochically for the entire country, as when James
Norgate wrote in 1873 that The Natives of India, although they talk
of an Affghan, seldom call the country Affghanistan: with them it is
Cabool, Candahar, Jellalabad, Ghuznie, all are Cabool (Phillott 1942:
59n; Pandey 1970: 85n).6 This is somewhat ironic, for as Barfield
(2007: 10) points out, a Pashtun center of ethnic gravity, so to speak,
would not be located in the Afghan capital, Kabul, but rather with the
region that straddles the borders of two nation-states. The close asso-
ciation of Pashtun identity with Pastunwl, a Pashtun code of con-
duct that stresses personal autonomy and equality of political rights
in a world of equals, he argues is practically impossible to fulfill in a
class-structured society or in areas where governments prohibit such
institutions as blood feuds and demand tax payments (ibid., follow-
ing Barth 1969: 132).7 Many of the areas in which Pashto is spoken are

6
Naby (1980: 239) notes that the Pashtuns are Afghan in Soviet terminology,
Pathans to the Indians.
7
Barfield adds, It is therefore the people who inhabit the most marginal lands that
are poor and beyond government control who see themselves as the only true Pash-
tuns. These include the Ghilzai border regions of eastern Afghanistan and the Kar-
lanri FATA [Federally-Administered Tribal Areas] regions of the NWFP [Northwest
Frontier Province] because only they can maintain the strict standards of autonomy
demanded by the Pashtunwali. In richer rural areas, such as the irrigated plains around
Peshawar or Kandahar where governments have been long established, this is less pos-
sible (10). In the case of the Kabul-based Muhammadzai of the erstwhile Afghan
nobility and other urbanized Pashtuns, the proximity to the centralized authority
58 walter hakala

generally hilly and, as is typical of such regions elsewhere in the world


(e.g., Switzerland or the Caucasus), social contact among groups varies
in some places from being quite limited to extensive, with the zones of
circulation corresponding especially to topographical features (Crews
and Tarzi 2008: 17-8, cf. Scott 2009: 40-63).
Statistics on the present population of Pushtuns in Afghanistan are
currently impossible to establish with any degree of certainty. If this
is the case now, it was as much so prior to the Soviet invasion of
the country, and though a census was attempted during the spring of
1979, it likely suffered from a number of structural deficiencies (Naby
1980: 240; Bhattacharya 1984: 126). In 1976, Dupree wrote that The
majority Pushtun constitute about one-half of Afghanistans approxi-
mately 14 million population.8 More recently, a great deal of social
integration did occur among the diverse groups during and follow-
ing the 1978 coup and subsequent Soviet invasion as Pashtun refugees
crossed primarily into Pakistans Northwest Frontier Province and
Baluchistan, and southeastern Iran. That this tragedy of war affected
the Pashtuns disproportionately more than any other Afghan ethnic
group is certain: the vast majority of the Afghan refugees to Pakistan
were Pashtuns (Pstrusiska 1992: 359). The total numbers of Pashtun
speakers in all of South Asia following the 1978 coup was supposed, in
a 1984 estimate, to be 20 million, of whom 9 million were originating
in Afghanistan (Ahmed and Titus 1992). However, considering the
legacy of the war during the 1980s, which disproportionately affected
Pashtuns, causing the deaths of some 1.5 million Afghans and the exile
of at least four million, figures asserting a large increase in the num-
ber of Pashtuns in Afghanistan during the 1980s seem rather suspect.
Septfonds wrote in 1993 that
As of the middle 1970s (that is to say, before the war, which involved the
exodus of three million Afghans in Pakistan and a million in Iran) . . . one
could consider Pashto as being the mother tongue of 40% of the popula-
tion of Afghanistan. Now (in 1993), the total number of the speakers is

is so great that it becomes very difficult for people of any importance to assert and
exhibit the autonomy and independence that their identity and position demand
(Barth 1969: 129). Somewhat incongruously, Barth adds, the elite and urban middle
class in this purely Afghan kingdom have shown a strong tendency to Persianization
in speech and culture, representing . . . a sophisticates escape from the impossibility of
successfully consummating a Pathan identity under these circumstances (ibid.).
8
Whether the Pashtun population of Afghanistan was ever a majority or is instead
a plurality is a matter of continued contention and not insignificant political conse-
quence.
locating pashto in afghanistan 59

approximately 20 million people, of which three quarters live henceforth


in Pakistans Northwest Frontier Province, Balouchistan and Karachi
(significant community) (Septfonds 1994: 19n).
A recent United States government estimate of the number of Pash-
tuns in Afghanistan as comprising 42% of a total population of
28,513,677 in 2004 with a general growth rate of 4.92% itself admits
to not [taking] into consideration the recent war and its continuing
impact (C.I.A. 2004). The number of significant digits included in this
figuredown to the individualshould alert the user of this figure
to its speculative and probably statistically-modeled origin (see also
Crews and Tarzi 2008: 24).
Prior to discussing the changing political fortunes of the Pashtun
people and their Pashto language in Afghanistan, there is the mat-
ter of the second difficulty, namely that of determining the degree to
which Pashto, as a linguistic phenomenon, lends itself towards being
viewed as a unified linguistic concept, constituted either on the level
of practical material utterance or as a purely epistemological construct.
Pashtuns place a great deal of importance upon a shared literary tradi-
tion that goes back several centuries and includes such renowned fig-
ures as Khushal Khan Khattak (d. 1689) and Rahman Baba (d. 1706)
(Addleton 1986: 37). This is in spite of often extremely low literacy
rates,9 a lack of a single agreed-upon written standard form of the
language, and great variety among the spoken dialects. According to
MacKenzie, Pashto shares with Kurdish, pride of place among mod-
ern Iranian languages:10 these two languages appear similar as regards
both area of territory and number of speakers and their abundance
of dialects (MacKenzie 1959: 231). But while, according to MacKenzie,
the features differentiating one Kurdish dialect from the next are
mainly morphological, with Pashto the criteria of dialect differen-
tiation . . . are primarily phonological (ibid.).11 The use in Pashto of a
modified Perso-Arabic script disguises these phonological differences

9
Rubin (2000: 1790), citing U.N. figures published in 1996 and 1997, indicates that
45% of the male population and only 18% of the female population was literate. These
figures were among the lowest in the world.
10
It is interesting here to note the attention given by Ravertythe father of Eng-
lish-language Pashto studiesto putative assertions made by both Afghan and English
authors (including Raverty) identifying the origins of Pashto in Hebrew and Chaldaic.
See, for example, Raverty (1987 [1860]: 15-20; 2001 [1867]).
11
Morphological differences between the dialects do in fact exist, but have not
been studied in any systematic manner. Personal communication, James Caron (Oct.
2007).
60 walter hakala

because consonants that are orthographically distinguished are, in sev-


eral dialects, undifferentiated phonetically, i.e., in speech. That is, the
phonologies of certain Pashto dialects differ in the degree to which
speakers treat certain orthographic norms as referring to denotation-
ally diacritic sound categories, i.e., to phonemes. As will be detailed
below, Pashto dialectology has generally eschewed analysis of orthog-
raphy, spelling, and morphology in favor of categorizations based on
a limited set of phonemic variations, themselves usually confined to
an enumeration of pronunciations for a single consonant.12 The ironic
results of this analysis issue will be addressed further in the section
describing Pashto standardization below.
The history of Pashto in Afghanistan in the twentieth century is
one of shifting diglossic relations. By shifting diglossia, what is meant
is that Pashto speakers in Afghanistan carry out linguistic interactions
in a number of speech forms, and that these individual interactions,
while often characterized by diglossia, are by no means stable from one
interaction to the next nor are they universally prevalent within a given
local population. Pashto is frequently spoken in a multilingual envi-
ronment, coexisting with a related Indo-Iranian language of prestige
(e.g., Persian Dari in much of Afghanistan, Urdu in Pakistan), or with
regional languages whose use is geographically more circumscribed.
In the former case, we see a hierarchy whereby Pashtos relationship
with Persian (in Afghanistan) and Urdu (in Pakistan) approximates
a situation obtaining throughout much of South Asia, namely that of
a vernacular occupying a complementary (if sometimes competi-
tive) niche in a linguistic ecosystem dominated by a cosmopolitan
or classical/literary language (a cultural division of labor for which
Pollock (1996: 208; 1998: 11), following Bakhtin (1981), suggests the
term hyperglossia).13 In the latter case, the dynamics are less certain,
as Pashto may be serving functionally as a link language or for a lim-
ited functional domain.14 We also observe another situation wherein

12
An exception to this may be found in a recent article by Mirdehghan (2010)
whose focus is on a comparative survey of the orthographies employed for Urdu,
Persian, and Pashto.
13
The value of the term vernacular as applied to South Asian languages (including,
one would presume, Pashto) is questionable, to be sure, and Pollock acknowledged
this in a more recent publication (2006: 22).
14
In the modern army since at least Abdurrahman and to some degree well before
him, Pashto was a ritual language used for ranks, technical terminology, and techni-
cal commands. Even the attan [a form of dance] was instituted for military exercise.
locating pashto in afghanistan 61

Pashto speakers are able to converse in more than one dialect of the
language. Again, determining prestige may be difficult as speakers may
subjectively attach greater esteem to their own speech forms while at
the same time using a different dialect to communicate with an out-
sider. Grierson, writing in the tenth volume of his monumental Lin-
guistic Survey of India (1921) about the state of Pashto in Afghanistan,
has the following comments suggestive of the shifting diglossic situa-
tions of the multilingual environment described above:
So far as non-British Afghanistan is concerned it must be remem-
bered that the whole of the population in any particular district is not
Pasht-speaking. There is a great mixture of races, viz. Tjiks, Hazrs,
Qizilbshs, etc., who, according to their origin, speak Persian, Turki,
Balch, or one of the Kfir languages. The map [of Pashto-speaking
regions] in many cases shows districts where only the majority of the
inhabitants are Afghns and Pasht speakers . . . On the other hand, in
every district of non-British Afghanistan villages of Pasht speaking
Afghns are constantly met with which are in a locality not shown in
the map as Pasht-speaking, and this mixture is more than ever the case
at the present time . . . Round the large cities, Persian is generally the lan-
guage spoken, even in a Pasht country, notably in the cases of Jalalabad
and Ghazni (Grierson 1921: 6).
Within Afghanistan, the language has had, in the last century, some
limited government support, especially as a language of the plurality (if
not majority) of its citizens. To a certain extent, the Pashto Academy
(Pato Tolna), founded in Kabul in 1931 for the purpose of carrying
out research on the Pashto language, folklore, and literature, has pro-
vided some stimulus for standardization, modernization, and language
instruction (Shafeev and Paper 1964: 1). In Afghanistan, Pashto has
gradually assumed a role as a language of governance and mass media,
though rather recently and often with some resistance:
Pashto became the official language of Afghanistan by royal decree in
1936.15 However, since the majority of Afghanistans officialdom was
and is Persian-speaking, it proved impossible to change suddenly from

This all was an icon for the supposed Pashtun military prowess. But the language of
the modern army in a more practical way was Dari, since most Pashtuns were exempt
from conscription. James Caron, personal communication, Oct. 2007. Cf. Edwards
2002: 71.
15
Prior to that, the official language of Afghanistan was Kabuli [also known as
Dar], one of the dialects of Tajik. In 1936, Pashto was declared to be an official
national language along with Kabuli (Shafeev and Paper 1964: 1).
62 walter hakala

Persian to Pashto as the language of administration. Furthermore, Kabul,


Afghanistans capital, where all the government offices, ministries, and
the only university of the country are located, is Persian-speaking. The
language of the royal court has been Persian for a very long time. The
traditionally great cultural and social prestige of literary Persian proved
another obstacle to the advance of Pashto (Penzl 1955: 11).
While Persian (or Afghan Dari) presently retains some of its legacy as
a language of prestige, its role as an H variety among native speakers
of other Afghan languages has perhaps shifted from being that iden-
tified with broader political hegemony (functioning as the language
of written/formal-spoken communication) to a more limited role,
amongst Pashtuns and other non-Persian Afghans, as a classical
language or lingua franca (see Weinreich 1980: 4).
Clearly, then, the Afghan state has come, in the twentieth century,
to have an increasing (if ultimately limited) influence over the devel-
opment of a standard Pashto. Little information, however, is readily
available in English on the history of the Afghan Pashto Academys
engagement with this process (see, e.g., Caron 2009: 42-3). A chapter
in this volume adds to what we know about the process by which
Pashto came to be included (along with Dari) as an official language of
Afghanistan (in the Constitutions of 1963, 1976, 1987, 1990, and 2004).
Indeed, Article 35 of the Constitution of 1963 went so far as to declare,
It is the duty of the state to prepare and implement an effective pro-
gram for the development and strengthening of the national language,
Pashtu (1963, italics mine). It is not certain, however, whether the
adjective national corresponds to its role in any official capacity or
rather to the support for the language as one among other indigenous
speech forms within the nation as whole. Several decades earlier, the
Afghan intellectual Mahmd Tarz (18661935) argued in the journal
Sirj al-Akhbr (19111918) that while Pashtu was a language of the
nation and should therefore be advanced as an official language of
the state, he also believed that
. . . only Persian had the capacity to act as the language of the state in
a nation composed of a poly-vernacular and largely illiterate citizenry.
Consequently, he opted for the continuing preservation of Persian as
the official language of Afghanistan as well as one of its two national
languages (Ahmadi 2008: 46-7, emphasis in original).
Tarz recognized that Persian served historically as a trans-regional
link language, and possessed a degree of social prestige to which
locating pashto in afghanistan 63

Pashto could not compare. While it might have a legitimate claim


to being the national language, unlike Persian, which is famous
and current throughout the Transoxiana, India, and even the Otto-
man territory, the Afghani [i.e., Pashto] language by contrast, is
limited to the pure land of the Afghans and is spoken only by a few
million Afghans (48). The lack of stability in the central government
in Afghanistan in the past century explains in part the lack of a sus-
tained policy of Pashto promotion by the central government (com-
pare with Scott 1998: 72-3). Ahmadi claims that the experiment
to make Afghanistan officially a monolingual (Pashto) state utterly
failed and following constitutional changes from 1963 onward, was
dully [sic] abandoned. This gloomy linguistic assessment would seem,
on the face of it, to have been borne out by a history of tragic setbacks
faced by the Pashtun people in the past fifty years, described in greater
detail at the conclusion of this chapter. And yet, the supposed failure
of Pashto to become the sole de facto language of all state functions
came in spite of important developments of what Caron has charac-
terized as an early form of ethnic nationalism of the first half of the
twentieth century, one that aimed at cosmopolitan status for Pashto
[that] was coterminous with the rise of civil society in Kandahar
(Caron 2009: 42). Caron attributes the formation of a vibrant Pashto-
based civil society on a growing integration of elite aristocracy with
mercantile elites: networks of men from nominally less royal, though
equally powerful and probably wealthier, lineages (42). Concepts
like civil society and what Partha Chatterjee has termed political
society (2004: 39-41) usefully permit historians of language to move
beyond a ubiquitous international framework and instead understand
how languages function in contextually-specific social domains inde-
pendently from the monological teleology of the nation state.

3.4. Pashto in Pakistan

By way of contrast, the recent history of the linguistic situation of Pashto


in Pakistan, while undeniably interlinked with that in Afghanistan, sug-
gests few strong cross-correlates. Pashto is spoken, by one account, in
68.3% of the households in the Northwest Frontier Provinces (NWFP,
recently renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa), and has a significant number
of speakers elsewhere in the country, especially in urban centers (to
which large numbers of Pashtuns have immigrated), and particularly
64 walter hakala

in Karachi where, in 8.7% of the households, it is the third most com-


monly spoken language (after Urdu and Punjabi) (Addleton 1986: 44).
However, Pashto in Pakistan has largely been relegated to the status
of a regional language, due in part to the dominance of Urdu (which
serves as an official language in government and schools, thereby estab-
lishing a diglossic relationship with every other language spoken in the
country), and also in part because of the sustained linguistic disrup-
tions that characterized approximately one hundred years of British
rule. Stemming partly from this legacy of disruption is a movement in
Pakistan calling for the creation of at minimum a provincially autono-
mous Pashtun state, or Pakhtunkhw, to which the Pashto language,
for better or worse, has been inextricably tied.
However, even within in the NWFP, Shackle (1980) makes clear
how, because of the necessarily multilingual nature of the region,
Pashto cannot fit comfortably into either the H or L slot of a simple
either-or diglossic formulation. Writing about Hindko (an Indo-Aryan
language spoken mostly in the eastern districts of the NWFP) speakers
in Peshawar, he observes that
There can be few monolingual speakers. Some groups have Pers[ian] as
a home language. Command of Pashto is increasingly general, while all
educated speakers are also fluent in U[rdu]. The Pe[shawari Hindko] of
younger speakers, especially those with higher education, tends to con-
tain a marked proportion of partially assimilated elements, especially
from U[rdu] and P[ashto] (Shackle 1980: 497).
Though claims are made that Pashto in the NWFP suffers due to pro-
motion of English and Urdu, Shackle points out, with regard to Hindko
and other even less commonly spoken languages, that Pashto itself
has certainly gained ground at the expense of Pe[shawari Hindko]
in recent years (497). In nearby Kohat, for example, Pashto also
seems to be spreading amongst long-settled Pathan families whose
first language was formerly Ko[hati Hindko]. There are a fair num-
ber of Ko[hati Hindko]-speakers, some groups of which have Persian
as a home language, but bilingualism with Pashto appears to be gen-
eral (486-7). As is clear from this, few Pashto speakers, whether in
Pakistan or Afghanistan, have ever lived in entirely monolingual envi-
ronments.16 Moreover, the diglossic role played by Pashto for these

16
The exceptions are primarily for certain women and in the tribal regions, for in
these populations, the range of possible interactive situations may be limited.
locating pashto in afghanistan 65

speakers is itself calibrated relative to the shifting roles played by


other languages within that system, i.e., its status can vary from H to
L and other levels in between, depending on which other languages
are also in use in the area and the linguistic repertoires of individual
language users.

3.5. Categorizing the Varieties of Pashto

Some debate continues today about how best to categorize the variet-
ies of Pashto spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Mackenzie (1959)
and Henderson (1983) have both independently advanced the notion
of there being four dialects of Pashto, varieties on the basis of the
pronunciation of the second consonant in the name of the language
(Henderson 1983: 595), each associated with a population center and
distinct geographical range. This would agree, according to Louis
Dupree, with the work of the Soviet linguist, N. Dvoryankov, had
he also been able to engage in field research in Pakistan (Dupree
1984: 761). Dupree summarizes this remarkable incidence of schol-
arly convergence in the following table:

Henderson Mackenzie Dvoryankov

Psto s Kandahar Southwest (Kandahar) Kandaharian


Pto Quetta Southeast (Quetta) (Western)
Ningraharian
Pto g NE Northwest (Central Ghilzai)
(Eastern)
Paxto x g Peshawar Northeast (Yusufzai) Paktyan (Southern)

I have added an additional column to Duprees chart to illustrate the


correspondence of the two Pashto letters and and their pronun-
ciations as reported by Henderson (Henderson 1983: 595). Thus, in
addition to the variety one might find in the pronunciation of the
word ( e.g., in Kandahar as Psto, in Quetta as Pto, etc., as per
the chart), one might also find ( we) pronounced mn in Kan-
dahar and Quetta, and mng in both NE and Peshawar (following
Hendersons territorial categories). Dupree, however, seems to have
misattributed Dvoryankovs latter two categories. On the basis of pho-
nology, Central Ghilzai corresponds more closely to Pakhtyan and
Yusufzai than to Ningraharian (Caron, personal communication).
66 walter hakala

U.S.S.R.
CHINA

IRAN

Herat KABUL
AN
N IST Wardak
x
A Peshawar
GH
AF

s.
Kandahar
N
S TA
KI
PA
Quetta
INDIA

Map 1. Variations in the pronunciation of ( based on Henderson 1983)17

Henderson (1983) provided a map (Map 1) onto which he graphed


the areas in which different pronunciations of the second consonant
of the name of the language, i.e., , are prevalent. It is not possible to
deduce from this mapwhich Septfonds describes as simplistic, [and]
with gross errors (1994: 31)how the consonant is pronounced in
other areas in which Pashto is spoken, especially those areas extending
west and north from the s region. A study that would include such
regions remains a desideratum. That Pashtuns are also the dominant
ethnic group beyond the areas Henderson has charted in his map is
well-documented and presented in numerous published maps (see
Map 2).
This map, however, cannot show the much broader pattern of Pash-
tun settlement as a minority community in Afghanistan (contrast this
with the more useful pair of maps appearing in Rubin 1993: 473). More-
over, it cannot demonstrate the degree of bilingualism in those areas in
which Pashtuns are a majority community (cf. also Grierson 1921: 6,
quoted above). Presumably then, many, though not all, Afghans (or

17
Permission to reprint this map was granted by Jonathan Rodgers, Secretary-
Treasurer of the American Oriental Society.
TADJIKISTAN
OUZBEKISTAN
CHINE
(Tadjiks)
TURKMENISTAN
PAMIRIS
TURCS Sheber-
ghan 21 20 17 13
Feyzabad
FARYAB 18
22 19 14 BADAKHSHAN BOUROUCHOS
IRAN
PERSANS Baglan
Meymaneh
JOWZJAN BAGLAN PASAKIS
27
10
PERSANS 28 (Hazaras) 8 NURIS-
12
SELSELEH 24 23 15 TANIS PAKISTAN
16 11 9
Chaghcharan 7 CACHMIRIS
Herat (Tadjiks) 5
26 6 INDE
GHOWR 25 1 3 4
2
ORUZGAN
Gardez
Ghazni LAHNDA-
FARAH AFGHANS
PAKTIA SINDHIS
(Pachtouns) Tarin Kowt
Farah 1: Baraki Barak 15: Charikar
HELMAND GHAZNI
2: LOWGAR 16: PARVAN
Qalat 3: Jalalabad 17: Qondus
DASHT-E KHASH
Lashkar Gah ZABOL 4: NANGARHAR 18: QONDUZ
5: Kabul (Kaboul) 19: Kholm
HINDIS
Qandahar 6: KABUL 20: SAMANGAN
locating pashto in afghanistan

Zaranj (Pathans) 7: Mehfar 21: Mazare-Sharif


QANDAHAR 8: LAGHAM 22: BALKH
9: Aasdabad 23: Bamian
10: KONARHA 24: BAMIAN
11: Mahnude 25: Kowle Ashrow
BALOUTCHES 12: KAPISA 26: VARDAK
BALOUTCHES 13: Talogan 27: Qaleh-ye Now
14: TAKHAR 28: BADGHISAT
BRAHUIS
67

Map 2. Distribution of major ethnic groups in Afghanistan (Veyrac 1997)


68 walter hakala

Pachtouns) in Helmand, Dasht-e Khash (i.e., Nimroz), and Farah


also have some familiarity with Pashto.18 Significant numbers of Pash-
tuns are, however, present throughout almost the entire country. Over
the last century, many Pashtuns were forcibly resettled by the govern-
ment in the north of the country (Barfield 2005: 5) while others took
advantage of the incorporation of new territories into the Afghan state
structure to extend preexisting trade networks and exploit tradition-
ally non-Pashtun lands for pasture and settled farming (Barth 1969:
126). Edwards (2002: 302) suggests that these patterns of Pashtun
settlement throughout Afghanistan are partly responsible for delaying
what would otherwise be an inevitable partition of the country into
autonomous ethnic enclaves.
Other studies have divided the language into two groups of dialects.
Raverty cites with approval the lexicographical work of Nawbullah
Yr Khn, who in his Khullsat al-Ansb distinguishes a western or
upper bar pashtn dialect from an eastern or lower lar pukhtn,
the former having some affinity to the Persian and the latter con-
taining many Sanskrit and Hindi words (Raverty 1987 [1860]: 16;
see also Raverty 1867: 95,865). Henderson notes that Darmesteter also
gives two varieties: Pasht and Pakht (Darmesteter 1888:xxxv ff;
cited in Henderson 1983: 595), corresponding roughly with those
Pashto-speaking areas outside and within Pakistans NWFP (Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa), respectively. Some seventy-five years later, Shafeev
wrote that Pashto is divided into two groups (branches) of dialects:
a western group (with a center in Kandahar) and an eastern group (with
a center in Peshawar) (Shafeev and Paper 1964: 1). Grierson, despite
distinguishing between essentially two types of Pashto, the Northeast
and the Southwest varieties, on the usual basis of the pronunciation
of the consonants and ( Grierson 1921: 7), implicitly recognized
three [varieties] (the list of vocabulary is divided into three columns,
of which one is dedicated to Waziri) (113-4; discussed in Septfonds
1994: 31). This perhaps is what led Penzl to declare in 1954 that though
[the] dialectical variation of Pashto is considerable . . . only three types

18
Rzehak (2008: 183), however, reports, Persian is the main language of adminis-
tration and education in Nimroz Province, whereas Baluchi may be used, along with
Persian, as the lingua franca in everyday communication, even by non-Baluch people.
These non-Baluch people of southwestern Afghanistan include Pashtuns, mostly
of the Ghilzai tribe, who also use Persian as their primary language in this region
(ibid.).
locating pashto in afghanistan 69

have emerged: The type of Peshawar; the Eastern type; the Kandahar
type (Penzl 1954: 74).
Two subsequent German grammars of Pashto continue to advance
the two branches model. On the one hand, Lorenz, basing his gram-
mar largely upon Shafeev and other Soviet linguists, states that one
arranges the dialects into the west or southwest group, Paxto (Pashto),
with the center in Kandahar, and the east or northeasts group,
Paxto (Pachto, Pakhto), with the center in Peshawar (north Paki-
stan) (Lorenz 1982: 15). Meyer-Ingwersen, on the other hand, citing
MacKenzie (1959), differentiates between spoken Pashtos large num-
ber of dialects and the language of literature and writing of the cultural
centers Kandahar, Kabul and Jelalabad (Afghanistan) and Peshawar
(Pakistan) [which are] substantially more uniform (Meyer-Ingwersen
1966: 1-2). He writes that for the latter, Differences exist here only in
the realization of some consonant phonemes, in the differentiation of
the short vowels . . . and in the rendition of fewer morphemes.
More recent scholarship has shown the actual situation of Pashto
dialects to be far more complex than the two-, three-, or fourfold divi-
sions (and especially those based exclusively on consonantal phonol-
ogy) might suggest. Kieffer, responding to the notion of Pashto being
divided into hard (where and are pronounced as a velar frica-
tive and velar occlusive, respectively) and soft dialects (where they
are pronounced as an unvoiced retroflex fricative sibilant and alveolar
fricative, respectively), writes,
Thus appears in the region of pato [i.e., the southeast region] a group
of geographically intermediate speeches B, clearly distinct from the
hard [i.e., northwest] dialects (A) and the soft [i.e., southwest] dia-
lects (C), which are localized in a median zone which clearly separates
the mareqi [eastern] (or allbti) zone from the marebi [western]
(or kandahri) zone and which we will call manjany, central, interme-
diate. The eccentricity does not stem from a particular pronunciation
of the phonemes that are usually used in order to differentiate the dia-
lectal regions. Indeed these speeches B have, on the contrary, the most
unexpected divergences that distinguish it, without hesitation, from the
speeches A and C; if they do not present any trace of uniformity, they
have, however, a major and clearly distinctive coherence; they all are
characterized by unique phonetic features and by certain characteristics
of their grammatical structure (Kieffer 1975: 5).
These unique phonetic features are constituted not by the pronuncia-
tion of consonants (i.e., the usual and criteria), but certain vowel
shifts:
70 walter hakala

. . . the metaphony or vowel shift of the waziri type, a/o, o/e, u/i sum-
marizes this change, which in Afghanistan, appears mainly in the speech
of the wazir and jadrn ethnic groups. According to materials of the
ALA [lAtlas Linguistique de lAfghanistan] the metaphony of the waziri
type appears in the speech of the following ethnic groups: wazir, jadrn
(marwat, alixanxel, giyanxel) then in tan i, gerbz and esmelxel, which
are perhaps also of jadrn or are allied with them (Kieffer 1973: 18).
Septfonds grammar Le Dzadrni: Un parler pashto du Pakty (Afghan-
istan) (1994) and Kieffers Grammaire de lrmur de Baraki-Barak
(Lgar, Afghanistan) (2003) clearly go a long way towards providing
linguists with valuable lexical and grammatical material for two hith-
erto unrecognized dialects of Pashto. The value of these works rests
in their being able to draw more useful distinctions among Pashto dia-
lects beyond the overused and simplistic division into varieties on the
basis of the pronunciation of the second consonant in the name of the
language (Henderson 1983: 595), a facile distinction whose descrip-
tive use is clearly limited.

3.6. Determining a Standard Pashto

One further difficulty lies in the matter of determining (both in the


sense of delimiting and constituting) a standard Pashto. Several dif-
ferent sources attest to the speech of Kandahar being the prestige dia-
lect in Afghanistan, and perhaps throughout the greater Pukhtnistn.
So Henderson remarks on how speakers of Pto or Paxto trying to
imitate speakers of Psto (the prestige dialect in Afghanistan) usually
replace s with (Henderson 1983: 595n). Penzl cites several authors
who have given support to this notion:
The Kandahar type of Pashto, which, because of its occurrence in the
provinces of Kandahar, Farah, and Herat . . . , is often called the south-
western or southern type, has enjoyed great prestige inside and outside
of Afghanistan. R. Leach (JASB, vol. 8) states in 1839: the Candaha-
ree is reckoned the purest dialect. C.E. Biddulph (Afghan Poetry of the
Seventeenth Century, 1890) calls the Northern dialect rough and harsh,
the Southern dialect as spoken in Herat, Kandahar, Quetta a soft one.
G. Morgenstierne (Report on a Linguistic Mission to Afghanistan, p. 10)
states in 1924: Just as in India the Peshawar dialect is predominant, a
modified Kandahar dialect is in use among the higher classes in Kabul
(Penzl 1955: 9).
Although, as Penzl writes, we cannot say . . . that all the distinctive
features of the Kandahar dialect are recognized as standard Pashto
locating pashto in afghanistan 71

within Afghanistan, the fact that it is the only dialect which has a
phonemic system corresponding to the prevailing orthography has
been important in determining the great prestige of the Kandahar
dialect (Penzl 1955: 9) as the cradle of Pashto orthography (Penzl
1955: 9; Penzl 1954: 81).
This, according to Mackenzie, is in direct opposition to Morgen-
stiernes earlier hypothesis from his 1932 Report on a Linguistic Mis-
sion to North-west India (MacKenzie 1959: 233). In support of this
north-eastern hypothesis, Mackenzie describes an earlier ortho-
graphic tradition than that now prevailing:
In the earliest known Pashto manuscript, written in ah 1061/ad 1651,
(with a subscript dot) is written for j, . . . for , and ( with central dot) for
. These signs were still used in a MS Dwn of Mrz, dated ah 1101/ad
1690, but were abandoned shortly thereafter (MacKenzie 1959: 233).
Mackenzies rejoinder, then, to Penzls attribution of linguistic priority
(if not temporal, then in literary normativity) to the Kandahar dialect,
is that while the Kandahar dialect has preserved all the consonant
phonemes expressed in the standard dialect . . . it has put [the full range
of vowel phonemes] to use in novel ways (MacKenzie 1959: 259). He
goes on to write that
It is an obvious inference that an older stage of Pashto [than the Kanda-
hari form privileged by Penzl], still current in the seventeenth century
if the orthographic evidence is trustworthy, combined a south-western
consonant system with a north-eastern vowel phoneme system . . . It is
this conceptual phonemic scheme, then, therefore, which is reflected in
the verse of Xush l Xn and Rahmn Bb [sic]. Apart from the evident
value of this Standard Pashto, in its discreet native dress, as a universal
literary medium among Pushtuns, it appears to have another important
application. It permits the description of Pashto morphology in more
accurate and universal terms than does any single dialect (MacKenzie
1959: 259).
In other words, Mackenzie suggests locating a Standard Pashto within
the very narrow limits of a literary tradition concluding with two sev-
enteenth century poets literary and, more importantly to Mackenzie,
orthographic productions. Despite the universal reverence Pashtuns
seem to feel for this shared tradition, the fact that this linguistic stan-
dard ceased to be current not long after these two poets stopped pro-
ducing poems does not seem to bother Mackenzie. Indeed, Mackenzie
reports with great satisfaction in a post-script to his essay that A
meeting of Pashtun scholars and writers from both Afghanistan and
Pakistan, held in Kabul during August 1958, proposed a number of
72 walter hakala

standardizations in the use of the present alphabet. These propos-


als . . . represent in the main a welcome return to the classical standard
described above (MacKenzie 1959: 259).
This has had ironic results. For while the [written] language has,
therefore, been a literary vehicle, widely understood, for at least four
centuries (MacKenzie 1959: 259), as the number of literate persons
able to write in Pashto has increased, so has a natural tendency to
use phonetic rather than standard spellings. Preferences for pho-
netic spellings among speakers of dialects with fewer diacritical sound
categories have thus, in MacKenzies view, confounded attempts to
standardize the orthography of these dialects (ibid.). Yet, and this has
especially been the case in Afghanistan, one also sees in recent years
an attempt to Pashto-ize the spellings of Persian, Urdu, and Ara-
bic loanwords, introducing specifically Pashto graphemes and lexical
morphology in place of historically more justified (or etymologically-
supported) spellings. An example of this would be in the Afghan spell-
ing of the Persian jawn, youth as dzawnay, in which
one sees a preference in the orthography for the specifically Pashto let-
ter over the Perso-Arabic , and in the morphology, for the replace-
ment of the Persian abstract noun suffix with an equivalent Pashto
suffix, the diphthong . For the southwestern dialects (e.g., that of
Kandahar), which possess a larger inventory of consonant phonemes,
this results in lexical forms whose pronunciations vary markedly from
the historical Persian prototypes. One also sees this sort of innovation
in the coining of pure Pashto terms, in which lexical elements per-
ceived as specific to Pashto are combined to produce neologisms. For
other dialects of Pashto that have retained relationships with distinct
and normative diglossic H languages (e.g., Dari in Kabul, or Urdu
and English in the NWFP), and whose speakers are more likely to be
multilingual, these innovations have not always been widely accepted.
Indeed, it would seem that the changes in orthography and vocabulary
championed by the Pashtun intellectuals of Kabul, have had a more
jaundiced reception by the Pashto literary class in Peshawar.19 This, in
many cases, may be directly attributed to the uneven historical inter-
ference of other H languages (especially Persian and Urdu) for these
speakers in the process of acquiring primary literacy.

19
James Caron, personal correspondence, Oct. 2007.
locating pashto in afghanistan 73

3.6.1. Origins of Literary Pashto and Language Policy


It may be worth remarking here that Pashto is generally agreed to
belong to the Eastern Iranian group of Indo-European languages,
derived from Zend or from a dialect closely allied with Zend (Grier-
son 1921: 9). The lexicon however borrowed heavily from neighboring
Indic sources, and continues to be influenced by Urdu and Persian.
Grammatically, there are many elements of Pashto (e.g., postpositions,
the ergative case) that would be quite unfamiliar to speakers of mod-
ern Persian, and which on the surface make the language appear more
similar to Urdu. For this reason, it is rather difficult to fit Persian-
Pashto and Urdu-Pashto diglossias neatly into categories based on
supposedly shared genetic relationships.
The above-mentioned mid-seventeenth century manuscript, the
Khair al-Bayn (Excellence of Expression), written by Byazd Ansr
(15261574) (Rahman 2002: 354) and associated with a contempo-
raneous Islamic revivalist and millenarian movement (Malik 1993;
MacLean 2003; Faruqui 2005: 498-9; Moin 2010: 170n), forms the ear-
liest remaining part of a tradition of Pashto texts written in the area
of what might be called popular religion. The second text, the
Makhzan al-Islm (Treasury of Islam), written by Akhwnd Dar-
wezah (15331615) as a sort of counter-polemic to Ansr, is accord-
ing to Rahman,
. . . a collection of famous religious texts in Pashto. Moreover, the lan-
guage of explication is also Pashto. The preface, however, is in Persian
and the author says that he intends to explain the beliefs of Islam for the
Afghans. . . . This book is said to have been taught both in the madrassas
and at homes [sic]. It was also read out to those who could not read it
themselves (Rahman 2002: 355).
Most fascinating of all, however, is the third manuscript on Rahmans
list, MullAbd al-Rashds Rashd al-Bayn (Guide of Expression)
written in ah 1124 (1712/3 ad). This book was read by women in
their homes and was a kind of sermon in verse (355). According to
Sayedul Abrar, there were two classes of readers who read Pashto
books: village women and storytellers in Hujras [a room for entertain-
ing visitors] (Abrar 1979: 90; cited in Rahman 2002: 359). Rahman
writes,
The village women were not formally educated. They were, however,
taught the Quran and some of the rudiments of religion by an older
woman known respectfully as Bibi (lady). The Bibi sometimes used a
74 walter hakala

Pashto textbook, often a versified one for interest, to teach the basics
of Islam. From their exposure to the Arabic script of the Quran some
of the Bibis also picked up literacy in the Pashto script which, being in
naskh after the initial stages, was more similar to Arabic than to Persian.
The women did not, however, confine themselves to religious texts. They
also read story books, also in verse, which they bought from vendors.
These were inevitably romances, notably of Adam/Durkhani, Jalat/Meh-
booba, Musa Khan/Gul Makai, and so on, and were already part of the
oral folklore since time immemorial. Professional story-tellers sang them
in the hujras (mens common rooms) in Pashtun villages and they too
purchased the same books to which the women found access (Abrar,
1979: 91). These popular books were very cheap. They had to beafter
all, neither village women, madrassas students or story-tellers had much
[disposable] income (Rahman 2002: 359).
From this discussion, it may be inferred that one of the main driving
forces behind the development of Pashto as a written literary language
was its potential as a medium for womens education.20 With very lim-
ited access to the outside world, and in particular, to unrelated men,
Pashtun women naturally would have little exposure to or need for
the lingua franca, Persian. However, exposure to Arabic literacy was
encouraged, though often this literacy was limited to inculcating a
rather passive capacity for recitation and memorization of the Qurn.
Actual exegesis was conducted instead through Pashto commentaries
and translation. In other words, the development of a written Pashto
was, according to Abrar and Rahman, at least initially spurred by the
pedagogical exigencies of Pashtun women. This conclusion, however,
must be taken with a grain of salt. As limited as literacy was (and
remains) among Pashto-speaking men, it is difficult to demonstrate
that women were able to exercise then a degree of financial agency
sufficient to institute, as Rahman and Abrar suggest, an entirely new
literary tradition. That many of the earliest Pashto sermons were versi-
fied suggests that they circulated in oral form, being memorized and
transmitted both in public (e.g., in mosques and in the male quarters
of a household) and in private (e.g., among women in worship).21

20
Raverty also holds this view. See Raverty (1987 [1860]: 26-7).
21
I am grateful to James Caron (personal communication, Oct. 2007) for suggest-
ing this to me.
locating pashto in afghanistan 75

Rahman (2002: 358) cites a couplet from the Rashd al-Bayn:




I have explained the Faith in Pashto
[Thus] I have made it easy for you
This couplet, in many ways, illustrates the paradox of Pashto literacy.
For those few men who had the opportunity to gain it, the language
of literacy would with few exceptions be that of the statePersian
or occasionally Hindavi (in the case of the Sur Sultans in the mid-
sixteenth century, cf. Alam 2004: 123), and in British India, from
the mid-nineteenth century onwards, increasingly Urdu and English
(see Hakala 2010)or that of the faith (i.e., Arabic). Were significant
Pashto manuscripts to have survived from prior to the 17th century,
Rahmans and Abrars suggestions concerning the indispensable role
women played in the establishment of the Pashto literary tradition
might be more tenable. For, in India at least, prior to the Mughal
conquest of India, Persian did not appear to have the same degree of
widespread currency among the ruling Afghan Lodi and Sur Sultans
of Delhi that it would come to have under Mughal rule. Bbur, the
first Mughal king of India, reported that few of the Afghans could
speak it at all (Babur and Beveridge 1970: 459-60; cited in Alam 2004:
123-4). Until the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, it must be remembered
that most of what currently constitutes the Pashto-speaking zone was
under Mughal suzerainty (if not direct control ) and Persian-language
administrative structures (Faruqui 2005). Pashto as a literary regis-
ter underwent a series processes that Sheldon Pollock (2006: 23) has
termed vernacularization:
Vernacularization is here understood . . . as the historical process of choos-
ing to create a written literature, along with its complement, a political
discourse, in local languages according to models supplied by a super-
ordinate, usually cosmopolitan, literary culture. The process can thus be
broken down into three connected components. Two[:] literization [i.e.,
subjecting a linguistic form to a written form], and literarization [the
creation of a literature dependent on written texts (see Pollock 2006:
4-5)][, and a] third, closely related to the latter, is superposition, or the
presence of a dominant language and literary formation.
To this end, MacKenzie argues that early Pashto poetry, though on
the Persian model, retained a distinctively non-Persian qualitative
(or accentual) system of prosody, the Perso-Arabic quantitative (or
76 walter hakala

chronemic) system of arz (meter) being unable to accommodate


the frequent occurrence in the Pashto lexicon of double- and triple-
consonant clusters (MacKenzie 1995: 339-41). It is apparent, then,
that there remain some slippages in the manner in which Pashto was
vernacularized: its prosodic system is imperfectly accommodated by
its othography,22 a fact that has not been eliminated despite Pashto
literatures heavy debt to Persian (through what Pollock calls liter-
arization and superposition).
One clear cause for the relative decline of the prestige of Persian has
been the increase of access and of value attributed to learning certain
traditionally European languages. In an interesting but deeply flawed
article by G. Cannon in 1963, one gets a sense of the often agonistic
role played by proponents of these European languages as they vied
not only for cultural, but political influence in the region (Cannon
1963). Written from the perspective of a 1960s U.S.-model develop-
ment-oriented academic, his recommendations of statist moderniza-
tion projects (e.g., the end of rote learning, more modern and relevant
pedagogical materials, an official single national language and a single
Western foreign one [319]) are hardly surprising. Towards this end,
Cannon describes how, In the sense of literacy programs, the pres-
ence of a common writing system for the two languages [Persian and
Pashto] is advantageous. Only a few additional symbols must be learned
for the representation of the Pashto dental affricative stops and retro-
flexes (314-5). It does, however, provide a good snapshot of the Kabul
education system from the perspective of an outsider and top-level
administrator at the start of what has been characterized as a period
of political liberalization from 19631973 known as New Democracy
that saw remarkable increases in the number of students at all lev-
els including enrollments at Kabul University (see also Rubin 1992:
79-80). In Cannons view, students who opted to study English were
at a disadvantage compared to those who had instead elected to attend
the German-medium high school Nedjat or the French-medium
Estaklal where the teachers are usually native speakers. In other second-
ary schools, where English served as the required European language,

22
This is part of what Pollock calls literization. On Arabic prosody, see Meredith-
Owens 1979 (compare with Blochmann 1872 and Pybus 1924). For other comments
on the limitations of Pashtos modified Perso-Arabic script, see Mackenzie 1959: 231.
It would, however, be difficult to identify any language with a conventional script that
perfectly represents the entire phonemic inventory of its speakers.
locating pashto in afghanistan 77

the instructors are primarily Afghans who labor under the serious
disadvantage of being the only ones who are exposing the students to
English (316). When he was writing, only students of Estaklal could
go on to attend the Kabul University Medical School (where classes
were taught by professors from the Sorbonne), students of Nedjat, the
sciences (taught by University of Cologne faculty), and students of
English, agriculture and engineering (taught by faculty from the Uni-
versity of Wyoming). The author is obviously alarmed by the prospect
of increasing interest in Russian language (as a means of entering the
Russian-medium Afghan Army School), and the increasing number
of Communist Chinese who are studying Persian or Pashto (318).
Calling Afghanistan a new Babel (318), he applaudsprematurely
for surethe government of India, which, has boldly made Hindi its
national choice (319). While one is left with little doubt as to which
foreign language he would like to see as official, and that he leaves
ambiguous which official single national language he wants privi-
leged above the other suggests that by this time, Pashto was seen to be
approaching equal political standing with Dari.
Beyond the capital, however, Pashto, admittedly with Persian, has,
generally speaking, occupied a more hegemonic H role in terms of
traditional theories of diglossia. With regard to the highly-localized
languages of the Hindu Kush, Pashto appears to occupy a compara-
tively privileged place, as is described by Fussman (1972). Using data
compiled by Morgenstierne from the early part of the 20th century
(and in particular, during a visit in 1924). Fussman endeavored to
produce the Atlas Linguistique des Parlers Dardes et Kafirs. Due to its
focus on the Dardic and Kafir languages, its applicability to the study
of Pashto is rather limited. It is useful, however, in gaining insight
into the historical development of what Penzl in 1955 described as
the advance of Pashto, in this case, at the expense of the Dardic and
Kafir languages of northeast Afghanistan. In the passage that follows,
Fussman describes how Morgenstiernes work, while suffering from
very incomplete accounts of vocabulary; nuances of meaning little
or poorly noted; phonetic transcription, not phonologic; [and] above
all very little information on morphology and syntax, is nevertheless,
for those who hail from the school of historical linguistics . . . truly
irreplaceable.
From their contact with the great languages of civilization (Persian
and Pashto), the Dardic and Kafir languages (even those in which the
structure is quite solid, like Pashai) are continuing to adopt borrowed
78 walter hakala

elements; new sounds appear (f in Pashai, for example); the typical


vocabulary, assimilate Persian and Pashto words in increasing numbers,
even the names of numbers. This situation is by no means new. From
1924 onwards, however, it has been considerably aggravated. Thanks to
transistors, radio broadcasts are heard in almost every village; Persian,
Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, English even, have begun to be understood by
many of these mountain dwellers formerly isolated from the so-called
civilized world. Roads are being opened, through which merchants and
visitors are coming. Allophone garrisons are being installed at strategic
points along the frontier. To give a recent example, in May 1970, during
a visit for a few hours in Birko, I was able to meet a Chitrali (speak-
ing Khowr), some Kams (speaking Kati), some Kohistanis (speaking
Bashkark), a Sawi, a Guur shepherd, and especially Uzbek soldiers from
the garrison, some Taiks who usually live in Mazar-i Sharif, coming
there as tourists, some Afghan officers (speaking Pashto), some Afghan
visitors (speaking Pashto), one among whom having come from the val-
ley of Wardak and the others from Bajaur. Everyone understood Pashto,
several also understood Persian. In these conditions, it was evident
that the phonological systems of certain dialects were becoming altered
quickly, that the dialectical differences were eroded and that the vocabu-
laries adopt foreign elements: for any comparative and historic study,
the materials collected by Morgenstierne, prior to the introduction of
the transistor, the progress of education and the opening of roads, are
irreplaceable (Fussman 1972: 5-6).
Aside from the often insurmountable difficulty of organizing linguistic
expeditions into these areas, Fussman notes how quickly the Dardic
and Kafir languages of Afghanistan have been overwhelmed by the
outside world, such that within a few years of Morgenstiernes expedi-
tion, Tirh and Woapr, for example, had become dead languages
(Fussman 1972: 4).
By 1970, Pashto had clearly come to occupy a position of great
practical influence, though it also faced resistance in its expanded role
within the government of Afghanistan. Works from the 1970s describe
the institutional strains that the implementation of Pashto (as both
the national and one of two official languages) was placing upon non-
Pashtun Afghan minorities (Miran 1977a; Miran 1977b; Dupree 1978).
These strains, in some ways, would seem to attest to the successes
Pashto was realizing in its relatively new capacity as official language.
Mirans work, in particular, introduces some of the pedagogical prob-
lems attending the increasing institutionalization of Pashto-Persian
(or Pashto-Dar) bilingualism in Afghan schools (Miran 1974; Miran
1977b). The situation, however, appeared quite different for several
other minority groups who chose to speak Pashto as a second lan-
guage. These include
locating pashto in afghanistan 79

. . . the Brahuis and Baluches who are living in the southwestern portion
of Afghanistan; the Dards who live in the northeast portion of the coun-
try and speak the Pashai, Guwarbati, Sawi, Tirahi language; the Gujars
who speak dialects of Hindi/Urdu and Pashto; the Jats, small gypsy bands
of wandering tradesmen who speak Pashto, as well as Dari; and some of
the small groups such as the Hindus and Sikhs also speak Pashto. All of
these small ethnic groups who speak Pashto either as a first, second, or
third language, with the exception of the Hindus and Sikhs, learn Pashto
because of geographical distribution, rather than for political, economic,
or social reasons. The Hindus and Sikhs learn Pashto because of eco-
nomic reasons, i.e., to use with monolingual Pashto speakers in transac-
tions of trade and other business matters (Miran 1977b: 124).
The analysis Miran gives of issues raised by Afghan bilingualism and
possible diglossia among various Afghan ethnic groups, however, is
not especially involved, and indeed quite limited in its practical scope.23
Miran may have been rather too sanguine in his hopes for extending
Pashto diglossia among non-Pashtun groups. Other accounts argue
instead that the policy of official bilingualism and with the increased
influence of Iran in the region over the past decade [i.e., the 1970s],
and the slow extension of its culture and language in the wake of its
growing political and economic power, the Persian language was gain-
ing ever wider acceptance in Afghanistan (Naby 1980: 242). Others
have noted that Pashto works from the same period attest to the inabil-
ity of Pashto-speaking elected officials to participate in Dari-language
national debates.24 One would like to see Miran or other future schol-
ars grapple more productively with the issues he raises and suggest
pedagogical means by which to overcome them.
A misconception has arisen that by the 1980s, Pashtun political
successes (and by extension, the success of the Pashto language) had
been undone by the Afghan-Soviet war. Pstrusiska (1992) argues, in
a fiercely polemic and, unfortunately, historically misinformed essay
treating recent Afghan sociolinguistics, that the war was no more than
an anti-Pashtun pogrom. The Soviets are implicated at the beginning
of the essay for The unavoidable process of cultural discontinuity
which accompanies war, [and which] has been intensified by the con-
scious demographic, ethnic and linguistic policies of the communist
regime . . . based on Soviet national policy and possibly recommended

23
Some of the languages mentioned (especially Tirahi) were extinct long before
Miran carried out his work in the 1970s. See the extended quotation of Fussman
(1972: 5-6) above.
24
James Caron citing Abdullh Bakhtanai in personal communication, Oct. 2007.
80 walter hakala

and prepared by the Soviets (359). Noting how the population of war
refugees is overwhelmingly Pashtun, she concludes, apparently with-
out considering it hyperbole, the first priority of the regime was to
rid Afghanistan of Pashtun (Afghan!) people (360). She documents a
few examples of the reversal of Pashtun dominance, and the suprem-
acy of the Pashto language in political discourse (360-1), the rise of
an anti-Pashto party (361), and the decline of state sponsorship and
promotion of Pashto through the Pashto Academy and schools (361).
Together with this, she notes the rise of the Russian language (at the
expense of Pashto and English) in secondary and higher education,
which she fears will lead in the not-so-distant future, if continued, to
dependency on Russian as a medium of interethnic communication
(!) (362) and the insertion of communist and military terminology into
all Afghan languages (363). Under the Soviets, attempts were appar-
ently made to bring Dari (a form of Persian spoken in Afghanistan)
closer to the Tajik (also considered to be a form of Persian) spoken
then in the Tajik Soviet Socialist Republic (363).
Many of Pstrusiska assertions, while if not entirely inaccurate (see
Crews and Tarzi 2008: 20-1), are in need of significant revision and
nuance.25 Some of Pstrusiskas fervent anti-Soviet rhetoric is echoed
in Bhattacharya (1984) regarding policy decisions in the Democratic
Republic of Afghanistan encouraging the promotion of minority lan-
guages and cultures, the implication being (see, e.g., page 133) that this
would be to the detriment of overall Pashtun hegemony. Earlier reports,
however, indicated that there was only token representation among
non-Pashtuns in the revolutionary government in Kabul, and the shift
in power that occurred with the Saur Revolution of 1978 involved the
displacement of the Durran Pashtun elite associated with the ancien
rgime with a rival group, a Ghilzai confederation (also comprised pri-
marily of Pashtuns) (Naby 1980: 245-6; Barfield 2007: 15). The Ghilzais
had stronger tribal backgrounds than did the old elite and were
native Pashto speakers (Barfield 2010: 226). Members of the royal
family, despite their Pashtun roots in the southern part of the coun-
try, mostly spoke Persian, and few were comfortable conversing exclu-
sively in Pashto (Edwards 2002: 63). Others have argued with empirical

25
Unfortunately, I am unable here to give a satisfactory account of this fascinating
period. Readers are advised to consult the works cited in this essay for a more com-
plete picture of the political situation during the 1980s and 1990s.
locating pashto in afghanistan 81

data that this change in composition of the Afghan political leadership


through the 1970s and 1980s reflected less a shift in the ethnicity (sub-
stituting Pashtun for non-Pashtun) than a change in tribal/class affili-
ation (Arnold 1983; Rubin 1992). Indeed, membership among both
factions of the Peoples Democratic Party of Afghanistan, starting with
Nr Muhammad Tarak and H fizullah Amn of the Khalq (masses)
wing and Babrak Krmal of Parcham (flag), remained largely Pash-
tun, though the Khalq Pashtuns tended to be of rural, tribal origin
while Parcham was especially effective in drawing Kbuls into its
fold (Rubin 1992: 88; Barfield 2007: 15; Edwards 2002: 32-56). Rubin
notes that the distinction between Kbul Pashtuns and those from the
southeastern hinterlands seems to be a rough proxy for class origin,
as the Kabulis tend to have fathers of high social status (89). Rubin
(1992: 87) has shown that the number of Pashtuns represented in the
Politburos and Central Committees of both wings of the PDPA was far
greater than their proportion of the Afghan population as a whole. The
Muhammadzai and largely Persian-speaking Pashtun elite of the pre-
vious Old Regime are conspicuously absent, however, not just from
the PDPA-Khalq but also from the various Islamist parties. Rubins
insightful comparison (82-5) of official documents produced by the
PDPA factions and their Islamist rivals, the H izb-i Islm, suggests
that their respective memberships overlapped not just in their over-
representation of Pashtuns, but also in a surprising number of ideo-
logical positions (cf. also Edwards 2002: 198). The appeal of the PDPA
to many Pashtuns belonging to marginal tribes and lineages lay in its
promise of the forcible reform of Pashtun rural society through the
dismantlement of the traditional khn system of hereditary landlord-
ism (Edwards 2002: 64-9, 74). These groups derived largely from the
mountainous southeastern borderlands and not the traditional elite
whose roots were in the well-irrigated plains of Kandahar and Hel-
mand (Barfield 2007: 10-5).
Whatever the validity of assertions of Pashtos decline during the
Communist period, following the withdrawal of Soviet forces from
Afghanistan in February 1989, Pashto (and Urdu) came increasingly
to be associated with the Taliban political movement, despite efforts
by that group to highlight the participation of a few non-Pashtuns
(Crews and Tarzi 2008: 31). Facing a new political reality without
Soviet military support, the PDPA dissolved and was rechristened
the H izb-i Watan (Homeland Party) under the Pashtun President
Najbullh (Rubin 1993: 481). Though born in Kabul, the president
82 walter hakala

was well-known for his skills in Pashto oratory (Barfield 2010: 239).
Having renounced Marxism, the Najbullh government attempted
to rebrand itself as as the only remaining nationalist, Pashtun-led
politically effective force in the country (Rubin 1992: 95-6). This
experiment was to prove short lived, and when that government was
overthrown in 1992, Pashtun influence on the country as a whole was
limited, due in part to the disintegration of the central government and
military and the fragmentation of the country into separately adminis-
tered regions. The large number of Pashtun refugees residing beyond
Afghan borders had no doubt produced a profound demographic shift
in the country, one that favored the assertion of regional autonomy
by various non-Pashtun ethnic groups (Rubin 1993: 486). The emer-
gence of ethnically-organized regional governments under the aegis of
such figures as the Uzbek commander Abdul Rashd Dostam and the
Tajik leader Isml Khn, and groups like the independent Hazrah
organizations and the so-called Northern Alliance under the Tajik
commander Ahmad Shh Masd, relegated Pashtun-dominated
political organizations like the Taliban and Gulbuddn H ikmatyrs
H izb-i Islm to the southwest, south and east of the country (Ahady
1995, Barfield 2010: 249-60). Despite a number of factors that led to a
decline in the political fortunes of Pashtun-dominated groups in the
early 1990s, midway through the decade Ahady predicted (correctly, it
would seem) that these setbacks would prove to be temporary:
In an era when ethnic majorities everywhere are becoming dominant,
it is highly unrealistic that, on a long term basis, the Pashtuns can be
denied noninstitutionalized (de facto) dominance in Afghanistan. Fur-
ther, the Pashtuns are likely to rebound because the causes of their decline
are temporary; for instance, disunity among them played an important
role in their decline, but with the rise of the Taliban, Pashtun unity has
strengthened significantly (631).
With the collapse of the Afghan educational system and with it the
ideal of bilingual instruction in Dari and Pashto, the generation that
grew up in the aftermath of the Revolutionwhether in Afghanistan or
abroadare less likely to speak multiple Afghan languages (Edwards
2002: 301). Pashtun use of Persian as a prestige dialect (functioning
especially in the social domains of literature and statecraft) has for
centuries been closely indexed to higher social classes and connec-
tions with urban Afghan culture (especially that of Kabul ) (Rahman
1995). Dari Persian had been a second language for many Pashtuns,
locating pashto in afghanistan 83

especially those with access to formal education and with aspirations


to government service. As a result of their long period of residence
and education in Pakistan, Urdu has been documented in recent years
as replacing Persian in this role among Afghan refugees, even upon
their return home. By 1999, the Taliban had extended their control
over nearly the entire country, excepting the Tajik northeast which
remained independent under the Northern Alliance. As a result of of
their military successes, and especially from the mid-1990s, Urdu and
Pashto enjoyed new prominence as languages of governance, even in
regions where neither had significant traditions of being commonly
spoken. Rzehak describes how Urdu came to be imposed as the pri-
mary language of administration in Nimroz province during the period
of Taliban rule from 1995 to 2001. The first Taliban governor of the
province, Hamdullh Niyzmnd,
himself grew up and was educated in Pakistan and spoke neither Baluchi
nor Persian. Under his rule Urdu became the official language of provin-
cial administration, and only Pashto was accepted along with it. Baluch
and Persian-speaking persons who applied to local officials and did not
know Urdu or Pashto were turned away (Rzehak 2008: 185).
Later Taliban governors spoke Pashto, and were remembered as very
hostile and barbarous persons who came from Pakistan and did not
have the faintest idea about local customs (186). The Pashto language
had become very closely associated for non-Pashtun Afghans through-
out the country with the Taliban. Barfield (2010: 260) describes how
Taliban leaders, following their successful May 1997 campaign in
northern Afghanistan, tried to address a crowd of uncomprehending
Persian and Uzbek speakers in Pashto at the main mosque in Mazr-i
Sharf. Similarly, at the southern extreme of the country, one resident
of Nimroz could thus recount (in Baluchi) that people
. . . were much afraid of the government at this time. Especially Persian-
speaking people and Baluch. If you knew Pashto you could do every-
thing. You could go to every office, if your language was Pashto. You
could do everything. Nobody asked where you were coming from and
where you were going. If you spoke Persian or Baluchi they thought you
were cursing at them. This is how they were (Rzehak 2008: 193).26

26
For analysis of Baluch-Pashtun interactions, see Barth (1964 and 1969: 123-5).
84 walter hakala

While Barfield (2007: 16-7) believes that the recent Taliban efforts
to destabilize the Pashtun-majority south and east of the country
are doomed by a variety of historical, demographic, and topographic
factors, there is little doubt that decades of massive human displace-
ment will continue to have significant sociolinguistic effects for years
to come.

3.7. Conclusions

Curiously, Pstrusiska, like Cannon thirty years earlier, evokes Babel


in her closing paragraphs. In fact, much of what she is describing (as
part of a supposed Soviet policy to divide and rule)27 is what I believe
Cannon feared might happen were Afghanistan not to take the bold
step and establish a single national language and a single foreign
one. Indeed, though Pstrusiska certainly does not predict the com-
ing rise of the Taliban, her essays treatment of the cultural discon-
tinuity which accompanies war anticipates in part the situation that
Taliban leaders would exploit throughout the coming decade. While
much has been written about the rise of the Taliban in the 1990s and
the conflicts among Afghanistans various ethnic minorities, few stud-
ies, if any, have focused on the linguistic violence that accompanied
it. Despite the latest imposition of an American-backed regime with
its supposedly parliamentary model on the Afghan people, violence
continues in the region and many Pashtun refugees remain outside
Afghan borders. Pashto appears to have succeeded in adapting to new
media. While this may have been a decisive factor in its crossing what
we might imagine as a threshold of language survival, the divisions,
both topographical and political, as well as the competing influence of
Arabic (effected largely through Pashtun immigrant laborers), Dari/
Persian, Urdu, and English especially, will continue to complicate fur-
ther standardization efforts. Despite our initial hopes, it seems that
that the thirty year gap in sociolinguistic fieldwork done in Afghani-
stan will not entirely disappear, and, that we must expect the paucity
of material produced in Western European languages on Pashto in
Afghanistan to continue.

27
This same fear, however, was also expressed by ethnic Turkmens and Uzbeks to
Naby (1980: 243, 245), some of whom advocated for education in a common Turk
language.
locating pashto in afghanistan 85

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CHAPTER FOUR

PERSIAN, FARSI, DARI, TAJIKI:


LANGUAGE NAMES AND LANGUAGE POLICIES

Brian Spooner

4.1. Introduction

Persian is an important language today in a number of countries of


west, south and central Asia. But its status in each is different. In Iran
its unique status as the only official or national language continues to
be jealously guarded, even though halfprobably moreof the popu-
lation use a different language (mainly Azari/Azeri Turkish) at home,
and on the streets, though not in formal public situations, and not
in writing. Attempts to breach this exclusive status of Persian in Iran
have increased in recent decades, but are still relatively minor. Per-
sian (called tajiki) is also the official language of Tajikistan, but here
it shares that status informally with Russian, while in the west of the
country Uzbek is also widely used and in the more isolated eastern
part of the country other local Iranian languages are now dominant. In
Afghanistan, although Persian (officially renamed dari in 1964, but still
commonly called farsi) is the official language, the national language is
Pashto, and there is no official restriction on the use of other languages
(see discussion by Nawid in this volume). Persian also continues to be
spoken in some of the northern and western parts of Pakistan and the
southern littoral of the Persian Gulf. Meanwhile, for most people in
Pakistan, Bangladesh and India, for reasons that are explained later,
Persian is informally recognized as a classical language. In the other
countries of the regionTurkey, the Caucasus, the Persian Gulf and
the other Central Asian republicssomewhat negative, discriminatory
attitudes are found with regard to Persian. This situation is a conse-
quence of the nationalisms that have emerged over the past fifty years
or so. This unusual combination of vast geographical distribution and
country-by-country variation can be explained only by detailed ref-
erence to the history of the language. Persian makes an interesting
historical case study, because it includes in a somewhat exaggerated
form a number of features that are found in other modern languages
90 brian spooner

that have long textual recordsfeatures which throw a shadow over


the continuing development of language policies in all these countries,
and may illuminate some of the less tangible factors behind language
policy in general.
Persian is an unusual, perhaps unique, case in world history: unlike
other languages which became media of written communication before
the modern period, it moved seamlessly out of its mediaeval past into
the status of official language in three modern countries without under-
going any significant modification. New Persian, the form of the lan-
guage which emerged in the Arabic script in the 8th century ad (with
a borrowed Arabic vocabulary component comparable to the Latin in
English) is the direct successor to Middle Persian (written in a form of
the Aramaic script since the third century bc) and Old Persian before
that (written in cuneiform since the 6th century bc). Besides the lon-
gevity and relative stability of New Persian over a period exceeding a
millennium (for more detail see Spooner and Hanaway in press) from
earlier periods of very low literacy rates to present situations of near
universal literacy, and from language of dynastic courts and admin-
istration to national languagetexts from the 9th and 10th centuries
are fully legible and still in use among educated Iranians todaythis
historical continuity was facilitated by a number of factors. The most
important are:

A. The geographical extent of its standard usage between the 9th


and the 19th centuries, from as far east as the trade routes into cen-
tral China under the Mongol (Yuan) dynasty in the 13th and 14th
centuries, south over the Deccan Plateau into southern India under
the Mughals, and as far west as the western reaches of the Ottoman
Empire in Bosnia, as the public language for any function associ-
ated with writingadministration, trade, literatureregardless of
local spoken languages, among non-Muslims (e.g. Hindus) as well
as Muslims.
B. Its association with the authority of governments and the culture
(adab) of the secular elites of cities throughout this vast area.
C. The social organization of literacy (over an area much larger than
the group of modern countries considered in this volume), which
effectively restricted entry to the literate class down to the middle of
the 20th century, the consistent degree of interaction among mem-
bers of the urban literate class throughout this area by travel and
correspondence, and the high cultural and religious value ascribed
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 91

throughout the population (non-literate as well as literate) down to


the present day to the corpus of poetry written in Persian over the
past millennium.
D. The boost of foreign (Western) interest in the cultural heritage for
which it was the vehicle, inspired by European classical education
and Orientalism from the Elizabethan period on.
E. The practice of colonial administration in India down to 1837.

In this chapter I explore how these factors combined in the 19th-20th


centuries to shape modern attitudes towards standard Persian over
this vast area, attitudes which more recently have begun to unravel as
a consequence of the emergence of vernacular nationalisms.
The English name Persian is from the name that has been in
Western vocabulary since Herodotus (c. 484425 bc). It comes from
Pars, the area around Persepolis (the Greek name we use for the sum-
mer capital of the Achaemenian Empire) on the southwestern edge of
the Iranian Plateau. When the Persians began to convert to Islam after
the Arab conquest in the middle of the 7th century, the language was
naturally influenced by the language of the Quran. Eventually, Arabic
settled into a role comparable to that of Latin in mediaeval Europe.
When the name of the area around Persepolis shifted from pars to fars
(Arabic had no /p/), the name of the language spoken there shifted
similarly to farsi. Since Persian was the language of administration of
western Asia under the pre-Islamic Iranian empires, and it was the
language of the secretarial class, it continued to be used by non-Arabic
speakers in the Islamic civilization that succeeded them, and conse-
quently spread over a much larger areaeventually at its peak in the
14th century as far west as the Ottoman territories of what is now
Bosnia, east into the Tarim Basin around the Takla Makan and down
the major trade routes into central China, and south into the Muslim
Sultanates of north and south India, where it remained the language
of administration, literature and polite society under the Mughals, and
later the British, into the 19th century. Through this period the social
grasp of the writing class in the cities, and the popular appeal of the
literature they produced, provided a keel that steadied the historical
trajectory of the written language and a magnet that not only held
together the far-flung writing community but also standardized the
speech of polite society. Eventually, however, a process of vernacular-
ization emerged and this Persianate unity and stability began to disin-
tegrate. The process began first in the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and
92 brian spooner

16th centuries, as the language of administration in the west shifted


gradually to a highly Persianized Ottoman Turkish. In India it was
facilitated by the British decision in 1835 to switch from Persian to a
partnership of English with Urdu (a creole of Persian superimposed
on an Indic syntax). It accelerated in the 20th century with the steady
rise of literacy encouraged by nationalism, similar to the earlier shift
from Latin to the vernaculars in Western Christendom. Over the past
50 years Persian, however, written as well as spoken, has probably
changed as much or more than in the preceding 500 years, and there
is now noticeable divergence in usage between Iran, Afghanistan and
Tajikistan. But Persian continues to be highly influential as a written
language throughout the area. Thanks largely to the continuing popu-
larity of classical poetry from before the era of modern nation-states
the process of disintegration has been very gradual and is by no means
complete.
I first heard farsi in an English sentence in the early 1970s. It
gradually became common, first outside academia, then inside. Before
about 1970 the Persian language was of little interest outside academia,
but since about 1980 we have become dependent on non-academic
interest in the language for the justification that is now necessary to
pursue it in academia.1 Although the change is not difficult to explain,
it tends to create divisions, even discrimination, where none existed
previously. For this, as well as perhaps other more sentimental, even
romantic, reasons, the International Society for Iranian Studies and
some other academic bodies have taken a formal position against the
use of farsi in English.
Why should the change have occurred? Unlike the change from
Persia to Iran which was mandated for diplomatic usage by Reza Shah
in 1935, there was no official pressure. Why should it have occurred
when it did? In what context should we ask these questions? Urdu is,
after all, in English regularly called Urdu, and always has been. We
do not question why hindi is called Hindi in English. On the other
hand, we would not call Greek ellenika. And to call German Deutsch
or French franais in an English sentence would raise eyebrows. So
consistency does not appear to be a factor. Is it perhaps a modern

1
Earlier, shorter versions of this article, with somewhat different emphases relating
more directly to curricular issues, have been published in Spooner 1992 and 1994.
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 93

form of orientalism? Persian came into English in the 18th century as


an anglicization of Herodotus Greek. Why should we change it now
to match the usage of native speakers, when we do not make similar
changes for other languages?
The new usage seems to have appeared during the period when the
number of native English speakers visiting and working in Iran was
increasing on a scale for which there may have been no precedent in
any other Middle Eastern or Muslim country. The perpetrators were
diverse and not easy to classify, including various types of profession-
als and nonprofessionals. Perhaps the movement derived from a sense
that farsi suggests some degree of familiarity with an exotic culture, a
cachet. It also connotes the equal value of another cultural commu-
nity on its own terms. It is patently modern, perhaps even postmod-
ern. Persian, on the other hand, may carry connotations of elitism,
romanticism, even Orientalism of an earlier type. It is by implication
dated.
The shift is not, however, without more serious implications. In the
case of most languages which are commonly learned by non-native
speakers, the consequences of replacing the English name of the lan-
guage with the native name would be no more than stylistic, and might
even suggest increased international significance both for the language
and for its speech community. Unfortunately, calling Persian farsi has
the opposite effect. Since Afghanistan and Tajikistan now use different
native terms for the language, the new usage may even be a symptom
of its declining international status, for it reduces it to a local level,
making national political connotations inescapable. In fact, by chang-
ing the English name of the language now we may appear to choose
political sides and risk becoming complicit agents of larger changes.
We are, of course, impotent to manage the naming of anything beyond
our own small academic and professional community in the English-
speaking world. However, by analysing the processes at work we may
learn more about one of our perennial concerns: the dynamic inter-
play between language and other dimensions of culture.
In what follows, I have limited objectives. I argue that careful atten-
tion to the naming issue may illuminate some of the darker corners of
the policy picture. We must avoid doing anything that would contrib-
ute to the deracination of Persian from its larger cultural and historical
context and legitimate a new status for it as just another national lan-
guage, albeit of a country with a population of some seventy million.
94 brian spooner

I am particularly concerned that the change invalidates much of the


justification we have for insisting that the place of Persian as a supra-
national literary language (because of its administrative and literary
role in Asia over the past millenium) should be more secure than, say,
Hungarian or Bengali. In brief, if we use farsi as the English name
of the language, the role of Persian as one of the main languages of
writing in world history is lost to English speakers (and generally to
non-Persian speakers). I shall therefore first attempt to place the phe-
nomenon in its historical context.

4.2. Dari, Farsi, and Tojiki

Persian and farsi are, of course, in origin not different names. They
both emerged from the same political situation some two thousand
five hundred years ago. Based on a summer capital in an area known
as Pars in what is now southern Iran, the Achaemenians established
an empire covering most of southwest Asia. As a result of their success
the toponym pars lives on in three related traditions:

A. Arabicized in the New Persian name of the province Fars in


southern Iran, and
B. Arabicized in the name of the language, farsi, and
C. Hellenized in the Greek pers- (the Greeks associated the Persians
with their mythical hero Perseus), derivatives of which are still used
to denote everything related to the high culture of Iran (pre-Islamic
and Islamic) in Western languages. The root that gives us Persian
became inseparable from the administrative language of the empire
and the homeland of the Achaemenians in southern Iran. Persian
(the language) and farsi are historically reflexes of the same word.
But apart from the fact that Anglicized Greek suits English better
than Arabicized Persian, local connotations and usages of the lat-
ter have recently changed in some respects (as a result of modern
nationalism) that are irrelevant to our generally more academic
concerns, as characterized in the former.

After the Achaemenians, the Persian language evolved under the suc-
ceeding empires (Seleucids 312250, Parthians 250 bc226 ad, Sasa-
nians 226651), losing its inflections (as Hellenistic Greek did over
the same period), and reemerged in its modern form after the Arab
conquest, since when it has changed so slowly that texts from over
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 95

a thousand years ago are as readable to modern Persian-speakers, of


any country, as Shakespeare is to modern English-speakers. In the first
ten centuries of the Islamic period it spread over an even larger area
extending into the Tarim Basin (modern Xinjiang) in the east and
the Deccan plateau of peninsular India in the south. Most of this vast
area came to be dominated by Persian-speaking Muslim ruling classes
of what may be called (after Hodgson 1974) Persianate culture, a
culture that was associated since the Achaemenians with the idea of
Iran (cognate with our Aryan), which became a local modern iden-
tity only with the rise of nationalism in the region beginning in the
19th century. The language inevitably served not only as the language
of government and bureaucracy but of all the functions of court (i.e.,
government) life, of which perhaps the most significant in the long
term has been a monopoly on all genres of literary production, famil-
iarity with which became the core of Persianate identity. Once estab-
lished in these roles, Persian continued to dominate them down to
the present century, when finally, long after Persianate culture began
to decline through much of the area, the geopolitical situation began
to change irrevocably. This change, when it finally came, was not as
might at first be surmised, the result of the intrusion of foreign pow-
ers, but rather of their departure.
For a thousand years, therefore, Persian enjoyed cultural preemi-
nence over a large proportion of central, western, and southern Asia.
This area is roughly equivalent to what le Strange (1905) called the
Eastern Caliphate. But the direct influence of Persian even today
extends beyond the Eastern Caliphate proper, most obviously into the
lives of the Hindus of South Asia, whose modern languages are replete
with Persian loan words and calques. The everyday language of local
communities throughout this vast area was

A. A variety of dialects of Persian.


B. A variety of other Iranian languages. The relatively well-known
Balochi, Kurdish, Ossetic, Pashto, Yaghnabi, though still impor-
tant, have not developed a standard form. A number of smaller
languages remain undescribed. Many others have disappeared in
recent centuries.
C. A variety of Indo-Aryan languages and dialects.
D. A variety of Turkic vernaculars.

For about the same length of time, since the beginning of the move-
ment of Turkic peoples into southwest Asia, Turkic has spread at the
96 brian spooner

expense of both Persian and other Iranian languages for purposes


of everyday communication between non-literate speakers of differ-
ent languagesthat is, as a local or regional lingua franca. Over large
areas, starting in Azerbaijan and spreading east, Turkic eventually
eclipsed many minor, localized Iranian languages. But Persian was
the principle language of writing, and continued to function as the
overall koine for any public interaction related to the written record,
whether administrative or literary. As much as half of the population
of modern Iran now speaks a form of Western Turkic for domestic
or other purposes, but all literacy (with only minor exceptions) and
(secular) education continue to be in Persian. Even after the growth in
this century of literacy and official use of languages other than Persian,
mostly in the parts of the region that came under colonial administra-
tions, where it suited Russian policy in the North and British policy in
India to encourage Turkic and Urdu respectively, Persian continued
to be important as a second language for the intelligentsia and in the
educational system. It is not entirely coincidental that Persian ceased
to be required in schools in India and Pakistan at about the same time
(early 1960s) as Latin ceased to be a requirement for entry to Oxford
and Cambridge. It is now suppressed in modern Hindi, though still
evident, as in modern Turkish, and even modern Greek.
Despite enormous diversity and periodic upheaval at the level of
community life, the history of this vast area throughout the two and a
half millennia from Cyrus to Khomeini displays a remarkable degree
of continuity and homogeneity in literate or high culture. It is perhaps
not surprising, therefore, that farsi continued as the Persian name of
the language throughout the area to the present day. The continuing
use of the term English by Americans and others comes to mind as
an analogous continuity, though with a much shorter history.
The future, however, appears less assured. Political, social, and eco-
nomic changes over an area much larger than the modern state of
Iran, and extending into the global Iranian diaspora that has devel-
oped since the 1979 revolution in Iran, are reflected in a changing
awareness of the language that has for so long been a symbol and
focus of Iranian identity. Here and there particular speakers or groups
make various efforts to conserve or to change the language and atti-
tudes toward it. Between the 1930s and the 1960s several efforts were
made to romanize the Persian script, but without impact. In the
Islamic period this language-and-literature-based identity was until
recently also largely an attribute of class. The current rise of a new self-
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 97

consciousness among all Persian speakers perhaps can be explained


only in the context of similar intensification of linguistic and ethnic
community identities throughout the world.
Such changes in the way speakers relate to unity and diversity in
their language are, of course, not uncommon in recent history. Com-
mon speech is often seen as a reflection or even a condition of com-
mon heritage or of common interests, and lack of it (however broadly
or narrowly defined) as a clincher of cultural difference, though it may
perhaps just as often be ignored. Much has been published in recent
decades about the language policies of colonial powers and about
linguistic nationalism. This work is not irrelevant to the continuing
uncertainties in the politics of Iran and its neighbors. But the effec-
tive context of the continuing history of Persian includes a number of
other factors.
Despite the continuing use of the term farsi even now through-
out the area, some regional variation has been officially recognized.
Although this recognition has been at the government level, it is not
entirely without popular support. Persian was renamed tojiki in
the Soviet Republic of Tajikistan (and, by extension, in the Persian-
speaking communities of the neighboring Soviet republics and through
the Soviet Union) in 1928. The Soviet authorities changed not only the
name of the language but also the alphabet. They first changed it to
Roman; by discontinuing education in the Perso-Arabic script they
effectively cut off access to materials printed in Persian outside Soviet
territory. This change also broke the most basic connection with the
Islamic world by separating the script of general literacy from the script
of the text of the Quran. Later, in 1940, the alphabet was changed to a
modified Cyrillic, thus reinforcing the political relationship with Rus-
sia and the other Soviet republics (which underwent the same change
at about the same time as part of a rebirth under Stalin of the Rus-
sification policy of the czars).
The change of alphabet was an interesting experiment. It had long
been advocated by Westernizers as a means to increase literacy. For this
reason it was attempted first in Azerbaijan in 1922, and effected with
success and to some foreign acclaim outside the Soviet Union in Tur-
key in 1928. There is, however, still no reliable evidence to recommend
it as a method of increasing literacy. Literacy has risen significantly
since the 1960s not only in Turkey and in the Soviet republics, which
changed their alphabets, but also and perhaps to a greater extent in
Iran, which retained its modified version of the Arabic script. Perhaps
98 brian spooner

no two languages are exactly comparable in the functionality of their


alphabets, but the countries with the highest literacy rates in the world
include Japan, South Korea and Thailand, whose scripts would not be
likely to rank very high on a Western scale of functionality or simplic-
ity. Although Persian in the Perso-Arabic alphabet is written phoneti-
cally, spelling is complicated by a number of factors: there are several
phonetically redundant letters, short vowels are normally not repre-
sented, and most diphthongs are not distinguished. Moreover, in the
Perso-Arabic alphabet, at least until very recently, only the standard
literary language was ever written, never any vernacular (cf. the case
of historical Chinese).
When Cyrillic was adapted for use in writing Persian, it was designed
not only to be completely phonetic but also to represent the language
as spoken by the Central Asian intelligentsia. Differences that marked
the speaker as coming from a particular area immediately and for the
first time became differences of spelling and standard vocabulary and
syntax. Even the local name of the language changed: tajiki in Perso-
Arabic became tojiki in the modified Cyrillic. Persian in Tajikistan was
thus cut adrift from the standard form of the language, and the scene
was set for local divergence from the international classical standard
(which had been maintained by inter-city correspondence and travel,
as well as the continuing value of established literary models, in the
absence of any central authority, for a thousand years) through con-
vergence not only with rural dialects of the area (under the influence
of Soviet populism) but also with other Iranian languages, and most
significantly with Eastern Turkic, especially Uzbek. The process accel-
erated in the following generation, which now constitutes the senior
cohort of the Tajik intelligentsia, who were socialized in an environ-
ment of Soviet rather than Islamic-Persianate literacy. Nevertheless,
six decades of isolation behind the Soviet border appear not to have
been sufficient to break the ties of language and culture inherent in the
common use of Persian, and the status difference between farsi, the
international standard, and tojiki (despite its recent standardization)
though not as abrupt as before, has not disappeared.
Now as the Tajiks become aware of the significance of their unex-
pected independence and renew relations with their Persophone
neighbors, they are faced with a new dilemma. Should they keep the
Cyrillic alphabet, in which they were educated (either in tojiki or, in
the case of many of the intelligentsia, in Russian), or switch back to
the Perso-Arabic? To stay with Cyrillic would defeat their purpose of
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 99

rejoining their historical community, the only community fully open


to them. But if they switch and the neighboring post-Soviet Islamic
republics do not, they will have cut themselves off from the tojiki
speakers of Samarqand and Bokhara, and the rest of Central Asia, the
closest members of their pre-Soviet historical community. There are
no reliable census figures for these other Central Asian Persian speak-
ers, but they could easily exceed the number of native Persian speakers
in Tajikistan. Tajikistan did, in fact, legislate an official change back to
the Arabic script in 1989, but legislation is easier than implementation
(cf. Perry 1996, 1997, and 1999).
Thirty years after the Soviets changed the alphabet in Tajikistan,
Afghanistan faced a similar problem due to the rise of Iranian cul-
tural and political influence in the region. In the modernizing govern-
ments that ruled Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey in the 1920sunder
King Amanullah, Reza Shah, and President Ataturk respectivelyonly
Ataturk was ready (and able) to disregard Islamic sensibilities and
break the relationship between literacy and Islam by changing the
script. In Afghanistan the main concern was to reduce the cultural
power of Iran. For this reason in the new constitution of 1964 Afghani-
stan changed the name of the language as used in Afghanistan to dari.2
This relatively minor change was sufficient to give rein to nationalists
who wished to introduce elements of vernacular usage into the writ-
ten language, making it divergent from the politically dominant form
of Persian emanating from Iranian nationalism. Dari, which signifies
the language of the court (as distinct from farsi, which signifies the
language of Fars which is now a province in southern Iran), had been
available as an alternative to farsi as the name of the language since the
earliest times. New Persian had emerged from Middle Persian as the
language of the local courts that began in the 9th century to take back
power from the Caliphs in Baghdad, less than two hundred years after
the Arab-Islamic conquest. Just as everyday educated Persian speech
in Tajikistan had been influenced by Uzbek and by other rural lan-
guages and dialects, and later by Russian, in Afghanistan it was influ-
enced by Pashto (the national language, though not the language of

2
In this connection it is interesting to remember that in the tug-of-war that has
emerged between Persian and Pashto in Afghanistan over the past hundred years the
Pashtuns raised their own language, Pashto, to official status, nominally equal to Per-
sian, when Afghans needed to distinguish themselves nationalistically from the Irani-
ans. Cf. Nawid, this volume.
100 brian spooner

the national bureaucracy) and by Urdu. Although literacy in Pashto


was still negligible at the time and still lags far behind Persian within
Afghanistan, a number of institutions were given Pashto names to be
used irrespective of language, such as pohantun for university (after
Iran had introduced the Persian-based daneshgah), making official dari
immediately divergent from Iranian farsi, in ways very similar to the
divergence between Indian Hindi and Pakistani Urdu after Partition.
By choosing the early name dari Afghans implied that their Persian
was the true Persian, and therefore superior to the farsi of the Iranians.
In this connection it is worth remembering that New Persian emerged
after the Arab conquest in what is now Afghanistan, and in the second
half of the 18th century (before the era of modern nation-states in the
region) the Afghan Empire was larger than the Iranian.
The standard Persian of Iran has, of course, similarly been influ-
enced by local linguistic factors. Historical convergence on the local
level has produced divergence from the standard literary new Persian
of the mediaeval period. It would, in fact, not be easy to determine
objectively which modern form of Persian has diverged least from the
medieval standard. The main differences lie in certain verb forms (most
of which are periphrastic), in choice of loan words, and in the adop-
tion of a number of neologisms generated by an academy. However,
partly because Afghans, Iranians, and Tajiks (among others) all rightly
claim Persian as their heritage, and partly because their separation into
different language communities is recent and incomplete, for educated
speakers there continues to be no problem of mutual intelligibility.
Persian continues to be the main language for all public purposes not
only in Iran but also in Afghanistan, which (with Tajikistan where the
role is shared with Russian) have a combined population approach-
ing a hundred million, as well as being the domestic or community
language of millions more in the other Central Asian republics, Paki-
stan and the Persian Gulf (and an international diaspora). Moreover,
beyond these primary communities and although largely forgotten, it
continues (like Latin in the West) to play an important role in vocabu-
lary and word-building in the other languages of the area (comparable
to the continuing use of Greek and Latin in English). Throughout, it
continues to be known informally and locally as farsi.
To summarize, apart from the colonial language policies of the
past and local nationalistic sentiments today, the idea of a separate
identity in dari and tojiki continues to have limited significance for
native speakers. Those who emphasize them have more concern for
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 101

national cultural equality than for linguistic form (if only because as
separate standards they are inadequately described and the amount of
scholarshipinternational as well as localrelating to them is of little
significance). Whatever the future may hold for Persian in Central
and Southwest Asia, Persian speakers today still identify with a single
language community. Beyond this cultural core Persian continues to
enjoy a high cultural value among the large number of people who
speak, read, and write it as a second or third language.

4.3. Persian I and Persian II

Outside Iran, Persia remained the Western name for the Iranian pol-
ity from the time of Herodotus until the Iranian government requested
the use of Iran in diplomatic correspondence in 1935. Shortly before
the 1979 revolution official usage was once again made optional (in
view perhaps of the public relations value not only of the connotations
of Persia in European languages but also of a more categorical dif-
ferentiation from Iraq). But the separation of the name of the country
(Iran) from the name of the language (Persian) for a full generation
had already had its effect in the popular mind and made easier the
introduction of farsi to English usage. Persian is now generally known
only as the national language of Iran and might therefore just as well
(it may be argued) be called by a distinctive name. Meanwhile, dari
and tojiki have easily acquired in the West the separate identity that
the Soviet and Afghan governments had sought for them.
Much else has changed that was beyond the control of governments,
as part of the general shift in relations between the countries in the
area and between these countries and the Western world. After the
severance of diplomatic relations between Iran and the United States
in 1979, academic enrollments in Persian in American universities
decreased significantly (similar to the case of Chinese after 1949).
There is also a significant change in the objectives of students who
enroll. The establishment in America of a major branch of the Iranian
post-revolutionary diasporaone of the most highly educated of its
typehas generated a new type of student, pursuing cultural heritage
within the American liberal-arts frameworkan option not readily
available to immigrants from, for example, Vietnam or the Philip-
pinesof University programs that were designed to train students for
doctoral research in history and literature have more and more been
102 brian spooner

called on to cater to the interests of heritage language students with


essentially non-academic objectives. Since university curricula are now
largely enrollment-driven, these interests must be accommodated.
This accommodation cannot but influence the way we teach. We
are obliged to reevaluate our programs and their relationship to the
rest of the curriculum. We find, for example, that for most purposes,
a Persian language course is now measured in simple functional terms
against courses in other less commonly taught languages (LCTLs),
not (as was the case until the early 1980s) in terms of its success as an
introduction to one of the worlds great literatures, which represented
a major episode of world civilization as well as the living heritage of
several Asian countries and the basis of educated speech and literacy
for a hundred million people. Lack of awareness of what might be
called the changing academic ecology of Persian has led us to react
defensively against the type of demands that are made of LCTL instruc-
tors in general, that Persian should be taught primarily as a spoken
language of everyday life, according to the informal pronunciation of
the Iranian capital, Tehran.
The University of Pennsylvania has been teaching Persian inter-
mittently since the early part of the last century and continuously
since 1949. But until the 1970s it was taught as a classical language
onlythe language of one of the worlds richest literary traditions,
dating from the tenth century and still vital today as the basis of pub-
lic interaction, with no break in continuity. It was in this form, after
all, that it continued to be important also as a professional language
among native speakers of other languages in the region. Persian had
entered the Western curriculum in the first place not because it was
the national language of Iran, but because it had been an international
language of educated speech and writing throughout a large part of
the civilized world, comparable to Hellenistic Greek, the original
koine, which predominated in similar functions over an overlapping
area a millennium or so earlier. Persian has now for some time been
taught in all the major Middle East programs in the United States,
but as a modern rather than a classical language. Academic attitudes
toward it have changed as a result not only of the emergence of Iran
as a major regional power in the 1960s but also because of changes in
academic priorities and in the criteria (never entirely explicit) for the
inclusion of particular languages in the curriculum. Few now are aware
that the earliest Western students of Persian had studied it in the 18th
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 103

century as the bureaucratic and classical language of Mughal India.


Official interest in the language grew because of its importance beyond
the North West Frontier of British India (though within India its
importance was declining, and it was replaced with Urdu for official
purposes in 18351837). Interest faded following the independence
and partition of India in 1947, since when the academic division of the
world into areas has located Iran within the Middle East. Now most
prospective students associate Persian almost exclusively with mod-
ern life in Iran and study it because of Irans role in the Middle East.
There is at least one case of an experienced Persian instructor being
considered ineligible for promotion because of an Afghan accentin
a major American university.
Changing attitudes towards Persian in the West are related to
changes on the ground in the region, and the relationship works both
ways. Since the early 1970s at the University of Pennsylvania and
elsewhere, the teaching of Persian as it is used for everyday public
purposes in modern Tehran has gradually diverged from the teach-
ing of the classical form of the language. In most cases students now
are introduced to Persian first as the standard language of modern
Iran, only secondarily in its classical form, and rarely at all in its other
standard national formsof Afghanistan and Tajikistanlet alone the
non-standard forms still in use in considerable populations scattered
(somewhat unevenly) throughout the region (see Farhadi and Perry,
2009, for a description of Persian as spoken in Kabul ). This divergent
and narrowing specialization of Persian instruction has resulted partly
from the pressures of funding agencies, which have sought to promote
social science studies and country-oriented research at the expense of
literature and region-oriented research in area-studies programs, and
partly also from a diversification of academic, professional, and other
interests among students. But the divergence has confused rather
than clarified the situation, because it is usually not explicit, it is by
no means complete, and it is more evident in some institutions than
others.
There is also inconsistent classification of the language in terms
of difficulty for English speakers. It is important to note that Persian
(when taught as the modern language of Iran) is relatively easy to begin
with, because some of the basic vocabulary is cognate with English and
the syntax is similar. Beyond the initial hurdle of a strange alphabet,
the student finds relatively simple sentences with familiar structures.
104 brian spooner

Partly for this reason introductory Persian classes are often relatively
large. However, few students progress far into the intermediate level
because of the increasing need to deal with vocabulary, syntax, and
usage that are culturally alien to English speakers as a result of the
high degree of convergence with the major non-Indo-European lan-
guages in the region, Arabic and Turkish, as well as the importance
of imported Arabic vocabulary. Enrollments in Persian (when taken
for essentially nonacademic, but now common, purposes) tend to fall
off sharply after the first year, further endangering its future in the
curriculum.
We are left with a dilemma. Persian has at best an uncertain future
in Western universities. If it is seen as the national language of Iran,
with little to distinguish it from other less-commonly-taught languages
in the eyes of the average university administration, its best chance
for survival is probably along the lines of Armenian, supported by an
expatriate community with ties to a home country. In the long term it
is unlikely to attract more than the occasional student of non-Iranian
background. But there is little evidence so far to suggest that the Ira-
nian expatriate community, despite its size and its resources, would
support Iranian studies as strongly as the Armenian community sup-
ports Armenian. This process will weaken the status of Persian outside
Iran.

4.4. Policy Implications

Decisions about language policy in Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan


in particular, but also to some extent in the region in general are
made in the shadow of the heritage of a millennium in which Persian
was the principal, if not the only written language. (Arabic was little
used outside the madrasa, where Persian was also used.) This shadow
plays differently in different countries today because of the local
nationalistic relations that have evolved between them over the past
century. Iran can only gain from international acceptance of Persian
as one of the major languages of world literacy. The other countries
face a dilemma: if their language is the same as Irans they lose their
major defense against what they identify as Iranian cultural imperial-
ism. By using a different name for their modern version of Persian and
allowing it to diverge as a result of separation from the longstanding
textual tradition of the region (which is now associated primarily with
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 105

Iran), they gain socio-political reinforcement for their local national-


ism, but they weaken their claim to its historical base. The spread of
modern education favors the political process and reduces the value of
the textual tradition. The division of Persian in the Western curricu-
lum into dari, farsi and tajiki is similarly related to a shift of academic
interest from the textual tradition to political realities.
The die is probably already cast, though much depends on regional
politics over the coming generation. To break out of this track it would
be necessary not simply to make the negative case: that Persian should
be broken into three national languages to be categorized as LCTLs
and programmed in the curriculum according to modern standard
methods, if at all. Rather, a major investment in the construction of
a positive case is required, perhaps through UNESCO channels: that
Persian be recognized along with a very few other languages at the level
of international cultural heritageas a language whose native speakers
are outnumbered by those who use it to varying degrees for a range of
purposes, including professional and research purposes, as a second or
third language because of the literature for which it became a vehicle
over the past millennium. Such a category of languages would include
English and French in the Western world and Chinese in Asia. (There
would of course be other candidates, but not a large number.) Catego-
rized in this way it would be easier both for the countries concerned
to build positively on their shared linguistic heritage, and to maintain
a place for Persian (inclusive of dari, farsi and tajiki) in the Western
or international curriculum. The academic appeal of Persian would be
increased and less dependent on the vagaries of international politics.
Instruction in it could once again be integrated into a larger program
of courses on the history and cultural products for which it is the key,
for a liberal-arts curriculum, rather than being ghettoized with other
LCTLs, as a skill.
In the meantime we should choose our terms carefully, and avoid
using terms that could bring the force of Western hegemony behind the
process of (non-Western) linguistic divergence. If we leave no doubt
that what we are teaching is Persian, in the larger or inclusive sense,
we can continue to claim that we are teaching not only the major lan-
guage of Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan (as English programs teach
the English of America, Anglo-phone Africa, Australasia, South Asia,
the U.K., etc.), but also an historically important international lan-
guage that continues to play an important role in vocabulary building
in other historically related languages. If some of us say we teach farsi,
106 brian spooner

we risk being overtaken for good by the national language image


with the implication that what we teach is no more or less important
(or loved) than the modern nation-state of Iran. The farsi image
will sweep us along in the direction mapped out by the Soviet colo-
nial ideology and the linguistic nationalisms it has left behind, besides
implicating us in the more dubious crime of unnecessarily inventing
English words. Those of us who are native speakers to boot might per-
haps also be accused of linguistic imperialism. But more significantly,
by disguising the international and historical significance of the lan-
guage by using the term farsi in situations where it is not necessary to
distinguish particular details of modern usage in different countries,
we not only damage our case for keeping Persian and its literature in
the liberal-arts curriculum, but we also lend the weight of the interna-
tional curriculum to linguistic divergence in Central Asia. As a result
the status of Persian outside Iran is likely to be reduced.
In either case, if we continue to emphasize modern usage in language
studies, we have a serious problem. We have to organize our teach-
ing around the standard usage of a particular community of native
speakers. Which standard Persian pronunciation and usage are we
to work with in this multi-national, multi-cultural age? dari? farsi?
or tojiki? If we take the position that we are working with Persian,
the historical international language, in full consciousness of all the
implications, we have an excellent case for defining our own role in
the changing modern curriculum and reclaiming the status that Per-
sian used to hold in it, making us immune to the pressures that have
recently put us on the defensive. However, maintaining this position
will require strong leadership, because it puts us at odds with the pro-
fessional community of modern language teachers that has emerged
over the past generation, who are native speakers of one variety of the
language. Meanwhile, language policy in Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan
and other countries of western and south Asia are torn between the
historical forces of identity that depend on the cultural value of classi-
cal Persian poetry and the modern forces of ethnicity and nationalism
that demand ethno-linguistic integrity.
Since the Islamic Republic of Iran is the largest modern community
of Persian speakers, this discussion would not be complete without
some attention to the Iranian point of view, specifically a review of
what has been done in Iran over the past few generations by language-
conscious Iranians both in and out of government to promote the
modern value of the language that is their treasured heritage and the
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 107

major historical thread in their cultural and modern political iden-


tity (cf. the powerful case made in Meskoob 1992). The process of
nationalization of the language began in the colonial period. Neither
Iran nor Afghanistan were actually taken over by a Western imperial
power. But the British interest in Indias northwestern approaches and
their concern with Russian imperial expansion and European intrigue
were the major factors leading to the definition, organized by the
British, of an internationally recognised border between Afghanistan
and Iran guaranteeing them both the status of modern nation-states
(cf. Goldsmid 1876, McLachlan 1994).
Although the major historical cities of the Persianate world have
been distributed fairly evenly throughout the territory that is now
divided among Afghanistan, Central Asia and Iran, the history of the
last three centuries has left modern Iran with the largest claim to rep-
resent the achievements of the past. How did this happen? The first
half of the 18th century was a period of general decline and disinte-
gration in south, central and southwest Asia. Then the major cities
of Central Asia (Bokhara, Khwarazm, Marv, Samarqand) were cut off
from the larger Persianate world by Russian expansion, a partition
of the Islamic world that was later reinforced by the Soviet Govern-
ment. The founding of Afghanistan in 1747 was achieved in basically
the same way as all the earlier cases of Islamic history (a process that
was immortalized by ibn Khaldun four centuries earlier), but from a
city (Qandahar) that had not previously been a Persianate capital. So
Afghanistan, which had been at the geographical center of the citied
(cf. Hodgson 1974 vol. 1, p. 50) Persianate world was built not on the
citied heritage of the Persianate world, but on the tribal heritage of its
geographical interstices. Although the historical cities of Herat, Kabul,
Mazar, and Qandahar, and even Ghazni, are important players in the
history of Afghanistan, their role is in no way comparable to Isfahan,
Kerman, Mashhad, Tabriz and Tehran, among others, in Iran. Herat,
which was historically perhaps the most significant of Afghanistans
cities, suffered in the 19th century first from dynastic conflict inside
it, and later conflict over it with Iran. Ghazni, which was one of the
early political centers of the Persianate world in the 11th century, has
never risen back to urban significance. But while Afghanistan became
a tribal polity with an urban periphery, Iran was built on a citied core
with a tribal periphery. The early rulers of Afghanistan hired a Persi-
anate bureaucracy, but they never integrated with the tribal elite. Iran
therefore by the historical accident of urban continuity has greater
108 brian spooner

claim to the heritage of the Achaemenians and the Sasanians in the


modern world.
Irans claim is strengthened by the city of Isfahan and the Safavids,
and the distinctiveness in the modern world of their Shiite Safavid
heritage. But for over half a millennium, down to the 16th century,
Persian had served as the sole language of public interaction, formal
and informal throughout the Persianate world, extending well into
China, and southern India, and even for a time under the Ottomans
into the Balkans. During this time it carried with it a general culture of
Islamic urbanity but no association with any particular political, cul-
tural or religious minority or subcommunity. The rise of the Safavid
Empire at the beginning of the 16th century was to transform this situ-
ationas the largest modern political community of Persian speakers,
the successor state to the Safavid Empire (15011722), distinguished
from its neighbors as the only state to establish the Twelver Shiite
interpretation of Islam.
From the time of the fall of the Sasanian Empire and the Arab con-
quest (651 ad) down to the rise of the Safavids (1501) Iran was a
cultural concept without a location, while Persian was the language
of administration, belles lettres and public life in general, for every-
one regardless of their local vernacular. Shiism was more prevalent in
some parts of the Islamic world than others, and was generally asso-
ciated not with any government (apart from periods of prominence
under the Buyids, 930s1055 in Mesopotamia and the Iranian Pla-
teau, and the Fatimids, who followed a different branch of Shiism in
Egypt and North Africa at roughly the same time) but with opposi-
tion to legitimate Sunni governments. During the Safavid and later
the Qajar periods, partly as a result of the influence of Western ideas
and political and economic pressures, the historical idea of Iran had
become associated with a particular empire, an empire that promoted
the Twelver Shiite interpretation of Islam. As Iran was transformed
into a nation-state (a process in which Western imperialism was a
catalyst). Persian became its national language. The fact that the new
Iran claimed a territory that had been at the heart of the pre-Islamic
Persian empires helped but did not determine this process. Much of
what has now become Afghanistan, or Central Asia or southern Iraq,
could claim the same heritage. In the crucial period of the second half
of the 18th century Afghanistan was in fact the stronger polity. But
the Afghan polity, despite the fact that its second shah established a
Persianate administration, arose from a different, non-citied, identity.
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 109

Although not understood at the time, the events of this period had
the effect of changing the status of Iran and Persian in relation to
other Persianate successor states and their use of Persian. As a result
the modern issue of the relationship between language and ethnic or
national identity emerged and governments began to find the need
for policies relating to language use. The Ottoman Empire had already
switched from Persian to a highly Persianate form of Ottoman Turk-
ish, in a gradual process beginning as early as the 15th century. But if
the British Government in India had not replaced Persian with Urdu in
1835 (and subordinated Urdu to English). Persian could have become
the national language of Pakistan, in continuity with its heritage as the
successor state of the Mughal Empire (15261857) and the primacy in
its territory of the Mughal city of Lahore. For discussion of the change
from Persian to Urdu in north and south India see the articles by
Aslam Syed and Anwar Moazzam in Spooner and Hanaway (in press).
Afghanistan sought to separate itself from the hegemony of Iran by
raising the status of Pashto, and in 1964 changing its name for Persian
from farsi to dari. In the part of Central Asia north of Afghanistan
that came under Russian rule, emphasis shifted to the Turkic vernacu-
lars, with the exception of the late (1928) Soviet creation of Tajikistan
where Persian was continued as the national language (though 40% of
the population spoke Uzbek and a significant number of the remain-
der spoke other Iranian languages) but under a changed name, tojiki,
in the Cyrillic alphabet. The status of Persian in China changed as a
result of similar processes. The many other local languages and dialects
of Iran were now in conflict with the inclusiveness of modern concep-
tions of national identity, and their numbers have diminished at an
increasing rate since the 1950s.

4.5. Language Policy in Iran

Once Persian had become fully nationalized in Iran, the purity of its
identity became as important as the purity of Iranian national identity,
inclusive within and exclusive without its borders. Language became a
matter for government policy in the 1930s. Over the next few decades
five specific problems came to be addressed:

A. The proportion of Arabic vocabulary that had been adopted in the


written language over the past millennium.
110 brian spooner

B. The modern tendency to adopt loan words from French, and later
from English.
C. The need to create new vocabulary for modern science and tech-
nology.
D. The rights of ethno-linguistic minorities to publication and educa-
tion in their own languages.
E. The need to accommodate the normal processes of language change
to issues of language policy.

Underlying all five of these problems was the history of Persian as


recounted in this chapter: the barely conscious assumption that Ira-
nian national identity was based on the linguistic continuity of the past
millennium as represented in the writings of classical authors, and that
it must therefore be managed carefully. Partly for this reason Persian
as written continued to change very slowly through the middle of the
20th century, but has speeded up since the 1970sa process acceler-
ated by a significant rise in the rate of literacy, and by increased inter-
action with the outside world, followed by the social consequences of
the revolution in 1979.
The first three of the problems enumerated above were dealt with
by the establishment of language academies. The work of these institu-
tions and the linguistic awareness that led up to them has been inter-
estingly documented and discussed by Perry (1985). Under Reza Shah
(19251941) the government had established the first Iranian Acad-
emy (Farhangestan) in 1935 with the mandate to coin new words that
would keep the language abreast of new developments in the world of
science and technology. However, the Academys tasks also included
responsibilities for gathering the languages historical vocabulary, and
formulating its grammar, as well as investigating the issue of script
or alphabet reform. Insofar as it is related in some way to issues of
orthography the historical development of modern nationalistic lan-
guage awareness among Irans elite is usefully documented by Hasha-
beiky (2005, especially chapter 4, pp. 73-124). She reviews discussions
of the relationship between Persian and its script from the middle of
the 19th century onwards, following the introduction of printing and
the expansion of interaction with Europe. News of the initiation of the
tanzimat period in the neighboring Ottoman Empire (18391876)
may also have been a factor, on top of the loss of territory to Russia
in the Caucasus (by the Treaties of Golestan in 1813 and Turkman-
chay in 1828). The tension between Westernizing intellectuals, many
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 111

of whom lived abroad, and an Islamizing and nationalistic majority


in Iran, which continues today, became significant in the second half
of the 19th century. Alphabet reform was considered by many to be
a contributing factor to under-development and a sense of national
inadequacy in a West-dominated world. But nothing was done about
it at the level of government, until the reign of Reza Shah (19251941),
and his son, Mohammad Reza (19411979). The Society for Alphabet
Reform was founded in Tehran in 1945. But interest in Romanizing
the script seems to have passed its peak in the 1950s. The first Academy
achieved little, was inactive for much of the time, and finally closed in
1953. It was not reopened until 1970, by which time nationalist con-
cerns about alien vocabulary had shifted from Arabic and French to
English (cf. Jazayeri 1958), and interest in Romanization (which had
been inspired by Ataturks example in 1928) had lost its appeal. The
work of the second academy was cut off by the events of 1979, and it
was not until 1990 that a similar body was again opened, this time with
the title of Academy of Persian Language and Literature.
With regard to the fourth question, opposition to the hegemony
and monopoly of Persian within Iran was slow to emerge. There were
signs of pressure to allow publication in Azari in the 1960s. For a few
years starting in the late 1960s the satyrical weekly tawfiq got away
with publishing columns in street Turki and street Arabic, presumably
because it appeared to make fun of them. This practice was, however,
stopped by the mid 1970s, and no publication was permitted in any
of the other minority languages, such as Balochi, Kurdish, Turkmeni.3
Public use of these languages was restricted to brief radio programs,
mainly national news.
Since the Revolution in 1979 Iran has been no less nationalistic,
but it effuses a new linguistic self-confidence. Several factors may have
contributed to this change. The dramatic increase in literacy rates,
that began with the work of the Literacy Corps as part of the White
Revolution in 1963, resulted during the mid to late 1970s (the period
leading up to the Revolution) in a sea change in the historical rela-
tionship between the written and spoken language. It was no longer
possible for a small elite to control the country through control of the
written languagethe medium of administration, and the national

3
Armenian and Assyrian Christians were allowed to publish in their own
languages.
112 brian spooner

culture and identity. Ordinary people with standard basic education


now shared the benefits of access to the written language. After the
Revolution the class that was as comfortable in French or English as
Persian, and would rarely talk in Persian with a foreigner, had moved
abroad. A new class had become literate and moved into the national
elite. Even though Western doctorates were not uncommon among
them, they saw no reason not to speak Persian, and they were less
concerned to suppress the use of minority languages. Now publication
in Azari and Kurdish is common (see http://kurdistantoday.ir/News
Detail.aspx?itemid=1683), though these languages do not compete
with Persian to any significant degree, and education remains entirely
Persian-medium, presumably because of the continuing cultural power
of the classical tradition.
All policy issues in Iran now are influenced both by general pro-
cesses of globalization and by particular Western attempts to influ-
ence. Since the U.S. is now funding Azari broadcasting specifically for
Iranian Azari-speakers (see http://www.eurasianet.org/departments
/insight/articles/eav031008a.shtml) the situation may change again.
However, the high literacy rate (irrespective of social class or higher
education) and general access to international media make it unlikely
that government policy will be able to control language effectively
any more in the long term. The rate of change in everyday language
usage has picked up, the proportion of Arabic loanwords appears to be
decreasing, and the written language is no longer entirely controlled
by the models of the classical period. The loss of these classical models
in which the models for public behavior were also embedded (known
as adab) is also seen in the process of cultural change. Now that a pop-
ulation of seventy million has equal access to information and plays an
equal part in the formation of public opinion, new forms of competi-
tion, political voice and public behavior are beginning to appear which
would have horrified an earlier generation.

4.6. Appendix: Is Persian Diglossic?

Some readers may wonder why the term diglossia does not appear
in this chapter, given the space devoted to it in the Introduction,
and the use C.A. Ferguson made of Persian in his initial definition
of diglossia (1959: 325). In the formative period of modern language
studies, when the textual study of a small number of individual
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 113

languages (philology) gave ground to the study of language in gen-


eral throughout the world (linguistics), the concept of diglossia was
an important contribution to the effort to find patterns in language
use that would facilitate comparative studies and the development of
theory. Many elements of Persian language usage fit the diglossia pat-
tern. However, by simply dropping Persian into the diglossia basket
we would distract attention from a number of other significant ele-
ments that distinguish it from that pattern.
Ferguson begins his article by introducing the idea of diglossia as
the use of two or more varieties of the same language in a single
speech community. He then uses Persian (along with Italian) as a prime
example of a situation of perhaps the most familiar type of diglossia:
in which there is a standard language and regional dialect . . . where
many speakers speak their local dialect at home or among family or
friends of the same dialect area but use the standard language in com-
municating with speakers of other dialects or on public occasions.
(He does not give sources, and he makes no reference anywhere in
his article to the work of scholars who specialized at that time in the
study of Persian. However, an earlier article of his (1957) suggests that
he used native speakers who were students at Harvard as informants.)
In the same opening paragraph he offers other different examples, and
compares the whole phenomenon to the process of language stan-
dardization in Germany and France. The article then elaborates his
definition by means of a comparative review of the cases of Arabic,
Modern Greek, Swiss German, and Haitian Creole. The history of each
of these languages, and their diglossic divergence is of course different,
as he freely admits. The question here is what would be gained or lost
from including Persian in the same catalogue as just another variety of
diglossia. The answer to this question is relative, rather than black and
white, but is relegated here to an appendix in order to avoid confusion
with the argument about language policy.
The concept of diglossia in its broadest sense might be expected to
include Persian. But this would leave open the question of whether
that would be analytically useful. In its broadest sense diglossia could
include even English, or in fact any language with an established tra-
dition of literacy, since every written language develops over time
according to a different dynamic from speech. Fergusons references
to Persian, both in the diglossia article (1959) and elsewhere appear
to take no account of the larger context of Persian usage, historical
and modern, but rather to treat it as comparable to Italian (ibid.), viz.
114 brian spooner

simply the language of a single modern national community. This


treatment omits a number of significant features, and does nothing to
improve our understanding of modern Persian usage. The point of this
brief appendix is to clarify what distinguishes Persian from the typical
diglossic language, and explain why it has evolved differently.
Ferguson was writing in the 1950s, when the literacy rate in Iran
was very low (perhaps 30%). Following the development of a Liter-
acy Corps in 1963 (after the model of the U.S. Peace Corps), which
provided teachers for village schools throughout the country, within
a decade or so the literacy rate rose spectacularly. It is now around
90%, probably the highest of all countries using the Arabic script, and
higher than is typical of the situations commonly classified as diglos-
sic. The importance of these figures lies in what they show about the
rate and quality of change in the relationship between written and
spoken language over the past half-century. If literacy is a major fac-
tor in diglossia, then the nature of diglossia in Iran has changed out of
recognition in not much more than a single generation, to the point
where if it fitted the situation in the 1950s it would have to be com-
pletely redefined for use today.
Attention to the historical situation introduces further complica-
tions. The history of Persian continues to be significant in modern
usage. As in other parts of the world Iranians today live under the
cultural shadow of the past. The past still conditions the present in
modern Western societies where history is losing its place in the cur-
riculum. The Islamic World, and Iran in particular, continues to be
historically aware, for reasons that are both Islamic and nationalistic.
As we have reviewed already, modern Persian has had a continu-
ous history since its re-emergence in the routinization of political life
that followed the Arab conquest of West and Central Asia in the 7th
century. During the following centuries it spread fast despite the fact
that the lands that had earlier been under Persian rule now looked
towards an Arabic speaking Caliph in Baghdad as the symbolic center
of the new order. In the 13th century, however, the Mongols arrived
from the East, put an end to the symbolic center in Baghdad and
established an empire that stretched from Western Asia into China.
Mongol administration became the vehicle for the further expansion
of Persianacross Asia into China, and later by successor empires
into southeastern Europe and South Asia.
What English has been for global communication in the 20th
century, Persian was in the high Middle Agesthe most important
persian, farsi, dari, tajiki 115

language for government, administration, communication and trade


throughout the ecumene. Yes, there was a Latinate world to the west
(but Venetian nobles sent their sons to Beirut to learn Persian), and
a Sinic world to the east (but Persian was the language of commerce
along trade routes well into central China, cf. Morgan 2011, and is
still taught as a language of religious commentary in many Chinese
mosques), and an Arabicate world in Africa (but Persian words found
their way as far west as Wolof in modern Senegal ). Moreover, Eng-
lish has for the most part not replaced local languages. Persian, on
the other hand, offered membership in the larger ecumene of civilized
life of the time. Those who joined it were not choosing a high (writ-
ten) language for a particular purpose and leaving a low (unwritten)
language or languages for less formal purposes. Rather by writing Per-
sian and speaking it (as it was written, according to adab) they were
participating in activities of larger political, economic and literary sig-
nificance, leaving the use of other local languages for interaction with
people who operated only on the local level without awareness of the
Persianate ecumene.
Persian was the English of the high Middle Ages, when Central Asia
was the center of the world. But its cultural value and its political and
economic significance were always changing. Its use expanded from
the 8th to the 13th centuries. It was at its height in the 14th century.
And it began to decline in the 15th, through a creeping process of
vernacularization, comparable to the emergence of the Romance lan-
guages at the expense of Latin in Europe. First, the Ottoman adminis-
tration switched to a highly Persianized form of Turkish. South Asian
vernaculars began to encroach in the 17th century, first Pashto and
Urdu, later Sindhi. The British in India finally shifted from Persian to
a partnership of English and Urdu in 1835. Perhaps the last govern-
ment of a non-Persian speaking population to change was the Princely
State of Hyderabad which completed the process in 1884 (cf. Moazzam
2011). The process was accelerated in the 19th century by the adminis-
trative reorganization of Asia, and the division of the Persianate world,
under British and Russian imperial rule. Persian had provided the cul-
tural glue that held together all the local Muslim polities and trade
centers from Anatolia to the Yellow River and from the Aral Sea to the
Deccan in south India. When this world became divided between two
external non-Muslim empires, Persian lost the function that was its
strength. But change in other dimensions of public life lagged, again
in ways that are comparable with Latin in the West. Persian continued
116 brian spooner

its literary function into the 20th century. It finally disappeared from
the school curriculum in India and Pakistan at roughly the same time
as Latin was dropped from the curriculum in England. But the cultural
value of its literature continues to support its international status to a
far greater extent than Latin in the West.
As the world continued to change in the 19th and early 20th centu-
ries, not only did the use of language change, but academic attitudes
toward the study of language also changed. Although the relationship
between Sanskrit and Greek had been noticed in the 16th century, it
was the work of Sir William Jones in the 18th century (17461794)
that spurred the first great expansion of language study to include the
textual records of all Indo-European languages. The next acceleration
in the process came with the rise of interest among anthropologists in
non-written languages in the late 19th century. Linguistics emerged as
a new field of study only in the 1940s, with a new focus on the scien-
tific study of language in general, whether written or not. It gradually
incorporated textual studies, as historical linguistics, the textual study
of written languages, which had been known as philology. While this
development led very quickly to spectacular advances in understand-
ing of language in general, it tended to orphan some types of historical
language study, in particular the historical sociology of literacy. Per-
sian is a very good, perhaps the best, example of such a victim. It has
been particularly unfortunate for Persian because (unlike, for example,
Latin) little work had been done on it earlier.
Persian has been one of the three most important written languages
in world history. Its vast corpus of literature continues to be highly
valued in the original as well as in translation in a number of countries
besides the three (Afghanistan, Iran, Tajikistan) which use it as official
languages, albeit under different names (dari, farsi, tajiki) in forms
which differ to a similar degree to the modern English of Australia,
England and the U.S.

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SECTION II

CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS OF THE FORMER


SOVIET UNION
CHAPTER FIVE

REVERSING LANGUAGE SHIFT IN KAZAKHSTAN1

William Fierman

In the last two decades a growing number of scholars have studied


attempts to raise the status of languages that have been on the los-
ing end in the process of language shift. Among the most well-known
cases are those on behalf of Catalan (which lost ground to Spanish)
and Irish (which lost even more ground to English). The field of
research that has begun to examine the efforts on behalf of the weaker
languages has become known as RLS, i.e., reversing language shift.
Much of the theoretical foundation for the work in this area has been
laid by Joshua Fishman, under whose editorship Reversing Language
Shift appeared in 1991.2 Indeed, in the view of linguist Angela Bartens,
it was with the appearance of this volume that the RLS field came
into being.3 In the light of the first ten years of case studies, Fishman
revisited his RLS theory and in 2001 produced a new edited volume,
Can Threatened Languages Be Saved?4
In the cases of Catalan and Irish, as well as perhaps most other
languages for which RLS is undertaken, the majority of their speakers
likely know at least one other language. Considering, for the moment,
the bilingual speakers of Catalan and Irish (who in most cases know
Spanish and English, respectively) their use of Catalan and Irish is
likely to be largely determined by domain of activity. In particular,

1
A substantial part of the material in this article originally appeared in Russian in
. ,
No. 6, 2005, pp. 49-71 Research for this article was supported in part by a
fellowship from IREX (International Research & Exchanges Board) with funds pro-
vided by the United States Department of State through the Title VIII.
2
Joshua A. Fishman, Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foun-
dations of Assistance to Threatened Languages (Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters,
1991).
3
Angela Bartens, Review of Can Languages Be Saved? The Linguist List, http://
cf.linguistlist.org/cfdocs/new-website/LL-WorkingDirs/pubs/reviews/get-review
.cfm?SubID=3834.
4
Joshua A. Fishman, Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Reversing Language
Shift, Revisited: A 21st Century Perspective (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2001).
122 william fierman

Irish or Catalan speakers are most likely to use these languages in the
home. However, in other domains, ranging from primary education to
mass media, commerce, public services, the legal system, and higher
education, it seems likely that on many days outside the home, certain
Irish or Catalan speakers would use at least some English or Spanish,
indeed, perhaps exclusively English or Spanish.
As discussed by Schiffman and Spooner in the introduction to this
volume, situations in which different languages are used in different
domains are referred to as diglossic. Diglossia may involve two very
different languages (such as Irish and English); however, it may also
involve two closely related languages such as Catalan and Spanish, or
even closer as in parts of Switzerland, where both High German and
local varieties of Swiss German are used.5
Regardless of the linguistic distance between languages, diglossia
may be quite stable as long as each language or language variety is
the one primarily or exclusively used in particular domains. However,
language shift is likely to occur in situations in which a stronger
language begins to displace the weaker one in spheres previously
reserved for the latter.6 Viewed from this perspective, RLS thus involves
the weaker language re-acquiring some of its functions. This is often
an uphill battle.
It should be kept in mind that, as Fishman demonstrates, today
even most of the worlds stronger languages are dominant only in
a relative sense. Thus, a dominant language in a medium-size Euro-
pean country (say, Greek in Greece) is in an unfavorable position vis-
-vis major world languages, such as English or French. This means
that even languages which gain ground through RLS are unlikely to
become the sole languages used by their speakers. In todays globalized
world, members of most speech communities will forever be bi- or
trilingual, with each of their languageseven the most powerful of

5
Much of the foundation for later work on diglossia was laid by Charles Fergu-
son in his 1959 article Diglossia in the journal Word, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 325-40.
Here Ferguson describes cases of diglossia involving societies where closely related
languages are used. Subsequently, Fishman extended the term to societies with lin-
guistically more distant or even remote languages (Bilingualism With and Without
Diglossia; Diglossia With and Without Bilingualism, Journal of Social Issues vol. 23,
no. 2 [1967], pp. 29-38).
6
Fishman (1967), p. 36.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 123

themenacting only special and complementary functions.7 Conse-


quently, in the vast majority of cases, RLS involves embarking on a
carefully multilingual and multicultural existence.8
In describing RLS and making recommendations about the best way
to attempt it, Fishman repeatedly likens weak languages to sick human
beings. Similar to patients with particular diseases that also afflict oth-
ers, such languages also require treatment that, although unique in
certain details, is designed for the same malady. Therefore, Fishman
advises, what weak languages need are not generalised predictions of
dire and even terminal illnesses, but, rather the development of thera-
peutic understandings and approaches that can be adjusted so as to
tackle essentially the same illness in patient after patient.9
Fishman acknowledges that many RLS-ers (as he refers to those
pursuing RLS) are reluctant to accept this reality and may view a
struggle for limited RLS goals as a kind of defeat.10 However, Fish-
man argues that goals should be selected based on a sober calculation:
in a particular case it might be prudent to recognize the impracticality
or even impossibility in the foreseeable future of creating a network
of secondary education institutions with the weak language as the
medium of instruction (e.g., when there are few young speakers). In
such a case, it might be better to focus first on efforts at a lower level,
such as cultivating opportunities in which senior citizens with good
language competence use and teach the language to younger people
through story-telling, traditional arts, and crafts at a neighborhood or
community level.11 Because resources are limited and should be used
most efficiently, Fishman says that Reasonableness in all things is a
far better maxim for the pursuit of RLS in a focused linkage pattern
than the skys the limit.12

7
Joshua A. Fishman, From Theory to Practice (and Vice Versa): Review, Recon-
sideration and Reiteration, in Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Can Threatened Languages Be
Saved? (Buffalo: Multilingual Matters, 2001) p. 476.
8
Ibid.
9
Joshua A. Fishman, Why Is It So Hard to Save a Threatened Language? In
Joshua A. Fishman (ed.), Can Threatened Languages Be Saved?, p. 1. The analogy of
a language to a sick human being has been the target of criticism by anthropolo-
gists, among them Joseph Errington. See Getting Language Rights: The Rhetorics of
Language Endangerment and Lost, American Anthropologist vol. 105, no. 4 (2003),
pp. 723-32.
10
Fishman 2001b, p. 17.
11
Fishman 2001a, pp. 468-9.
12
Fishman 2001a, pp. 475-6.
124 william fierman

Although Fishmans approach is partly prescriptive, he does not


present a rigid order. Rather, he offers a Graded Intergenerational
Disruption Scale (GIDS), characterized as a logical set of priorities
or targets to guide RLS-efforts towards a desired goal.13 This scale
progresses from four phases with the goal of attaining diglossia to
four others which are supposed to transcend it. The latter four include
establishing domains for a weaker language in the mass media, gov-
ernmental service, the workplace, and education. Fishman maintains
that Stage 6 (third from the bottom in the GIDS scale) is commonly
the RLS fulcrum.14 This crucial nexus of intergenerational mother
tongue transmission is the intergenerational and demographically
concentrated home-family-neighbourhood community.15 Although
Fishman concedes that the fulcrum may be at another stage for RLS
efforts for a particular language at a particular time, he stresses that
in order for RLS efforts to be effective, stages should be linked and
reinforce one another. This means, for example, that RLS work that
focuses on schools is more likely to accomplish its goals if it is closely
linked to efforts in the home-family-neighborhood environment. In
one of the relatively few predictive moments, Fishman forecasts a
drastic and painful failure for solely school-based language study.
This is above all because in order for RLS efforts to succeed, a language
needs a society in which it can function, before school begins, outside
of school during the years of schooling and afterwards, when formal
schooling is over and done with [emphasis in original].16 This clearly
implies that diglossia involving a sick language is unlikely to succeed if
RLS relies on school-based study without attention to use of language
in the home.
Fishmans advice to eschew unattainable goals reflects a recognition
that declaring policy and implementing it are very different kinds of
undertakings, and that overly ambitious proclamations are likely to
fail because language planners lack the resources and mechanisms to
carry out their plans. Acknowledgement of the particular challenges
posed by language policy implementation is hardly new. In the pio-
neering volume published in 1974 titled Can Language Be Planned,

13
Fishman 2001a, p. 465.
14
Stage 6 is actually the third of the eight stages, which begin with Stage 8; the
last stage is Stage 1.
15
Fishman 2001a, pp. 466-7.
16
Fishman 2001a, p. 471.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 125

the concluding chapter with the Research Outline for Comparative


Studies of Language Planning identified policy formulation, codifi-
cation, elaboration, and implementation as the four major subdivi-
sions of language planning.17 In the agenda for research laid out in this
piece, Fishman and his three co-authors described the entire process
of implementation as least frequently studied.18 Although in the
intervening decades many scholars have turned attention to language
policy implementation,19 this process is still often overlooked.20 What-
ever the reason for this, the oversight does not mean that implementa-
tion is not important. Indeed, as Harold Schiffman and Brian Spooner
note in the introduction to this volume, implementation tends to be
the Achilles heel of language planning.
Fishmans study provides a useful framework for studying efforts
to reverse language shift that occurred in the case of Kazakh, one of
the major Turkic languages spoken in the former USSR, now the state
language of Kazakhstan. By the 1970s and 1980s, Kazakh had lost seri-
ous ground in many domains to Russian, the most widely spoken lan-
guage in the Soviet Union. This phenomenon, which was especially
pronounced in urban areas, was in large part a result of Soviet policy
designed to create a sense of commonality among the diverse popula-
tion of the USSR, whom ideologists described as the Soviet people.
After presenting background on Kazakhstan and a brief overview
of language status at the end of the Soviet era, I will examine Kazakh
RLS efforts since the late 1980s. I will argue that although efforts to
strengthen Kazakh have been focused on the higher stages of RLS,
and have largely ignored the home environment and critical linkages
that Fishman stresses, the prospects for a robust Kazakh language
and the re-establishment of Kazakh-Russian diglossia in the future
are bright. I will present evidence that Kazakh RLS has been at least

17
Joshua A. Fishman, Jyotirindra Das Gupta, Bjrn H. Jernudd, and Joan Rubin,
Research Outline for Comparative Studies of Language Planning, Can Language Be
Planned? Joan Rubin and Bjrn H. Jernudd (eds.) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii,
1971), p. 293.
18
Ibid., p. 299.
19
For a list of some of the literature on this dimension, see Harold Schiffmans
Bibliography on Language Planning and Implementation at http://ccat.sas.upenn
.edu/plc/clpp/bibliogs/implementbiblio.html, accessed 12 March 2006.
20
See Harold Schiffman, review of Michael E. Brown and umit Ganguly (eds.),
Fighting Words: Language Policy and Ethnic Relations in Asia, review published in
Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 63, no. 4 (2004), pp. 1069-71.
126 william fierman

partially successful, and consider reasons for the success despite


Kazakh RLS-erss misdirected efforts.
Because the shift from Kazakh to Russian and the consequent need
for RLS largely concern towns and cities, this chapter will largely ignore
rural areas, where in fact the majority of Kazakhs still live. Based on
guesstimates of various informants in Kazakhstan who have studied
ethnic relations, it appears that even in the late 1980s, somewhere in
the range of 85 to 90 percent of rural Kazakhs could comfortably con-
verse in Kazakh on everyday subjects. It is likely that the proportion of
rural Kazakhs who could not speak Kazakh exceeded 10 or 15 percent
only in certain raions (districts) of oblasts (provinces) bordering on
Russia. Among the 85 to 90 percent of rural Kazakhs who could com-
fortably speak on everyday subjects, many certainly resorted to Rus-
sian for communication in particular domains, e.g., television or radio
listening, technical education, or political activities. Thus, in most rural
areas of Kazakhstan inhabited by Kazakhs, diglossia prevailed. As we
will see below, however, the situation in urban areas was very different.
Only in recent years has this situation begun to change significantly.

5.1. Background on Soviet Nationality and Language Policy

The overall thrust of language policy in the former Russian Empire


and over the period between the 1917 Bolshevik seizure of power and
collapse of the USSR in 1991 was undoubtedly assimiliationist. Despite
this, it is useful to remember that until the early 1930s, the Bolshevik
leaders, attempting to distinguish themselves from their tsarist prede-
cessors, pursued many internationalist initiatives. One of the areas
in which this internationalism is easiest to trace is historiography.
In its early years the Bolshevik regime endorsed the Pokrovsky
school, which was highly critical of the role of the tsarist state as
oppressor and conqueror of foreign peoples.21 In its international-
ist phase of the 1920s and early 1930s, official party doctrine stressed
that tsarist policies had persecuted non-Russians, among other ways,
by refusing to allow them their own political institutions and destroy-
ing their cultures. This phase in which tsarist policies were depicted

21
Roman Szoporluk, The Ukraine and Russian in Robert Conquest (ed.), The Last
Empire: Nationality and the Soviet Future (Stanford, CA: Hoover, 1986), p. 168.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 127

in uniformly negative fashion ended abruptly in the early 1930s. New,


quickly rewritten official versions of history treated the Russian con-
quest of non-Russian peoples much more positively, with emphasis on
the progressive role of Russias expansion; references to Russians
oppression of other peoples were largely omitted.
The internationalist phase was clearly reflected in language pol-
icy. During this period the Bolsheviks encouraged creation of writing
systems for many languages (in some cases, their very first writing
systems), launched massive literacy campaigns, and promoted the use
of non-Russian languages in administration and education. Indeed,
Russian administrators working in non-Russian areas were exhorted
to learn local languages and promote members of the local ethnic
groups.22 Such initiatives were unceremoniously dropped in the first
half of the 1930s, after which Moscow no longer encouraged rapid
expansion of non-Russian languages into such domains as higher edu-
cation and administration.23 The shift in policy was also reflected in
the prescribed lexical items for non-Russian languages. Whereas in
the late 1920s there was a tendency to create new vocabulary for many
languages of the Soviet East through borrowing from such languages
as Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, in the mid-1930s, the regime declared
many of the recently approved words archaic or counterrevolution-
ary, and replaced them with equivalents similar to Russian words or
identical with them. The trends even extended to phonetics and spell-
ing.24 Language instruction in schools also reflected the primacy of
Russian: in 1938 Russian language became an obligatory subject in
non-Russian schools throughout the USSR. A critical symbolic change

22
See Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in
the Soviet Union, 19231939 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), Ch. 3; Wil-
liam Fierman, Language Planning and National Development. The Uzbek Experience
(Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991), pp. 173-92; and Gerhard Simon, Nationalism and
Policy Toward the Nationalities of the Soviet Union (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1991),
Ch. 2.
23
Not coincidentally, the mid-1930s also witnessed Stalins purges, and the Com-
munist Party became much more dominated by Russians. See Martin, Ch. 9; Fierman
(1991), Ch. 9; and Simon, Ch. 3.
24
At least in the case of Uzbek, another Central Asian language, the name of the
Shakespearean drama Hamlet (as it had been called in the early 1930s) became
Gamlet (reflecting the Russian pronunciation and transcription). I do not know for
sure that this same change was made in Kazakh in the 1930s. However, by the 1970s
the name of the play (in Cyrillic) was spelled with a G. (Gamlet, Qazaq sovet
entsiklopediyasy, vol. 3 [Almaty, 1973], pp. 145-6.)
128 william fierman

at the end of the 1930s was the replacement of Latin-based writing


systems that had been adopted for many languages at the end of the
1920s. The newly dictated scripts were based on the Cyrillic alphabet.
Linguistic russification was carried out with the support of theories
of the linguist Nicholas Marr, who posited that all languages of the
world were moving towards eventual unification. According to this
theory, diglossia and bilingualism in the Soviet Union (and, indeed,
throughout the world!) were temporary phenomena that would disap-
pear with the triumph of one world language. Though rarely articu-
lated in explicit fashion, it became clear that the single world language
would strongly resemble Russian.
Subsequent to the internationalist phase, almost any developments
that brought non-Russian languages closer to Russian or that expanded
the domains of Russian use were declared progressive; those which
did not were denigrated as reactionary or nationalist.25 Although
the degree of adherence to this principle varied during the remainder
of the Soviet eraand it affected different languages in very different
waysuntil the 1980s, it was extremely dangerous for a Soviet citizen
to declare openly that Moscows russification policies were in any way
harmful.
Directing a state with a very centralized political and economic sys-
tem, by the early 1930s, the Communist Party had extremely powerful
levers through which to affect language use. The Soviet state, under
Communist Party direction, controlled all schools, all mass media, all
factories and farms, all public services andthough in somewhat less
direct fashioneven legally sanctioned religious institutions. This did
not mean that the Party was all-powerful or did not have to temper
policies because of factors that it could modify only slowly, if at all.
Even Stalinhad he decided during the terror of the 1930s that the
entire Soviet population should begin to speak Russian onlycould
not have obliged all parents in the far-flung empire to speak to their
children in Russian. Some parents did not know Russian; moreover,
even Stalins reach into the home was limited. In addition, however,
the regime needed to transmit political messages, provide technical
training, and communicate about other subjects to a population that

25
Soviet rhetoric, however, continued to use the word international, but the
meaning of the word in official Soviet lexicon changed radically in the early 1930s.
See Martin, p. 457. Russification remained a central element of Soviet linguistic policy
even after Stalins repudiation of Marrs theories in 1950.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 129

did not know Russian, or else knew it poorly. It therefore was obliged
to use the languages they understood. Russian could not be made to
serve overnight.
Another reason for allowing use of non-Russian languages, one
which became more important as the terror of the Stalin era subsided
after 1953, was that blatant discrimination against non-Russian lan-
guages could aggravate the Party leaderships relations with mem-
bers of society on whom Soviet rule depended. This is not to imply,
of course, that (for example) the Georgian or Estonian intelligentsia
could have overthrown Soviet power in their republics. However, by
the last decades of Soviet rule, the central leadership could not entirely
ignore issues affecting its own legitimacy. In this context it is worth
noting that in 1978 a proposal to remove reference to Georgian as
the sole official language of the Georgian SSR in that republics new
constitution led to large scale demonstrations. This outburst forced
the Soviet leadership to allow the new constitution to maintain the
reference to Georgian.26
Despite such concessions to non-Russian languages, in the 1970s
and 1980s, the Soviet leadership undertook major campaigns to pro-
mote Russian as non-Russians second mother tongue. These efforts
were especially prominent in educational policy. As a result, for exam-
ple, the number of hours devoted to Russian language instruction in
non-Russian schools was increased, pay bonuses were introduced for
Russian-language teachers in non-Russian schools, new language labo-
ratories were installed, and special journals devoted to the teaching of
Russian to non-Russian children were established. In some schools
with non-Russian medium of instruction, teachers and pupils alike
were exhorted to use only Russian at school one day a week.27
It would be misleading to imply that language shift to Russian was
a result solely of direct Party pressure to promote the second mother
tongue and limit the use of others. Indeed, because Russian offered
superior opportunities for educational and social mobility, many non-
Russian parents consciously chose to send their children to schools

26
Ronald Grigor Suny, The Making of the Georgian Nation (Bloomington, IN: Indi-
ana University Press, 1988), p. 309.
27
See Isabelle Kreindler Forging a Soviet People: Ethnolinguistics in Central Asia,
in William Fierman (ed.), Soviet Central Asia: The Failed Transformation (Boulder,
CO: Westview, 1990), pp. 219-31, and William Fierman Language Development in
Soviet Uzbekistan, in Isabelle Kreindler (ed.), Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet
National Languages (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1985), p. 221.
130 william fierman

with Russian (rather than the native language) as medium of instruc-


tion. In many cases, of course, parents had no choice but to send their
children to Russian-medium schools. In particular, for ethnic groups
without their own union republics, instruction in the native lan-
guage was frequently available only for the first grades (especially in
the last decades of Soviet rule), most often in rural areas. Indeed, even
in the case of certain non-Russian union republics, urban areas had few
titular-language schools.28
Outside of Belorussia and perhaps Ukraine, Kazakhstan was the
republic where this situation was most pronounced. This is one of the
major factors that shaped the need for RLS after Kazakhstans inde-
pendence. Before looking at these efforts, however, we must consider
the geographic and demographic context for these efforts. After this,
we will examine Kazakh RLS efforts during the last two decades, some
indicators of success, and prospects for the future.

5.2. Geographic and Demographic Background on


Kazakhstan

Geography has been and remains a critical factor shaping Kazakh-


stans development. The territory of todays Republic of Kazakhstan
(RK) (virtually identical to that of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic
[KazSSR] in the late Soviet period) is an enormous landmass shar-
ing a border of over 4000 miles with Russia. As an independent state,
Kazakhstan is the ninth largest country on the planet. Most of its fron-
tier with Russia lacks such natural barriers as rivers or mountains.
For this reason, and because it has been part of the Russian Empire
and Soviet Union, the economy and transportation network of many
areas in the north and east of Kazakhstan have traditionally been
more tightly linked to Russia than to the most densely populated areas
of Kazakhstan in the south. At its peak, during the late Soviet era,
Kazakhstans population exceeded 16 million.29 Following the collapse

28
For a description of the situation in Ukraine see Roman Solchanyk Catastrophic
Language Situation in Major Ukrainian Cities, Radio Liberty Research Bulletin RL
286/87, July 15, 1987. For Belarus, see Kathleen Mihalisko Language Revival: What
Would It Require in Belorussia? Report on the USSR, vol. 1, no 11 (March 17,
1989).
29
Current Kazakhstan official calculations based on the 1989 Soviet census show
a republic population of 16.2 million at the beginning of 1989. Unless otherwise
50 60 70 Iry 80 90
tsh
Ob RUS SIA
RUS SIA Petropavlovsk

lga
Qostanay

Vo
50 (Kostanay) Pavlodar Er 50
Oral ti s
(Uralsk) ASTANA
Semey skemen MONG.
Aqtbe (Semipalatinsk) (Ust
(Aktobe) Qaraghandy Kamenogorski)
(Karaganda)
Atyra 90
(Atyrau)
Lake
Balkhash
Baykonur
Cosmodrome
Aral
Sea
Aqta Sy
Qyzylorda (Kyzylorda) Khan
(Aktau) r Da Tngiri C H INA
ry Almaty Shyngy
a
Taraz

Am
u
Caspian Shymkent

D
KYRGYZSTAN

ar
40 AZER. Sea 40

ya
UZBEKISTAN Naryn
reversing language shift in kazakhstan

TURKMENISTAN 0 100 200 km


50 60 70 80 0 100 200 mi

Map 1. Kazakhstan and adjacent areas. Source: CIA World Factbook, accessed at https://www.cia.gov/library
/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/kz.html.
131
132 william fierman

of the USSR, it fell to under 15 million,30 and even at the beginning of


2010 it was still only slightly over 16 million.31
Though both in Soviet days and in the period of independence,
Kazakhstan has been named for one of the groups inhabiting its ter-
ritory, its ethnic composition is far from homogenous. Indeed, at the
beginning of 1960s, the Kazakh population was just under 30 per-
cent. By the last Soviet census (1989) its share had grown to about 40
percent. However, it still barely surpassed the Russian share of about
37 percent.32
Naturally, with Kazakhs and Russians consistently accounting for
about 80 percent or more of the population, all other ethnic groups
in Kazakhstan are much less numerous. The largest oneUzbeks
comprise 2.9 percent; the next largest, Ukrainians 2.0 percent; no other
single group accounts for more than 1.4 percent.33 The picture for two
of the minor groups has changed dramatically since 1989. At that
time Ukrainians comprised well over 5 percent, as did Germans (who,
due to emigration, have fallen to only 1.1 percent today).34 We should
note that even though Kazakhs outnumbered Russians at the time of
independence, the total population of Slavic nationalitiesRussians,
Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Polesstill accounted for a total of
over 44 percent and thus outnumbered Kazakhs. This is important for
language processes because non-Russian Slavs were overwhelmingly
fluent in Russian, and many were more proficient in Russian than
their own nationality language. Indeed, by the late 1980s, a similar
phenomenon applied to the majority of Kazakhstans most numerous
non-Slavic groups as well, including Germans, Tatars, and Koreans.

indicated, census data cited here for 1989 and 1999 are taken from a volume contain-
ing the 1999 (sic) Kazakhstan census: Qazaqstan Respublikasynyng statistika zhonin-
degi agenttigi, Qazaqstan Respublikasy khalqynyng ulttyq quramy (Tom 1) (Almaty,
2000).
30
Ibid.
31
Podvedeny itogi Natsionalnoi perepisi naseleniia Respubliki Kazakhstan
2009 goda, 4 Feb. 2010, accessed 3 May 2010 at http://www.stat.kz/p_perepis
/Pages/n_04_02_10.aspx.
32
Published results of the 1959 All-Union Soviet census show Russians comprising
almost 43 percent of Kazakhstans population in January 1959 (Tsentralnoe statis-
ticheskoe upravlenie pri Sovete ministrov SSSR, Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi naseleniia
1959 goda [Moscow: Gosstatizdat, 1962], p. 206).
33
Podvedeny itogi . . .
34
Podvedeny itogi . . .
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 133

Although space precludes a detailed examination of the ethnic com-


position across various regions of Kazakhstan, it is important to keep
in mind the RKs regional heterogeneity. In general, Kazakhs are the
dominant group in the south and west, but Slavs come close to equal-
ing or even outnumber Kazakhs in certain areas of northern, eastern,
and central Kazakhstan. In the late Soviet era, Russian dominance in
these regions was even greater.
For the present study, which focuses on RLS in urban areas, it
is critical to note the traditionally very high proportion of Slavs in
Kazakhstans urban areas. In 1989, non-Kazakhs comprised 73 percent
of Kazakhstans urban population, including close to 58 percent Slavs
(of whom the overwhelming majority was Russian [51 percent]). Thus,
at that time, for the republic as a whole, urban non-Kazakhs outnum-
bered urban Kazakhs by a ratio of almost three to one.35
Like the share of Kazakhs in the entire population of different
regions, the share in urban areas also varied greatly from province
to province. For example, as of 1989, in the case of the then existing
seventeen oblast centers (i.e., provincial capitals), Kazakhs were the
majority in three of them. In all the remaining ones, however, Kazakhs
comprised less than a third of the population, and in seven, Kazakhs
comprised less than a fifth of the population.36
Since then, the demographic situation has radically changed in
urban areas throughout the country. From their share of 27 percent
of urban inhabitants in 1989, by 2004 Kazakhs had increased to a share
of about half of all urban inhabitants.

35
The Soviet census data for Kazakhstan in 1989 demonstrate the high level of Rus-
sification among non-Russian Slavs in KazSSR cities. Even though there was a general
tendency in the USSR for individuals to claim the language of their ethnic group as
their own native (rodnoi) language (even if they did not fact know it), in 1989, over
63 percent of the KazSSRs 584,824 urban Ukrainians, over 66 percent of the urban
Belorussians, and over 81 percent of the 27,113 urban Poles claimed to be native Rus-
sian speakers (and not native speakers of the language of their ethnic group). The
same was true for about half of the 469,803 urban Germans and 86,977 urban Koreans
(Gosudarstvennyi Komitet po Statistike SSSR [GosKomStat] Itogi Vsesoiuznoi perepisi
naseleniia 1989 goda. tom VII, chast 1 [Moscow, 19911993], p. 300).
36
Based on data from B. Khasanuly, Ana tiliata mura (Almaty: Zhazuwshi, 1992),
pp. 148-58. The number of oblasts (and consequently number of oblast centers) fluc-
tuated at the very end of the 1980s, in particular because of the liquidation and then
quick re-establishment of Mangyshlaq and Torghay Oblasts.
134 william fierman

Table 1. Ethnic breakdown RK population 1989, 2004, and 2010


% of total % of % of % of RK % of % of % of
KazSSR KazSSR total RK urban total RK RK urban population
population urban population population population population in RK
1989 population 2004 2004 2010 2010 oblast
1989 centers
plus
Almaty
and Astana
2010

Kazakhs 40 27 57 49 61 N.A. 58
All 60 73 43 51 39 N.A. 42
non-Kazakhs
All Slavs 44 58 31 41 27* N.A. 35*
Russians 37 51 27 37 24 N.A. 28
Other 7 8 4 4 3 N.A. 7
Slavs
Neither 16 14 12 10 12 N.A. 7
Kazakhs nor
Other Slavs
* 2010 data for Poles are not available and are therefore not included. However, they almost certainly constitute
less than 0.3 percent of Kazakhstans population. Source: (data for 1989) Qazaqstan Respublikasynyng statistika
zhonindegi agenttigi, Qazaqstan Respublikasy khalqynyng ulttyq quramy (Tom 1) (Almaty, 2000), pp. 21-4 and
(data for 2004), Qazaqstan Respublikasynyng statistika zhonindegi agenttigi, Qazaqstannyng demografiyalyq
zhylnamalyghy 2004 (Almaty 2005), p. 18.

Unfortunately, because Kazakhstan no longer publishes data broken


down into rural and urban categories by ethnic group, it is not pos-
sible to provide data analogous to the numbers cited above for the
most recent years. However, judging from available data on the share
of Kazakhs in Kazakhstans most important cities (oblast centers plus
Almaty and Astana), it is clear that the trend noted just above has
continued.
Although in 1989 Kazakhs were an even smaller minority in the
oblast centers considered here than in the Kazakhstans total urban
population at that time, today the majority of the population in the
oblast centers is Kazakh. As the following table indicates, the change
over two decades has been dramatic.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 135

Table 2. Ethnic breakdown RK oblast centers 1989 and 2010


% of population in % of population in
Kazakhstan oblast centers Kazakhstan oblast centers
plus Almaty and Astana plus Almaty and Astana
1989 (est.*) 2010
Kazakhs 23 58
All non-Kazakhs 77 42
All Slavs 63 35
Russians 55 28
Other Slavs 8 7
Neither Kazakhs nor 14 7
Other Slavs
Source of data: for 1989, Khasanuly, Ana tiliata mura (Almaty: Zhazuwshi, 1992),
pp. 148-58; for 2010, Qazaqstan Respublika Statistika Agenttigi, Seriya 15. Demografiya.
2010 zhyl basyna Qazaqstan Respublikasy khalqynyng oblystar, qalalar zhane auwdan-
dar boyynsha, zhynysy men zhekelegen zhas quramy, zhekelegen etnostary boyynsha
sany.
* Cities included in the data here, besides Almaty and Astana, are those that were
oblast centers in 2010. (Thus, for example, data are not included for Semey (Semi-
palatinsk), which was an oblast center in 1989 but which was not an oblast in 2010.
Data for Poles and Belorussians are not available for any of the oblast centers. I have
estimated the number of Belorussians to be approximately 5 percent the number of
Russians. For five cities, most importantly Qaraghandy, the number of Ukrainians
is not available. I have made a conservative educated guess in these cases. It is likely
that overall the data above for 1989 slightly understate the other Slavic share of the
population.

5.3. Kazakh Language Status in the Late Soviet Era

At the time of independence, very few Slavs or other non-Kazakhs had


any competence in the Kazakh language.37 More important for our

37
Until the late 1980s, Western scholars had few opportunities to conduct archi-
val or on-site research on sensitive issues in Kazakhstan, and Soviet sources were
very selective in publishing information on linguistic processes. These factors severely
limited the scope and depth of research on the Kazakh language published in the
West prior to 1991. General information in English published prior to the collapse of
the USSR on Soviet language policy (including Kazakhstan) can be found in Stefan
Wurm, Turkic Peoples of the USSR: Their Historical Background, their Language, and
the Development of Soviet Linguistic Policy (Oxford, 1954); E. Glyn Lewis, Multilin-
gualism in the Soviet Union (The Hague: Mouton, 1972), and Bernard Comrie, The
Languages of the Soviet Union (NY: Cambridge University Press 1981). Some of the
best Soviet-era research on language policy in Central Asia (in short articles) was pub-
lished by Radio Libertys research division in research series which appeared under
the titles Radio Liberty Research Bulletin and Report on the USSR. Language policy
136 william fierman

Neither Kazakh
Neither Kazakh
nor Slav
nor Slav
16%
14% Kazakhs
27%
Other Slavs Other Slavs
Kazakhs
7% 8%
40%

Russians Russians
37% 51%

Figure 1. Ethnic composition KazSSR Figure 2. Ethnic composition RK


total population 1989 urban population 1989

Neither Neither
Kazakh nor Kazakh nor Slav
Slav 12%
14% Kazakhs Other Slavs
23% 4%
Other Slavs
8%

Kazakhs
Russians 57%
27%

Russians
55%

Figure 3. Ethnic composition oblast Figure 4. Ethnic composition RK total


centers combined with Almaty and population 2004
Astana 1989. The status of oblast cen-
ter refers to center in 2010, not 1989.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 137

Neither Kazakh
nor Slav
10% Neither Kazakh
nor Slav
Other Slavs
12%
4%
Other Slavs
3%

Kazakhs
49%

Russians Kazakhs
Russians 24% 61%
37%

Figure 5. Ethnic composition RK Figure 6. Ethnic composition RK total


urban population 2004 population 2010

Neither Kazakh
nor Slav
7%
Other Slavs
7%

Russians
28%
Kazakhs
58%

Figure 7. Ethnic composition oblast


centers combined with Almaty and
Astana 2010
138 william fierman

study of RLS, however, was that an increasing share of urban Kazakhs


born after World War II were monolingual Russian speakers, thus
producing a very unstable diglossic situation that was sliding towards
monoglossia. Besides Kazakhs minority status, this was a result of the
many direct and indirect ways that the Soviet system offered mobility
to those with native-level Russian competency, and penalized those
who stuck too closely to their non-Russian cultures and languages.
Let us now turn to a very brief overview of use of Kazakh and Rus-
sian in various domains at the end of the Soviet era. This will provide
a baseline for discussing RLS efforts below.

in Kazakhstan is treated specifically in Martha Brill Olcott, The Politics of Language


Reform in Kazakhstan, in Sociolinguistic Perspectives on Soviet National Languages:
Their Past, Present and Future (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter 1985), pp. 183-204. For the
best English-language treatment of issues relevant to Soviet-era language in Kazakh-
stan (though only covering the period 19231939), see Terry Martin, The Affirmative
Action Empire. Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 19231939 (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 2001).
Western scholars opportunities for research on language processes in Kazakhstan
changed radically with the advent of glasnost in the USSR during the late 1980s and
especially after the fall of the USSR, when access became much easier. For an account
of general trends in Kazakhstan in the context of other post-Soviet Muslim states,
see Jacob M. Landau and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, Politics of Language in the Ex-
Soviet Muslim States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 2001). Unpublished but
accessible English-language works focusing specifically on Kazakhstan include Bhavna
Dave, Politics of Language Revival: National Identity and State Building in Kazakh-
stan (Unpublished PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 1996); R. Stuart DeLorme,
Mother Tongue, Mothers Touch: Kazakhstan Government and School Construc-
tion of Identity and Language Planning Metaphors, (Unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania, 1999) available http://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations
/AAI9926116/; and Aliya S. Kuzhabekova, Past, Present and Future of Language
Policy in Kazakhstan, (Unpublished MA thesis, University of North Dakota, 2003),
available at http://www.und.edu/dept/linguistics/theses/2003Kuzhabekova.PDF. Pub-
lished English-language works directly addressing language policy in Kazakhstan
during the late Soviet period and beyond include Bhavna Dave National Revival in
Kazakhstan: Language Shift and Identity Change, Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 12, no. 1
(1996). pp. 51-72, A Shrinking Reach of the State? Language Policy and Implementa-
tion in Kazakhstan, in The Transformation of Central Asia: States and Society from
Soviet Rule to Independence, Pauline Jones Luong (ed.) (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2003), pp. 129-58, and KazakhstanEthnicity, Language And Power (Routledge,
2007); William Rivers, Attitudes towards Incipient Mankurtism among Kazakhstani
College Students, Language Policy, no. 1, 2003, pp. 159-74; and William Fierman
Language and Identity in Kazakhstan: Formulations in Policy Documents, 1987
1997, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 30, no. 2 (1998), pp. 171-86;
Kazakh Language and Prospects for its Role in Kazakh Groupness,Ab Imperio No. 2,
2005; and Language and Education in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan: Kazakh-Medium
Instruction in Urban Schools, The Russian Review, vol. 65, no. 1 (2006).
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 139

5.3.1. Workplace
The overwhelming majority of urban workplaces in the 1970s and
1980s in Kazakhstan were monoglossic, with Russian the language
of communication. Above all this was because few urban Kazakhs
worked in ethnically homogenous environments, and because in inte-
grated environments very few non-Kazakhs (who almost everywhere
constituted the large majority) knew Kazakh. On the other hand,
by the late Soviet era, most urban Kazakhs were fluent or had good
skills in Russian.38 The probability of using Kazakh on the job was
further decreased because in line with Party policy to make Russian
the lingua franca of all Soviet citizens, non-Russians were discouraged
from speaking in their ethnic groups titular language in the presence
of Russians or others who did not understand it. As described by a
Kazakh poet looking back from 1993 at the Soviet era, even when a
crowd of forty Kazakhs might gather, the presence of a single Russian-
speaker was enough for the Kazakhs to consider it their obligation
to speak Russian.39

5.3.2. Education
Both at the primary and general secondary levels, Russian was the
dominant language of education in cities of Kazakhstan. In 1990 (by
which time the share was almost certainly higher than half a decade
before) fewer than 17 percent of Kazakhstans urban children were
being educated in the Kazakh language. True, this represented about
half of the Kazakh children living at the time in urban areas. How-
ever, approximately 60 percent of the schools where these children
studied had parallel Russian and Kazakh streams, and Russian was
the main channel for communication among students from different

38
In 1989, only about 1 percent of Kazakhstans urban non-Kazakhs claimed
fluency in Kazakh. At the same time, almost 78 percent of Kazakhs in urban areas
claimed a mastery of Russian (Itogi 1989, vol. 7, chast I, pp. 296 and 300). Among the
employed population the share was undoubtedly even higher.
39
Sadybek Moldashuly, Tort ayaghyn teng basqan, Zhas Alash, 14 Jan. 1993, p. 2.
By Russian-speaker Moldashuly seems to be referring to members of Russian-
speaking ethnic groups, which would have included not just Russians, but Ukrai-
nians, Belorussians, Poles, as well as others such as Germans and Koreans. For a
discussion of the pressures on Kazakhs to speak Russian in Kazakhstans cities see
Dave (2007), Ch. 3.
140 william fierman

streams.40 In the mid-1980s, the city of Almaty41 was home to over


200,000 Kazakhs out of approximately 1,000,000 inhabitants. Yet only
two schools in the city provided Kazakh-medium instruction.42 Higher
education in Kazakhstan was overwhelmingly in Russian. As of the
19891990 academic year, only 17.9 percent of all students enrolled
in Kazakhstans higher educational institutions studied in Kazakh-lan-
guage groups.43 It goes without saying that any Kazakhs who studied
in elite Soviet higher educational institutions in such cities as Moscow,
Leningrad, Novosibirsk, and Kiev also studied exclusively in Russian.

5.3.3. Mass Media


Unlike Kazakh-medium schools, Kazakh electronic mass media were
widely available in Kazakhstans urban areas in the Soviet era. Still, at
least in the case of radio, the situation of Kazakh relative to Russian
deteriorated in the USSRs last decades. Kazakh Radio (i.e., the main
radio station for Kazakhstan, not just in Kazakh language) generally
transmitted its main program daily from 6:00 a.m. until midnight. Up
until the early 1960s, the Kazakh-language share comprised half or
even more of total transmissions; however, it was subsequently reduced
to only about one third. This was compensated somewhat by twelve
hours of Kazakh-language broadcasts of Kazakh Radios Shalqar edito-
rial office. The subject mix treated in Kazakh Radios Kazakh-language
broadcasts probably contributed to a low level of interest among urban
listeners: the editorial office of Kazakh Radio in charge of program-
ming specifically for agricultural workers, for example, produced
shows with three hours of material daily. This would account for half
of all Kazakh-language broadcasts. The agricultural broadcasts in Rus-
sian, only two hours, seem to have constituted a much smaller share

40
Unless otherwise noted, data on schools and pupils cited in this chapter for
academic years 2000/2001 and beyond are from Agenstvo Respubliki Kazakhstan po
statistike, Raspredelenie shkol i chislennosti uchashchikhsia v RK for years 2000/2001,
2001/2002, 2002/2003, 2003/2004, and 2004/2005; likewise, unless otherwise noted,
data for earlier years are calculated from material provided to the author by the
Kazakhstan Ministry of Education.
41
At the time, the city was known in English by the Russian name Alma-Ata.
42
One of the schools in Kazakhstan was a boarding school attended largely by
children from other parts of the republic. The Kazakh population of Almaty in 1979
was 147,000 (16.5 percent of the total ); by 1989 it was 251,000 (22.5 percent of the
total ) (Mikhail Guboglo, Demography and Language in the Capitals of the Union
Republics, Journal of Nationalities, vol. 1, no. 4, pp. 28-9).
43
Khasanuly (1992), p. 185.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 141

of all broadcasts in that language, perhaps only about 15 percent.44


Naturally, in addition to radio broadcasts originating in Kazakhstan,
listeners could tune in to a much richer variety of programming from
Moscow, which was also likely to be more professionally produced
and, of course, in Russian.
The quality of Kazakh-language television was reportedly much
lower than radio, and seems to have averaged about three hours out of
the total eight hours of broadcasts per day. As in the case of radio, the
share of Kazakh-language transmissions in republic TV also markedly
declined during the 1970s. Likewise, programming from Moscow was
much more varied than what was produced locally.45 We cannot be
sure of electronic mass media viewing and listening habits, but there
is reason to believe that especially among younger urban audiences,
Russian-language programming was preferred.

5.3.4. Kazakh Language Competence


Although it is difficult to measure, it is clear that the decline of Kazakh
was most severe among the younger urban Kazakhs.46 Thus, if it were
possible to wind the clock backward to conduct empirical field research
in Kazakhstans cities of the late 1980s, we would almost certainly
find a high correlation between youth and poor Kazakh skills. This is
implicit in the description given by Bhavna Dave, who described the
unstable diglossia of Kazakhstans cities in the mid-1990s saying that
the most striking feature of the language behavior of urban Kazakhs
is the remarkable disjunction between the language repertoires of suc-
cessive generations. Apparently referring to the end of the Soviet

44
Ramazan Saghymbekov, Almatydan soylep turmyz (Almaty: Qazaqstan baspasy,
1979), pp. 149-53 and information in e-mail communication from Asiya Baigozhina
(Almaty) dated 21 March 2005. According to another source that describes what
appears to refer to broadcasts of just the main program of Kazakh Radio, as of either
1989 or 1990, only 4.5 out of 19.5 hours were in Kazakh (Qazaq adebiyeti, 23 March
1990).
45
E-mail communication from Baigozhina, 21 March 2005 based on information
from Firuza Perzadaeva.
46
It should be noted that Soviet census data are of almost no help in assessing
how many Kazakhs actually spoke Kazakh. In the 1989 census, even among urban
Kazakhs, over 97 percent claimed Kazakh as their native language. (GosKomStat SSSR
Itogi . . . Tom 7, chast 1, p. 300). For a discussion of the dynamics of Kazakhs status
in schools, see William Fierman, Language and Education in Post-Soviet Kazakhstan:
Kazakh-Medium Instruction in Urban Schools, The Russian Review, vol. 65, no. 1
(2006), pp. 98-116.
142 william fierman

era, Dave notes that typically individuals older than about sixty were
primarily Kazakh-speakers, though well-versed in Russian. They still
do, or at least used to, read literature in the Kazakh language, and
can recite from memory poems, folk songs, and passages from the
Kazakh epics. By contrast, the population between twenty and sixty
years of age is overwhelmingly Russian speaking, their familiarity
with Kazakh depending primarily on the number of years spent in
Kazakh-dominated rural areas.47
In the last decades of Soviet power there appears to have been an
increasingly widespread attitude in urban areas that Kazakh skills
were superfluous. This is illustrated, for example, in a 1993 article
by a 34-year old Kazakh journalist who deals at length with various
issues of linguistic russification. In the middle of his essay he answers
a hypothetical question about how to judge those Kazakh parents who
sent their children to Russian schools in the Soviet era. He responds
to his own question saying,
One shouldnt blame the older generation for sending their children
to schools with Russian as the language of instruction if they exhibited
national honor by having the child speak in the native language in the
family and around elders. The degrading thing was not that their child
was being educated in Russian, but that their language and soul were
becoming Russian, [i.e.,] that the child would respond in Russian when
addressed in Kazakh.48
This negative attitude towards Kazakh was accompanied by scorn
towards Kazakhs who spoke anything but perfect Russian. This is
represented in an article by a Kazakh writer whose father was one of
Kazakhstans most famous twentieth century military heroes, Bauyr-
zhan Momyshuly. Writing in 1989, Baqytzhan Momyshuly (the son),
remembers his attitude in childhood to the opening of the Kazakh-
language boarding school in Almaty: he thought the institution was for
culturally backward children and those with disabilities. Momyshuly
reports that in the Soviet era many Kazakh parents who had them-
selves experienced difficulties due to poor Russian sent their offspring
to Russian schools because they saw no prospects for their native
tongue. The result was that We, their children, did not understand
our mother tongue, and even when we did understand it, we consid-

47
Bhavna Dave, (1996). National Revival in Kazakhstan: Language Shift and Iden-
tity Change. Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 12, no. 1, p. 66.
48
Kosemali Sattibayuly, Sana tazarmay, salt zhaqsarmaydy, Zhas Alash, 4 March
1993.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 143

ered it rather shameful to respond in Kazakh. Moreover, Baqytzhan


Momyshuly recalls, he and most children like him began to look down
on adults whose Russian skills were inferior to their own.49
How many urban Kazakhs could or did speak Kazakh at the end
of the Soviet era? The answer, of course, depends on domain of use,
and, unfortunately, we have no reliable data to judge. Though they
do not generally distinguish among domains, post-Soviet accounts by
Kazakhs describing language competency at the end of the Soviet era
most often claim that about 60 percent of Kazakhs knew their mother
tongue.50 Some writers consider even this figure too high, saying that
it includes many individuals who could speak Kazakh only with dif-
ficulty.51 Other commentators, however, maintain that 60 percent is
far too low.52
In any case, it is clear that a very high proportion of Kazakhs in
rural areas were fluent in Kazakh in a wide range of domains. Indeed,
given that over two-thirds of them were still being educated in
Kazakh-medium classrooms, it seems safe to say that over 75 percent
would qualify as fluent in the definition of accounts cited above.
If we assume, furthermore, that those claiming 60 percent Kazakh-
language fluency among all Kazakhs also recognize the high level of
fluency in rural areas (where 62 percent of all Kazakhs lived in 1989),
this implies a very low estimate of fluency in urban areas, prob-
ably in the range of 30 percent. Given everything we know about the
unstable urban diglossia of the time, it is almost certain that among
the younger population it was much smaller still.53

49
Baqytzhan Momyshuly, Zhetimning qaytyp oraluwy, Leninshil zhas, 15 Sep.
1989.
50
See, for example, S.Z. Zimanov (Perestroika i ravnopravie iazykov, Kazakh-
stanskaia Pravda, 23 Mar. 1989) who states that 40 percent of Kazakhs either do
not know their mother tongue or know it poorly and that in Almaty 90 percent of
adolescents (podrostkov) do not speak Kazakh. A. Qaydarov, about the same time,
explained the 40 percent figure as the number who could not speak fluently, even
though they understood Kazakh (Memlekettik til zhane oghan baylanysty maseleler
turaly oy-tolghauw, Sotsialistik Qazaqstan, 3 Aug. 1989).
51
Baqqozha Muqayev, Arymyz da abyroyymyz da, Leninshil zhas, 1 March 1990.
52
Baqytzhan Khasanuly (1992, p. 198), for example, says that the figure of 40 per-
cent Kazakhs not knowing Kazakh can be accepted only in the sense that it refers to a
lack of knowledge of the written literary language; writing in 1992, Kazakh journalist
Kamal Smailov claimed that the share of Kazakhs not knowing Kazakh was at most
30 percent (Radi spravedlivosti Kazakhstanskaia Pravda, 8 Feb. 1992).
53
If 60 percent of all Kazakhs were fluent in Kazakh, and among rural Kazakhs
the proportion was 75 percent, this would imply that among urban Kazakhs (who at
the time constituted 38 percent of the population) the level of fluency was about
30 percent.
144 william fierman

5.4. Political Context for RLS Efforts

Table 3. Dates of major political importance and list of decrees, laws,


and programs
Mikhail Gorbachev becomes General Secretary of March 1985
Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Kolbin replaces Kunaev as head of Kazakhstan December 1986
Communist Party
Decree On Improving the Study of the Kazakh March 1987
Language in the Republic
Nazarbayev replaces Kolbin as head of Kazakhstan June 1989
Communist Party
Kazakh SSR Language law September 1989
Language program for implementing LL89 June 1990
Amendments to June 1990 language program. September 1990
Kazakhstan declares independence December 1991
Language law of independent Kazakhstan Republic July 1997
Language program for 19992000 October 1998
Language program for 20012110 February 2001
Presidential decree on completing in stages the shift May 2006
of office work to Kazakh by 2010
Framework on Expanding the Sphere of Functioning November 2007
of the State Language . . . in 20072010
Beginning of public discussion of new language July 2010
program for 20112020

Soon after assuming the Soviet leadership in 1985, as part of glas-


nost and perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev introduced major changes
in policies related to manifestation of feelings of identity. Whereas
Yuri Andropov and Konstantin Chernenko (Gorbachevs immediate
predecessors) had relied heavily on more and stronger propaganda to
inculcate a sense of common belonging, Gorbachev relaxed nationality
policy and began to allow greater opportunities for expression of pride
in more parochial ethnic, linguistic, and religious identities. Among
the non-Russians, intellectuals in the republics of the Baltic (Estonia,
Latvia, and Lithuania) and south Caucasus (Armenia, Azerbaijan, and
Georgia) were leaders in taking advantage of the new freedom and
pressing for expansion of its limits.
Like their counterparts elsewhere in the USSR, Kazakh intellectuals
also took advantage of the new atmosphere to speak in much more
favorable terms about their language, culture, and history, and more
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 145

openly critical fashion about russification. One Kazakh poet lamenting


the state of affairs in very dire terms claimed that Kazakh was fol-
lowing the path of Russian in the nineteenth century to a grave state,
when it became only a means of communication for the common folk,
while the nobility, even children, understood [only] French.54 Others
implied that Kazakh was not only sick, but dead. One critic observed
that glasnost and perestroika were finally offering Kazakhs the chance
to mourn the loss of their language . . .55
In addition to the impact of developments in such areas as the
Baltic and south Caucasus, language policy in Kazakhstan during the
last years of Soviet power was profoundly affected by dramatic events
transforming Kazakhstans own political life. In December 1986,
Moscow removed the republic party first secretary, Dinmukhamed
Kunayev, an ethnic Kazakh who had served as the number one politi-
cal figure in Kazakhstan for over twenty years. His replacement was
an ethnic Russian, Gennadii Kolbin, who had no ties to the republic.
This shift evoked a broad negative reaction among Kazakhs, including
disturbances in a number of Kazakhstans cities. Kolbin was to lead
the republic only until June 1989, when he was replaced by Nursultan
Nazarbayev.
Elected president of the Kazakh SSR in 1990, Nazarbayev was subse-
quently elected and re-elected independent Kazakhstans president in
1991, 1999, and 2005. During his tenure as leader of this country, Naz-
arbayev has overseen the dismantling of the Soviet economic system
and allowed political reform that has included creation of independent
political parties and development of a relatively free press. Although
he has been less authoritarian than leaders in such other neighboring
Central Asian countries as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, Nazarbayev
has created a very strong presidential system and has occasionally dealt
harshly with political opponents. Under Nazarbayev, Kazakhstan has
begun extensive development of its vast energy-related resources.

54
Fariza Ongharsynova, Qaytip khalyq bop qalamyz?, Ana tili, 13 June 1991, p. 3.
55
Izbasar Shyrtanov, Otkenge orel, qalghangha salauat, Ana tili, 11 July 1991, p. 3.
Shyrtanov is identified as the chair of the Manghystau Oblast Kazakh Language Soci-
ety. His choice of words in Kazakh, tilimiz . . . zhoghyn zhoqtauw clearly brings to
mind the mourning of someone who has died.
146 william fierman

5.5. Support for Kazakh Language in Formal State Policy

Let us now turn to an analysis of state policy concerning language,


first taking a look at the late Soviet period, and then proceeding to the
era of Kazakhstans independence.56 We will briefly consider a 1987
decree on language before considering the two major laws devoted
to language. One of them is the (Soviet-era) 1989 law; the other was
adopted in independent Kazakhstan in 1997. We will also look at lan-
guage programs that were adopted to amplify both the Soviet-era-
and independent-Kazakhstan laws. The program for the 1989 law was
promulgated in 1990; two language programs have been issued for the
1997 law, one in 1998 and the other in 2001. As we will see, none of
these directives focused on encouraging use of Kazakh in the home or
neighborhood. True, some provisions pointed to domains that had the
potential to raise consciousness of Kazakh in the family (e.g., through
the mass media). However, the focal point of these measures was not
home or neighborhood, and at least in the short run these measures
did not have a major effect on these domains.

5.5.1. Soviet Era Government Measures


Public appeals for more attention to the local languages began to be
heard in the Baltic republics in the middle of 1986. This was less than
a year before March 1987, when the first official measure of the late
Soviet period was adopted addressing the status of the Kazakh lan-
guage. Its adoption appears to have been a manifestation not only of
a slowly evolving change in the Soviet leaderships overall nationality
policy, but more specifically a key element in a the Soviet leaderships
attempt to soothe Kazakh pride, which had been seriously wounded

56
For views by Kazakh scholars on language planning in Kazakhstan, see E.D.
Suleimenova and Zh. S. Smagulova Iazykovaia situatsiia i iazykovoe planirovanie v
Kazakhstane (Almaty: Qazaq universiteti, 2005) and Bakhytzhan Khasanuly Iazyki
narodov Kazakhstana. Ot molchaniia k strategii razvitiia (Almaty: Arda, 2007).
The volume by Suleimenova and Smagulova is particularly valuable in its nuanced
judgments and the reference to the broader sociolinguistic and language planning
literature. For documents relevant to language planning in Kazakhstan, see (for the
Soviet period) E.D. Suleimenova (ed.), Iazykovaia politika v Kazakhstane (19211990
gody). Sbornik dokumentov (Almaty: Qazaq Universiteti, 1997) and (for 19951998,
with documents provided both in Russian and Kazakh) see Qazaqstan Respublikasyn-
daghy til sayasaty. Quzhattar zhinaghyIazykovaia politika v Respublike Kazakhstan.
Sbornik dokumentov (Astana: Elorda, 1999).
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 147

by the removal of Kunayev in December 1986 and the way in which


the subsequent disturbances were handled.
This first measure, adopted less than three months after Kolbins
appointment, was a decree titled On Improving the Study of the
Kazakh Language in the Republic that was jointly issued by the Cen-
tral Committee of the Communist Party of Kazakhstan and the Kazakh
SSR Council of Ministers.57 Though the document broke new ground
by promising assistance to those who wish to master the Kazakh
language, including members of the indigenous nationality,58 it was
framed in fairly familiar rhetoric about affirming the Leninist prin-
ciple of bilingualism. Among other things, the decree called for pro-
viding simultaneous Kazakh translations at various public cultural
and political events, courses to study Kazakh, and new materials and
personnel to improve Kazakh instruction. Nothing in this document
suggested organizing any activities that, except in very indirect ways,
would foster Kazakh in the home.
The next major state regulation concerning language was the Kazakh-
stan language law adopted in September 1989. This was approximately
the midpoint of a year and a half period during which similar laws
were approved in all Soviet republics whose republic constitutions did
not already give the titular nationality language a special status. Not
surprisingly, the first language laws were passed in Estonia and Lithu-
ania, in January 1989; the last republic to adopt a law was Kazakhstans
neighbor Turkmenistan, in May 1990.59
Although motivated by similar sentiments, RLS-ers in Kazakhstan
faced a very different situation than those in the former Soviet Baltic
and south Caucasus republics. Everywhere RLS-ers sought a higher
status for the titular language. In the Baltic and south Caucasus,
however, members of the titular nationality living in urban areas of

57
Postanovlenie Tsentralnogo Komiteta Kompartii Kazakhstana i Soveta Minis-
trov KazSSR no. 98 Ob uluchshenii izucheniia kazakhskogo iazyka v respublike,
reprinted in Iazykovaia politika v Kazakhstane (19211990 gody): Sbornik dokumentov
(Almaty: Qazaq universiteti, 1997), pp. 251-5.
58
Reference to Kazakhs as the indigenous nationality implies that no other eth-
nic groups are indigenous. Many Russian or Uzbek authors, however, would
dispute such a position, claiming that in certain parts of Kazakhstan, they are also
indigenous.
59
Constitutions of the south Caucasus republics that were adopted in 1978, con-
tinuing established practice, stipulated the titular nationality language as the state
language; these republics did not adopt language laws parallel to those adopted in all
other union republics in 19891990.
148 william fierman

their republics were much more likely than Kazakhs in Kazakhstan to


speak their own language. Even younger urban cohorts of the titular
nationality in these other regions of the USSR generally knew both the
titular language and Russian; few had become monolingual in Russian.
Moreover, at the end of the 1980s, titular languages in all of the south
Caucasus and Baltic republics (including Latvia, where Russians were
a very large minority) were being used in many more domains than
Kazakh was used in Kazakhstan.
Language planners in the Baltic appear to have been seeking a sort
of diglossia in which in the foreseeable future all non-titular inhabit-
ants would be bilingual and know the titular language, while titular
inhabitants would know their own language, but perhaps not know
Russian. To judge from the direction that things have developed in the
independent Baltic republics, this was not an impossible goal.
Whether in direct or indirect fashion, Kazakh RLS-ers modeled
Kazakhstans language law after the Baltic republics laws.60 In the
heady days of 1989 they might have dreamed of a rapid restoration of
Kazakh to a status that was already in sight for the titular languages
of the Baltic or south Caucasus; however, this was clearly not feasible
in Kazakhstan.
Kazakhstans 1989 Law on Language(s) (henceforth LL89)61 pro-
vides Kazakh, Russian, and local official languages practically equal
status in the work of organs of state power and administration in
Kazakhstan, as well as in the judicial system (Arts. 8 through 14). It
further offers all citizens the right to choose the language in which to
conduct their business in such spheres as education, health, commerce,
communication, and transport (Art. 16). In addition, LL89 provides
all citizens the right to choose their language of education from pre-
school up through higher education, and guarantees students the right
to take entrance exams for higher education in the languages used as
medium for instruction in the republics schools (Arts.18 and 20).
The law also guarantees the equal functioning of Kazakh and Russian

60
Several individuals who participated in writing Kazakhstans language law told
me that in 1989 they followed laws being adopted in other republics very closely.
61
According to its Russian title, the legislation adopted by the Kazakhstan Supreme
Soviet in 1989 was a Law on Languages [Zakon o iazykakh], i.e., explicitly dealing
with more than one language. However, thanks to the nature of the Kazakh unmarked
singular noun, the Kazakh title of the law [Til turaly zang] left it unclear whether the
law concerned one language or more than one. (It would have been possible to make
the plural nature explicit by calling the document Tilder turaly zang in Kazakh.)
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 149

in the mass media and culture (Art. 21). In terms of language instruc-
tion, the law makes both Kazakh and Russian obligatory school sub-
jects from primary through higher education, and mandates that both
be included in the list of subjects completed by every graduate of sec-
ondary school or higher education (Art. 20). The law was originally
planned to take effect on July 1, 1990, although some key provisions
were to be introduced gradually, e.g., some that concerned govern-
ment offices over five years, and some others that concerned educa-
tion over ten years.62
It quickly became clear thatregardless of what might be achieved
in such regions as the Baltic republicsplans for implementing LL89
were far too ambitious for Kazakhstan. This is reflected in the fate
of The State Program on the Development of the Kazakh Language
and Other National [natsionalnye] languages in the Kazakh SSR in
the Period Up Until 2000 (henceforth SP90), the creation of which
had been presaged in LL89. This program was accompanied by two
addenda, both of which were quickly and greatly softened. The first,
which consisted of the names of raions (districts) and cities, provided a
deadline by which office work [deloproizvodstvo] should be conducted
in the state language in each. All administrative units were to have
reached this stage by January 1, 1995. The force of the addendum,
however, was undercut by a September 1990 Kazakhstan Council of
Ministers amendment that delayed introduction of the state language
into office work into the indefinite future, leaving it to the discretion
of the local administration executive committees to do this, taking
into account the specific social-economic conditions and demographic
situation in each region.63
The other change was to the second addendum to SP90 that, unlike
the first, was apparently not published.64 The September amendment
annuls a key feature of the unpublished addendum, which apparently
mandates an oral Kazakh test for all students entering non-Kazakh

62
O poriadke vvedeniia v deistvie Zakona Kazakhskoi SSR O iazykakh v Kazakh-
skoi SSR, Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 28 Sep. 1989.
63
O nekotorykh izmeneniiakh i dopolneniiakh k Gosudarstvennoi programme
razvitiia kazakhskogo iazyka i drugikh natsionalnykh iazykov v Kazakhskoi SSR na
period do 2000 goda, Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 29 Sep. 1990.
64
In fact, to the best of my knowledge, this addendum has never been published.
I became aware of it only because of the amendment to it.
150 william fierman

higher education beginning in 1995.65 The specifics of the implemen-


tation of the law are less important here than the rapid backtracking
itself, which was no doubt caused by recognition that the goals of the
SP90 second addendum were entirely unrealistic.

5.5.2. Government Measures in Independent Kazakhstan


It was not until 1997, by which time Kazakhstan had been independent
for almost eight years and had already adopted two constitutions (!),
that the country adopted another major legal measure focusing on
language. This was a second language law, intended to replace LL89.
This Law of the Republic of Kazakhstan on Language(s) of the
Republic of Kazakhstan (henceforth LL97) reflects developments in
the constitutions that had been adopted in the interim, in 1993 and
1995 respectively.66 In both of the constitutions, Kazakh is named as
Kazakhstans sole state language. The 1993 constitution also keeps
Russian as the language of cross-ethnic communication. The 1995
document, however, omits this term altogether, giving Russian vaguely
defined functions on a par with Kazakh in state organizations and
organs of local administration.67
One of the most notable differences between the laws of 1989 and
1997 concerns mass media. The 1989 law guarantees functioning with
equal rights of Kazakh and Russian in the mass media (Art. 20); it
also provides for the production and distribution through the mass
media of cultural and scholarly works in the state language, the lan-
guage of cross-ethnic communication, as well as other languages of
ethnic groups living compactly in the republic (Art. 23). This is less
supportive of Kazakh than LL97, which besides guaranteeing the func-

65
This unpublished amendment had called for a conversation [sobesedovanie] on
Kazakh language and literature (the form of the conversation to be selected by the
rectors office) to be gradually introduced for secondary school graduates prior to
entrance exams for non-Kazak fakultety of higher educational institutions.
66
The respective Russian- and Kazakh-language titles of the 1997 law reflected the
titles of the 1989 law. That is, as in 1989, the Russian title in 1997 refers again to a law
on languages (o iazykakh), whereas the Kazakh title refers to a law on language
(til turaly) (Suleimenova [ed.], 1997, pp. 5, 109).
67
See William Fierman, Language and Identity in Kazakhstan: Formulations in
Policy Documents, 19871997, Communist and Post-Communist Studies, vol. 30, no. 2
(1998), 171-86. The term language of cross-ethnic communication has fallen out of
the official lexicon in Kazakhstan. The 1995 Constitution also provides that the state
look after the creation of conditions for the development and study of languages of
the people [sic] of Kazakhstan.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 151

tioning of the state and other languages in publications and the mass
media, mandates that at least half of all radio and television broadcasts
be in Kazakh (Art. 18).
In most ways, however, LL97s departures from LL89 were much
more modest or vague. Thus, although LL97 did not repeat the earlier
laws wording about the use of Russian, it did adopt the inexact word-
ing from Article VII of the 1995 constitutionthat in state organiza-
tions and organs of local self government Russian is officially used on
a par with Kazakh.
Among the modest gains for Kazakh introduced in LL97 are the
changes defining its status in state organs, which, however, leave large
loopholes that continue to allow for Russians de facto domination.
Whereas LL89 states that Acts of republic organs of state power and
administration are adopted in Kazakh and Russian (Art. 9), LL97
mandates that Acts of state organs are worked out and adopted in
the state language, and when necessary, they may be worked out in
Russian with translation being provided into other languages (Art. 9).
Like LL89, the new law keeps both Russian and Kazakh as manda-
tory subjects in all educational institutions and mandates that they be
included in the list of classes completed by every graduate of second-
ary and higher educational institutions (LL97, Art. 16).
The broad outlines for implementing LL97 were laid out in two
state programs on the functioning and development of languages,
one adopted in October 1998 (covering the period through the end of
2000), and the other adopted in February 2001 (covering the period
through 2010).68 In terms of promoting use of the Kazakh language,
both the 1998 and 2001 programs focus on higher level functions for
Kazakh, those which Fishman suggests will not be successful if RLS
efforts do not also address lower level functions. The closest that
the 1998 program comes to promoting language in the home is in its
broad declaration about assuring implementation of LL97s very gen-
eral statement on the mass media and in calling for a program to cre-
ate illustrated books for preschoolers as well as cartoons. Even these,
however, are buried in a long list of about fifty other tasks, including
five that focus on conducting office work in Kazakh.

68
Gosudarstvennaia programma funktsionirovaniia i razvitiia iazykov [1998], in
Iazykovaia politika v Respublike Kazakhstan (Sbornik dokumentov) (Astana: Elorda,
1999), pp. 161-75 and Gosudarstvennaia programma funktsionirovaniia i razvitiia
iazykov na 20012010 gody, Kazakhstanskaia pravda 17 Feb. 2001, p. 3.
152 william fierman

The program covering the period 20012010 is even more explicit


in showing that cultivation of language in the home and neighbor-
hood is not a major concern. The second program lists five priority
directions of work, ordered from top to lowest. The lowest of the five
is language development in the sphere of culture and mass media,
as well as in the health and public service sphere. Of course, use of
Kazakh in the family might be indirectly stimulated by greater oppor-
tunities for education in Kazakh (mentioned in Priority 2). Neverthe-
less, this program, as the other documents examined above, are silent
on explicit steps that might encourage Kazakhs reestablishment in the
urban Kazakh family. The programs might have included, for example,
creation of special materials or television programs for parents with
weak Kazakh who wanted to introduce language into the home, or
perhaps engaging Kazakh-speaking members of the older generation
in organized fashion to provide assistance.69 However, these kinds of
steps, which would have addressed what Fishman sees as the crucial
nexus of intergenerational mother tongue transmission, are absent.
Perhaps the states lack of attention to language in the family is
understandable in that the state is responsible for what happens in
the public sphere, but not the home. Indeed, LL97 specifically affirms
that the law does not regulate language use in interpersonal relations
or in religious associations (Art. 2). Nevertheless, considering the
laws clauses on such high end language functions as diplomacy, the
absence of reference to language in the home is striking.
In the years since the adoption of the program covering 2001
2010, a number of decrees and resolutions have been adopted, usually
related to implementation of the ten-year plan. It is worth mentioning
two of these in particular. One is a presidential decree (ukaz) modify-
ing the 20012010 plan. Among other things, this document outlines
the stages for shifting government office work to Kazakh by 2010.70

69
Fishman stresses that RLS movements need to organize such courses as how to
be parentsand even how to be grandparents. Indeed, Fishman says, How to do
RLS in your home is a course that one can and should be enrolled in repeatedly in
every RLS setting and that should be sponsored by every RLS movement and team-
taught by the most experienced, inventive, and dedicated advocates that are available
(Fishman [2001a] From Theory . . . p. 479). True, for years Kazakh television has
broadcast Kazakh lessons, but the quality and nature of these programs are such that
they do not provide much guidance for parents trying to introduce Kazakh into the
home.
70
Ukaz Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan O vnesenii dopolnenii v Ukaz Prezi-
denta Respubliki Kazakhstan ot 7 fevralia 2001 goda No. 550, 30 May 2006 accessed
7 May 2009 through http://www.zakon.kz/engine/print.php?newsid=72542.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 153

Another document rooted in the ten-year plan is the Framework for


Expanding the Sphere of Functions of the State Language and Raising
its Competitiveness for 20072010.71 As the period covered by the
plan for the first decade drew to a close, work started on a new ten-
year language program to cover the period 20112020.72
It should also be noted that there has also been frequent discussion
of the need to amend or replace LL97, or else to adopt a separate law
addressing only the state language. Indeed, in 2007, the incumbent
deputy chair of the Language Committee announced that he had pre-
pared a draft of a new law.73 To date, however, no such law has been
adopted.74

5.5.3. Qazaq Tili Qoghamy and Its Work


In 1989, a non-governmental organization known as Qazaq tili
qoghamy (Kazakh Language Society, henceforth Qtq) was created
in Kazakhstan.75 Reflecting the institutions origins as an informal

71
Kontseptsiia rasshireniia sfery funktsionirovaniia gosudarstvennogo iazyka,
povysheniia ego konkurentosposobnosti na 20072010 gody, 21 Nov. 2007, accessed
7 May 2010 through http://www.zakon.kz/98548-postanovlenie-pravitelstva-respubliki
.html.
72
V gosprogramme po razvitiiu iazykov do 2020 g. prioritetnym dolzhno stat raz-
vitie gosudarstvennogo iazyka, Kazinform, 25 Jan. 2010, accessed 7 May 2010 through
http://www.zakon.kz/engine/print.php?newsid=160512. A year earlier Kazakhstans
Minister of Culture and Information had noted the need to begin work on this (V
etom godu nuzhno razrabotat novuiu dolgosrochnuiu Gosudarstvennuiu programmu
funktskonirovaniia i razvitiia iazykov- M. Kul-Mukhamedov,Kazinform, 24 Jan. 2009,
accessed through http://www.zakon.kz/engine/print.php?newsid=131636.
73
Interview with Muhit Nurtazin, Men Til turaly zhanga zang zhobasyn zhazyp
shyqtym, Ayqyn, 8 June 2007, p. 3. From the interview with Nurtazin it appears that
his proposal was broader than a proposed law just on the state language. However,
just a few months later a working group reportedly met to discuss proposals for a new
law On the State Language of the Republic of Kazakhstan. The timing suggests that
perhaps Nurtazins proposal might have dealt only with Kazakh. (Sostoialos zase-
danie rabochei gruppy po razrabotke proekta Zakona RK O gosudarstvennom iazyke
Respubliki Kazakhstan, Kazinform, 19 Aug. 2007, accessed 7 May 2010 through
http://www.zakon.kz/92297-sostojalos-zasedanie-rabochejj-gruppy.html. Among oth-
ers, B. Khasanuly (2007) has advocated adoption of a law On the Kazakh Language
as the State Language of the Republic of Kazakhstan (p. 209).
74
During meetings I held in Kazakhstan spring and summer 2010, a number of
Kazakh interlocutors cited the need to adopt a law specifically dealing with the Kazakh
language. In discussing the shortcomings of the draft language program for 2011
2020, Dos Qoshim explicitly criticizes the drafts failure to mention the need for such
a law (Dinara Myngzhasarqyzy, Til turaly baghdarlamagha talap kushti, Turkistan,
21 Aug. 2010 accessed through http://www.kazakh-tili.ru/?show=news&id=1547).
75
Initially the organization was simply called Ana tili (The Mother Tongue [Soci-
ety]), with the purview of all languages in Kazakhstan (Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 4 June
154 william fierman

group in the era of glasnost and perestroika, the leaders showed every
indication of intending to continue their activity as a kind of inter-
est group lobbying government for bolder measures to promote the
Kazakh language. At the same time, however, its leaders seem to have
expected that, in accordance with traditional Soviet practice for pub-
lic organizations, they would directly or indirectly enjoy generous
state funding. This aspiration was not without foundation, since ini-
tially the relations between Qtq and the state were very close.76
Beyond this, though, from the very beginning, Qtq manifested pre-
tensions to power of decision-making and control. For example, in
1990, the local Qtq in Qyzylorda took the chairman of the oblast exec-
utive committee and the oblast first party secretary to task for their
indifference to promoting the Kazakh language.77 At about the same
time, the Qtqs president, A. Qaydarov, suggested that the Council of
Ministers empower Qtq to review whether state funds allocated for
implementing the language program were being spent effectively by
relevant organizations.78
Kazakhstans sudden independence at the end of 1991 seems to
have stimulated even greater hopes for a rapid rise in Kazakh language
status as well as greater demands from Qtq to enjoy the power and
wealth accruing to an organization entitled to direct this important
process in a newly independent country. Almost immediately upon
independence, a prominent literary scholar active in Qtq proposed
transforming it into a state committee; in the same breath he proposed
requiring a knowledge of Kazakh for all personnel hired into positions
of leadership!79 Aspirations for power were also evident in the resolu-
tion of the Qtqs first post-independence (and second ever) qurultay
(congress), which called for Qtq to be given rights to investigate, check
on implementation and take action on language issues, and for organi-
zation of a state language committee to work very closely with Qtq.

1989). Reflecting the fact that it was primarily concerned with the Kazakh language
(and not other mother tongues spoken in Kazakhstan), within months the organiza-
tion was renamed Qazaq tili (Leninshil zhas, 24 Oct. 1989).
76
For a more detailed treatment of Qtq, see U. (sic) Fierman Elity i alfavity. Pov-
orot iazykovogo sdviga v Kazakhstane, Etnograficheskoe obozrenie no. 6, 2005, pp.
49-71.
77
Qiya betkeydegi kosh, Ana tili, 16 Aug. 1990, p. 3.
78
Ana tili, 16 Aug. 1990, p. 1.
79
Ana tili, 6 Feb. 1992, p. 2.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 155

It is clear that Qtqs bold proposals were not in step with the thinking
of President Nazarbayev, who spoke at the qurultay. Instead of elabo-
rate praise for the organizations activitiessomething his audience
would no doubt have greatly appreciated and maybe expectedthe
president criticized Qtqs regional branches that had begun to politi-
cize their work too much, thus threatening to disrupt civil peace.80
Although it continued to operate, the power and influence of the
Qtq waned over the 1990s. As noted in an article in Qtqs publication
in 2000, the number of Qtq branches had sharply declined in recent
years, and Qtq had become exhausted and suffocated. What was left
were just occasional thin lines shining like the water remaining in
ravines after a flood.81 A year and a half later another picture of an
ineffective Qtq appeared in the form of a cartoon depicting the organi-
zation as a sleeping man with his head on a pillow and lying by a lock
that is holding closed a book called Kazakh Language. The key to the
lock lies on top of the book, and sitting on top of it are three other
figures reading another book with the words English and money
in English, and butter (maslo), cheese (syr), sausage (kolbasa),
and the first three letters of patty (kotleta) in Russian.82
Eventually, in about 2005, a new organization appeared, seemingly
with much the same mission and outlook as Qtq. This new body,
referred to as both Memlekettik til qozghalysy [State Language Move-
ment] and Memlekettik qoghamdyq til qozghalysy [State Language
Public Movement], has been led by a Kazakh writer and politician
Mukhtar Shakhanov; Shakhanov has been openly critical of Qtq for
its meager achievements. Shakhanov and his organization have also
repeatedly challenged President Nazarbayevs moderation in language
policy and, more broadly, nation building.83
By the time of meetings I held in Kazakhstan in 2010 with repre-
sentatives of state and public institutions involved in language policy,
many could not even recall an organization named Memlekettik til

80
Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 28 Nov. 1992, p. 1.
81
Qaydasyngdar, Qazaq tili qoghamdary? Ana tili, 17 Feb. 2000, p. 7.
82
Turkistan, 14 July 2001, p. 5.
83
Indeed, at the end of 2009, Shakhanov even threatened a hunger strike to protest
the draft of a new doctrine of national unity (Serik Maleev, Aktsenty rasstavleny,
Liter 16 Dec. 2009, accessed 6 May 2010 at http://www.liter.kz/index.php?option=com
_content&task=view&id=872&Itemid=2). For an early reference to Shakhanovs
movement see Asylkhan Barlybayuly Ordaly oylaryn bolisti, Dala men qala, 21 Oct.
2005, accessed at http://dmk.kz/arhiv/?act=readarticle&id=141.
156 william fierman

Figur 1. Cartoon from the Kazakh newspaper Turkistan (14 July 2001, p. 5): mocks
the (sleeping) Kazakh Language Society (Qazaq tili qoghamy) for its inactivity in pro-
moting the Kazakh language and the Societys insensitivity to the danger of popular
material interests favoring Russian and English.

qozghalysy; all, though, were familiar with Shakhanovs vocal demand


about raising the status of Kazakh language in high prestige domains
as quickly as possible. Qtq was still functioning in 2010, though it
seemed a mere shadow of what it was in the early years.
The contours of the history of Qazaq tili qoghamy and Memleket-
tik til lie beyond the scope of the present article. For our purposes
here, however, it is important to note that even though they are not
state bodies, the articulated programs of Qtq and Memlekettik til have
focused on promoting Kazakh in high and mid-level domains of
Fishmans GIDS scale, introducing or expanding the use of Kazakh
in such areas as diplomacy, the national legislature, formal education
at all levels, and the mass media. As in the case of the Kazakhstan
government RLS efforts, however, these organizations have failed to
address in direct fashion the need to reinforce Kazakh in the home.
Thus, the government as well as Qtq and Memlekettik til appear to be
working in a way that Fishman predicts carries a high risk of failure.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 157

Despite these mistakes, the prospects for Kazakh in the coming


decades seem fairly promising. We will return briefly to consider the
reasons for this at the end of this chapter. Before doing so, it is worth
reviewing the status of Kazakh in a number of domains in urban areas
of Kazakhstan since the turn of the twenty-first century.

5.6. Moderate RLS Success

5.6.1. Workplace
Even today, in most major cities of Kazakhstan, Russian is still used
more than Kazakh. Some communications, including a large share of
those with the government in the capital, continue in Russian. How-
ever, for a number of reasons discussed below, Kazakhs status in the
workplace has improved. The effect of legislation promoting Kazakh
has been most pronounced in government offices. In late 2001 or early
2002, Qyzylorda Oblast (where Kazakhs comprise about 95 percent
of the population) became the first oblast officially to shift all office
work (deloproizvodstvo) to Kazakh. By January 2005, at least four
other oblasts had officially followed Qyzylordas lead, 84 and by spring
2006 it was announced that the shift to the state language had taken
place in seven oblasts.85 In addition, the shift to Kazakh reportedly was
also proceeding in the first years of the decade in certain demographi-
cally Kazakh raions (districts) of oblasts which overall did not have a
Kazakh majority.86 As of 2005, plans called for all government internal
office work throughout the country to be shifted to Kazakh by 2008.87
This goal, however, was not met.
Even in areas of the country where the shift has supposedly taken
place, work has often proceeded in Russian: Kazakh translations
are frequently produced just in order to demonstrate that goals to

84
The other four oblasts are Atyrau, Manghystau, Zhambyl, and South Kazakhstan
(Oralbay Abdikarimov Memlekettik til zhyly bolmaydy, biraq . . ., Ana tili, 27 Jan.
2005).
85
Iazykovaia politika Kazakhstana budet priobretat vse bolshuiu politicheskuiu
i ideologicheskuiu znachimostE. Ertysbayev, Kazinform, 12 May 2006, accessed
7 May 2010 through http://www.zakon.kz/engine/print.php?newsid=71915.
86
For an example of such raions in Pavlodar Oblast see Nurlybek Samatuly,
Memlekettik tilding taghdyry memlekettik qyzmetkerlerding qolynda, Ana tili,
10 Oct. 2002.
87
Oralbay Abdikarimov Memlekettik til zhyly bolmaydy, biraq . . ., Ana tili, 27
Jan. 2005.
158 william fierman

produce a certain percentage of documents in Kazakh have been


met.88 Commenting on this situation in 2010, Kazakhstans General
Procurator M.A. Zhorgenbayev noted that many institutions which
had on paper shifted to the state language were relying heavily on
translators.89 According to Zhorgenbayev, measures undertaken by
government bodies to expand the use of Kazakh had been limited to
organizing short-term courses to teach it and providing reports that
allocated budgets had been used. In fact, he said, Russian was used
for 75 percent of office work and correspondence [deloproizvodstvo i
dokumentooborot].90 Despite this and other evidence of continued use
of Russian, it is clear that Kazakh is used much more in government
offices today than fifteen years ago, let alone in the Brezhnev era of the
1970s and early 1980s.91

5.6.2. Schools
Kazakh today is in a much stronger position in urban education than
twenty years ago. In primary and secondary education, the share of eth-
nic Kazakh urban pupils who attend Kazakh-medium classes reached
somewhere between 70 and 75 percent in the first years of the new
millenium.92 In Almaty, the former capital, the share increased from a
few percent in the 1980s to over 60 percent. Many of the children in
Almatys Kazakh-medium classes are offspring of Kazakh parents who

88
Commenting on this situation, Director of Kazakhstans Institute of Linguistics
Sheruwbay Qurmanbayuly stated that if government organizations actually conducted
their meetings in Kazakh, then the situation with written documentation would be
entirely different (Til tughyrdan tuspesin! Ayqyn, 22 Jan. 2010, accessed 4 May 2010
at http://www.aikyn.kz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=959).
89
Mazhlis: Gosudarstvennyi iazykfaktor edinstva stranykonferentsiia,
Zakon.kz, 19 March 2010, accessed 7 May 2010 through http://www.zakon.kz/166739-
mazhilis-gosudarstvennyjj-jazyk-faktor.html.
90
Changing targets for the shift to Kazakh have reflected the growing official rec-
ognition that the shift to Kazakh in government institutions has been lagging. The
strategic plan of the Ministry of Culture and Information (which oversees the Lan-
guage Committee) changed the target for shift of office work for 2009 downward from
70 percent to 60 percent (Minkultury Kazakhstana peresmotrelo sroki perevoda
deloproizvodstva na gosiazyk, Novosti-Kazakhstan, 3 Sep. 2009, accessed 7 May 2010
through http://www.zakon.kz/146385-minkultury-kazakhstana-peresmotrelo.html).
91
For a report on problems of introducing Kazakh even in an oblast with a large
Kazakh population (South Kazakhstan) see Shadiyar Moldabek, Til uyrenuwdi bala-
baqshadan bastauw kerek, Zaman Qazaqstan, 30 July 2004.
92
For information on how this was calculated, see William Fierman (2006), Lan-
guage and Education . . . pp. 106-7.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 159

have moved to the city from rural areas in search of employment.93 A


very small share of non-Kazakhs, probably about two percent, also
studies in the Kazakh medium.94 Overall, the share of school pupils
(all ethnic groups and urban and rural combined) in Kazakh-medium
classes is approximately 60 percent.95
The share of students enrolled in Kazakh-medium higher education
has also increased. In 19891990, such students accounted for only
17.9 percent of the total.96 By 20012002, however, the share had grown
to 31.5 percent, and by 20052006 to 42.6 percent.97 Many anecdotal
reports suggest that the quality of higher education in Kazakhstans uni-
versities has declined substantially since independence; among other
reasons this is due to the low salary levels in higher education, and
the opening of new (often private) universities with very poor facili-
ties and underqualified teaching staff. For such reasons, the increase
in share of students in Kazakh-medium groups undoubtedly includes
many students receiving an inferior higher education. Although the
situation is changing, Kazakh-language textbooks and supplementary
texts for universities are often still not available, or else they are poor
translations. For this reason, many Kazakh-medium university students

93
See A. Zabirova, Selsko-gorodskaia i mezhgorodskaia migratsiia v sovremen-
nom Kazakhstane: motivy i rezultaty, Tsentralnaia Aziia i Kavkaz, no. 3, 2004.
94
Among the two percent there is only a miniscule number of Russians. The
majority are likely members of other Turkic-speaking nationalities (Natalia Vdovina,
Russkii iazyk v Kazakhstane, Informatsionno-analiticheskii portal Evraziiskii dom,
2008, accessed 7 May 2008 through http://www.perspektivy.info/oykumena/krug
/russkiy_yazik_v_kazakhstane.htm).
95
The figure of 60 percent was cited by President Nazarbayev in a speech given
October 2008 (Vystuplenie Prezidenta RK N.A. Nazarbayeva na XIV sessii Assamblei
naroda Kazakhstana, Zakon.kz, 24 Oct. 2008, accessed 7 May 2010 through http://
www.zakon.kz/124086-vystuplenie-prezidenta-rk-n.a.html). The proposed draft of the
Doctrine of National Unity published at the end of 2009 cited a figure of 61 per-
cent (Proekt Doktriny natsionalnogo edinstva Kazakhstana, 26 Oct. 2009, accessed
7 May 2010 through http://www.vkgu.kz/ru/project-doktrini-nacionalnogo-edinstva
.htm). A much higher figure of 67 percent, cited shortly thereafter by Minister of Cul-
ture and Information M. Qul-Mukhammed, is almost certainly in error (Til tughyr-
dan tuspesin, Ayqyn, 22 Jan. 2010 accessed 7 May 2010 through http://www.aikyn
.kz/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=959). For urban and rural ethnic
Kazakh children combined, Khasanuly (2007) says the share studying in the Kazakh
medium was 80.4 percent.
96
Khasanuly (1992), p. 185.
97
Vdovina (2008). According to Vdovina, the share in individual years for Kazakh-
medium was 20012002: 31.5 percent; 20022003: 36.2 percent; 20032004: 38.6 per-
cent; 20042005: 40.0 percent; and 20052006: 42.6 percent.
160 william fierman

are still obliged to use a substantial share of Russian-language materi-


als during their studies.
Those seeking to raise the status of Kazakh have supported the
introduction of an obligatory test on the Kazakh language as part
of the ENT exam given to those graduating from Russian-medium
secondary schools.98 When initially proposed, it appeared that a poor
score on the Kazakh test of the ENT would seriously damage chances
of those with poor Kazakh skills wanting to enter higher education.
However, it was decided that, for the time being at least, the score
on the Kazakh test would be given a very low weight in determining
entrance to higher education.99

5.6.3. Media
Today the law requires all electronic media channels and stations to
broadcast at least half of their transmissions in Kazakh. This law was
not universally observed,100 especially in the early years. To achieve
compliance, many broadcasters ignored the spirit of the law by
scheduling Kazakh-language programs at inconvenient times such as
the middle of the night; today the selection of Kazakh television and
radio programs is much richer than five years ago, not to mention two
decades ago. They include game shows, talk shows devoted to con-
troversial topics, and music clips reminiscent of those on American
MTV. Some programs, such as news broadcasts, are transmitted in
much the same form in Russian and Kazakh. Others, however, are
unique in one language or the other. Today, films broadcast in Russian
are frequently accompanied by Kazakh subtitles.
The mere presence of programs does not, of course, mean that a
particular share of the potential audience is viewing or listening to
them. Indeed, as in the Soviet era, many programs from Moscow

98
ENT is the abbreviation of the Russian name for the exam Edinoe natsionalnoe
testirovanie (Common national testing) that most university-bound students take at
the end of their secondary education.
99
For reference to plans to introduce the exam, see MON RK planiruet vvesti
vtoroi etap ENT dlia abiturientov vuzov, pretenduiushchikh na granty i kredity,
Kazakhstan segodnia, 23 Nov. 2007, accessed 8 May 2010 through www.zakon.kz
/engine/print.php?newsid=98343. For information that in 2010 the score on the
Kazakh language exam for graduates of Russian-medium schools is not to be counted
see ENT-2010: Kak eto budet? accessed 8 May 2010 at http://www.uchi.kz/ent/ent-
2010-kak-eto-budet.
100
A 2002 analysis of ten TV channels available in Almaty showed that just over
30 percent of their total broadcast time was in Kazakh (Zhas Alash, 4 April 2002).
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 161

continue to enjoy great popularity among audiences in Kazakhstan.


In addition, many cable channels with programs from around the
world are also available. Nevertheless, anecdotal evidence suggests
that a substantial share of the Kazakh audience, including the urban
audience, at least occasionally tunes in to Kazakh-language electronic
media.101 Furthermore, Kazakh has an important niche in new forms
of mass mediathe internet and music on CDs and DVDs. The
number of Kazakh-language websites is still quite modest, even com-
pared to the number of Russian-language sites based in Kazakhstan.
The number, however, is growing. In addition, CDs and DVDs with
Kazakh-language entertainment are available and seem to enjoy large
youth audiences.

5.6.4. Half Empty? Half full?


It is also worth noting here that Kazakh language is much more
prominent today in symbolic roles and positions than fifteen years
ago. Many public signs in cities of Kazakhstan (including many which
previously were only in Russian) are now both in Kazakh and Rus-
sian, or sometimes in Kazakh only; moreover, when the signs are in
two languages, the Kazakh text is often larger or more visible than the
one in Russian. On ceremonial occasions, Kazakh public orators often
make a point of delivering at least part of their addresses in Kazakh.
Popular attitudes are also changing: dozens of my own personal
informal conversations with urban Kazakhs over the last five years
have reflected a growing realization among them that there are advan-
tages to acquiring skills in their own language. Interlocutors have
pointed to such benefits as enhanced employment prospects as well as
the shield from being shamed for not knowing their own language.
Despite these successes, it is evident that RLS success still lags far
behind legislation, not to mention behind aspirations among mem-
bers of Qtq and Memlekettik til. As in so many other cases around
the world, implementation has been something of an Achilles heel.
Space precludes a detailed exploration here of the many obstacles that
have confounded Kazakh RLS. Among the most important factors,

101
See Amirkhan Mendeke, Bul qay arna? BulElarna, Qazaq adebiyeti, 15
March 2002; Esengul Kopqyzy, Ala-qula arnalar, Turkistan, 14 Feb. 2002; and
50 50 degendi kim shygharghan, Zhas Alash, 4 April 2002. As Mendeke notes, a
state-funded national TV channel was launched with programming entirely in Kazakh.
However, today that stations programming is partially in Russian.
162 william fierman

however, has been opposition from both non-Kazakhs and Kazakhs


who have weak or no Kazakh language skills. Many of these same indi-
viduals, especially those who work in job with administrative respon-
sibility, have been able (or obliged) to impede promotion of Kazakh
when they have faced choices of either advancing RLS or supporting
projects perceived as serving more urgent economic or social priori-
ties. In education, for example, even ardent Kazakh RLS adherents
must occasionally face choices such as whether to prioritize repair of
a schools roof or invest in better Kazakh language instruction; and the
head of city administration must make such decisions as whether to
support the hiring of additional staff to enforce regulations on Kazakh-
language public signage or use those same funds to increase the size of
the local police force. Implementation of language policy in Kazakh-
stan today is also impeded by corruption, a widespread lack of respect
for the law and officials, and a long tradition of conducting campaigns
whose success is judged more by fulfillment of formal criteria than by
effect. Due to these and other such problems, if we liken the status of
Kazakh language in urban areas of Kazakhstan to a glass of water, it
certainly contains more liquid than in the mid- or late-1980s; however,
it is still only approaching half full.102
Although some of the most ardent promoters of the Kazakh lan-
guage may dream of a Kazakhstan where Russian is just one among
many foreign languages, there is a broad realization that a large share
of urban Kazakhs will continue to need Russian for many domains,

102
Authors of a number of articles published since the 1990s have attempted to
measure attitudes towards Kazakh and use of the language. One study, by M.M.
Arenov and S.K. Kalmykov, for example, reports that 76.38 percent of Kazakhs sur-
veyed claimed to watch Kazakh-language television programs, and that 95.5 percent
of Kazakhs can express themselves in Kazakh (The Present Language Situation in
Kazakhstan, Russian Social Science Review, May/June, 1997, vol. 38, no. 3. [Accessed
through EBSCO HOST, 3 April 2005]). A survey of students conducted in 1999 by
William Rivers asked students Na kakom iazyke Vy by khoteli vospityvat detei v
budushchem? [In what language would you like to raise children in the future?]
(Attitudes towards Incipient Mankurtism among Kazakhstani College Students,
Language Policy, No. 1, 2003, pp. 159-74). Rivers data provides a wide variety of
responses, including Kazakh, Russian, Several, English and Russian, English
and Kazakh, and Kazakh, Russian, and English. It is very difficult to determine
the significance of the data reported by these researchers. In the case of Rivers, for
example, interpretation of results would require an attempt to ascertain what respon-
dents understood by the term vospitanie (upbringing). A much better sense of the
Kazakhs rising status is provided by I.S. Savin, Realizatsiia i rezultaty kulturno-
iazykovoi i obrazovatelnoi politiki v Kazakhstane v 1990-e gg., accessed 20 Feb. 2005
at http://chimkent.by.ru/Savin2.html.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 163

and that, despite modest progress in non-Russians learning Kazakh,


most will not soon be able to use the language outside of a very limited
set of domains and registers. Thus, the diglossia of Kazakhstans cities
will likely continue to be one of asymmetric bilingualism. This seems
implicit, for example, in demands occasionally voiced by Kazakh RLS
proponents that a Kazakh language fluency requirement be enforced
for ethnic Kazakhs who seek certain jobs, but not for members of
other nationalities.

5.7. Conclusion

Nothing in the Kazakh experience suggests that Fishman is incorrect


in his warning that concentration on the higher level stages of RLS is
a risky form of treatment. Among other reasons, this is because such
treatment is inefficient and expensive. This holds especially in cases
when the dominant language, like Russian, has well-developed reg-
isters in many areas relevant to modern life, including science, tech-
nology, and law. In these circumstances, the cost of RLS therapy
may bankrupt the patient and supporters (i.e., the promoters of RLS)
before the remedy produces positive results. Thus, because there are
no public hospitals to heal ailing languages, a high end approach
can be fatal. Attempts to displace a dominant language in rapidly
developing fields of science and technology is also difficult because
creation, standardization, and dissemination of specialized vocabulary
all take time; meanwhile, new concepts are being developed and thus
require additional new terms.103
Although the general rule about the inadvisability of high end
approach for RLS is valid, failure to abide by this rule seems unlikely
to have the dire consequences for Kazakh that it might in many other
cases. Thus, in many ways Kazakh is a lucky patient.

103
For examples of attempts to promote Kazakh in such fields as finance, medicine,
and the military, see respectively Finansisty obediniaiut usiliia dlia unifikatsii ter-
minologii na kazakhskom iazyke, Panorama, 26 March 2004; Sandughash Serikqali,
Qazaq tilimeditsinada, Zhas Alash, 24 Dec. 1998 and Darigerler qazaqshagha bet
bursyn, Egemen Qazaqstan, 5 May 1998; and Gh. Qozhaghulova, Qazaqtildi sard-
arlar sap tuzeuwde, Ana tili, 30 Aug. 2001. For arguments on the need to introduce
Kazakh broadly into technical and scientific higher education, see Ghabdolla Nisan-
bay, Tilge ghylymi-tekhnikalyq oris qazhet, Egemen Qazaqstan, 20 Aug., 1998. On
the creation of a 31-volume set of terminology dictionaries see Aqseleuw Seydimbek
and Sherali Bilal, Rukhani qazina, Egemen Qazaqstan, 2 June 2001.
164 william fierman

One of the most important and fairly rare conditions affecting


Kazakh RLS is that Kazakh has an independent state, Kazakhstan,
officially supporting it. In todays world, few language communi-
ties undertaking RLS outside of the former USSR can even dream of
having their own state.104 The importance of the state is especially
great in Kazakhstan because, despite privatization, the state still owns,
controls, and/or has a very strong influence on key branches of the
economy.
Kazakh is also fortunate in that, as a result of the Soviet experience,
there is a widespread popular belief that ethnic group, territory, and
language should coincide. This can be traced to the Soviet Communist
Partys definition of a nation (in turn rooted in Stalins theses of 1913),
which posited that each nation is united by a common language, terri-
tory, economic life, and psychological make-up as manifest in a com-
munity of culture.105 This belief, which has survived Soviet power, has
left a widespread mindset that the Kazakhs are a unique people with
a distinct culture and language, and that the particular culture and
language are somehow linked to their particular territory, i.e., Kazakh-
stan. This principle also seems to support some Kazakhs hopes that
eventually Kazakh monoglossia will prevail in their country.
Another important factor that favors Kazakhs revival is a powerful
national leader supporting the language, though not to an extreme.
Nursultan Nazarbayev has been very mindful of domestic and inter-
national concerns that would make a tilt too far in favor of Kazakh
language unwise, especially at the expense of Russian. Nevertheless,
Nazarbayev has stressed Kazakh language as a symbol binding the
community of all Kazakhs (and eventually all of Kazakhstan); he has
also supported expansion of its domains of use. Unlike his immedi-
ate predecessor, Kolbin, who was reluctant to support Kazakh as the
republics only state language, Nazarbayev immediately embraced this

104
The fact that this is so rare is noted by Fishman (2001b) Why Is It So Hard . . .
p. 19.
105
Stalins treatise Marksizm i natsionalnyi vopros (Marxism and the National
Question) originally appeared in Prosveshchenie Nos. 3-5 (MarchMay), 1913; among
other editions, it was translated and reprinted in the sixteen volume collection Works
(Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House), vol. 2, pp. 300-81, now available at
http://www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/MNQ12.html.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 165

position upon his accession as party first secretary; it was only a few
months later that LL89 was adopted.106
Nazarbayevs support for Kazakh has likely been critical in coun-
tering bureaucratic resistance to measures related to RLS. Many
of Kazakhstans politicians and much of Kazakhstans administra-
tive apparatusincluding many Kazakhsare products of Russian-
medium education, and prefer to use Russian in their work. As Fish-
man points out, most threatened languages have no outside support
of any operational significance to fall back upon.107 This is not the case
for Kazakh. Nazarbayevs public support makes it harder for bureau-
crats to resist, even those who are lukewarm or oppose the shift from
Russian to Kazakh.
Despite calls from some quarters in his country for a federal system,
Nazarbayev has insisted that Kazakhstan maintain a unitary political
structure. On balance, this also has probably played a positive role
in promoting RLS, at least in areas of Kazakhstan with large Slavic
majorities. Though RLS progress has been slow in these areas, the uni-
tary state structure has likely facilitated measures that have benefited
Kazakh.
Combined with the above, the demographic dynamic in Kazakh-
stan is a very powerful force supporting Kazakh RLS. Both natural and
mechanical demographic factors have been working to its advantage:
the absolute number and share of Kazakhs is rising, while the number
of Slavs and Germans is declining. Besides low birthrates, this is due
to emigration: over the period 19931997 alone the number of Slavs
and Germans leaving Kazakhstan exceeded those arriving by about
1.5 million. In the same period, there was a slight positive balance of
Kazakh immigration into Kazakhstan: arriving Kazakhs exceeded those
who leaving by 46,700.108 Immigration to Kazakhstan by Kazakhs in
subsequent years increased: according to President Nazarbayev, in the
decade leading up to 2009, a total of 650,000 Kazakhs arrived in their

106
As suggested above, however, this was not merely Nazarbayevs doing, but rep-
resented a trend sweeping the entire USSR.
107
Fishman (2001b) Why Is It so Hard . . . p. 13.
108
Azimbay Ghali, OrysymQara ormanym, Zhas Alash, 11 March 2000, p. 2.
The largest share of Kazakh immigrants has come from Mongolia and Uzbekistan
(E. Iu. Sadovskaia, Migratisiia v Kazakhstane na rubezhe XXI veka: osnovnye tendentsii
i perspektivy [Almaty: Ghalym, 2001], p. 109).
166 william fierman

historical homeland, i.e., Kazakhstan.109 Between 1999 and 2008, the


Kazakh share of immigrants into the country jumped from 26.4 per-
cent to 75.6 percent (whereas Russians declined from 48.6 percent to
13.5 percent); meanwhile, over the same period, the annual share of
Kazakhs among all emigrants from the country remained low, between
4 and 7 percent.110
The increasing share of Kazakhs has also been a result of a substan-
tially higher birth rate among Kazakhs than among Russians. In 1991,
when Kazakhs comprised something over 40 percent of Kazakhstans
total population, they accounted for 72.4 percent of the total natural
population increase of 219,429. In 1993, they accounted for 88.2 per-
cent of the natural increase of 145,371. By contrast, Russians, whose
total number was not yet much less than Kazakhs, accounted for only
12 percent of the increase in 1991, and already in 1993 experienced
negative natural growth.111 These data, of course, reflect not only the
high birthrate among Kazakhs, but the higher death rate associated
with the higher average age of the Russian population. For births
alone, Kazakhs accounted for over 65 percent of the total in 1999; by
2008 the share had climbed to over 71 percent.112
Migration within Kazakhstan, especially Kazakhs movement from
rural to urban areas, has also affected language in urban areas, where
Kazakh became so weak in the late Soviet period. Although some cit-
ies that witnessed emigration of Slavs and Germans simply withered
because they lacked employment opportunities, as the data cited above
indicate, others attracted Kazakh migrants who, arriving from rural

109
Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan na otkrytii III sessii Parlamenta
RK chetvertogo sozyva 1 sentiabria 2009, accessed at http://www.parlam.kz/DocSp
Prezident.aspx?lan=ru-RU&idpr=23. According to Nazarbayev, a total of over one
million Kazakhs had arrived since independence.
110
Nedavnie izmeneniia tendentsii vneshnei migratsii Kazakhstana: Vzaimosviaz
s urovnem obrazovaniia, vozrastom i etnicheskoi prinadlezhnosti migrantov, Obzory
literatuy i statistiki (Rakurs Center for Economic Analysis), no. 6.1, pp. 4-5, accessed
at http://www.cear.kz/cont/RAKURS_Literature%20&%20Statistical%20Surveys_6.1
_rus.pdf.
111
Azimbay Ghali, Qazaq qaytse kobeydi. Nemese optimistik demografiia, Ege-
men Qazaqstan, 1 Jan. 2000, p. 3.
112
Over this same period, the Russian share of births dropped from about 18 per-
cent to under 14 percent. This means that whereas in 1999 there were approximately
3.6 Kazakhs born in Kazakhstan for every Russian, by 2008 the number was almost
5.2 (Qazaqstannyng demografiyalyq zhylnamalyghy, 2008 [Qazaqstan Respublikasy
Statistika agenttigi, 2009]), p. 178.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 167

areas or other smaller towns, replaced the former Russian, Ukrainian,


and German inhabitants.
The demographic trends since independence described above have
significantly altered the urban linguistic environment in which RLS
efforts have taken place. Most new arrivals in cities are bilingual in
that they have enough Russian skills to get along; moreover, many
also undoubtedly still see that knowledge of Russian increases their
chances of upward mobility. Nevertheless, their presence in the cities
has halted the slide towards Russian monoglossia that was characteris-
tic of the 1970s and early 1980s. This growing share of Kazakh speak-
ers in the cities and towns has raised the likelihood that non-Kazakh
speakers or those with very limited skills will encounter the Kazakh
language in their workplace or at public or private gatherings. Whereas
in the 1970s or 1980s, bilingual urban Kazakh-Russian-speakers would
generally have refrained from using Kazakh at work meetings where
not everyone knew the language, today it is common for Kazakhs to
speak Kazakh in this kind of setting. In the new environment it may be
prudent for non-kazakhophones, especially Kazakhs, to learn at least
enough Kazakh to understand what others are saying.
These same demographic processes have greatly increased the ranks
of urban Kazakhs who support measures that relate to Kazakh lan-
guage revival. In particular, they have produced a larger cohort of
individuals in urban areas who are likely to seek linguistic accommo-
dation for Kazakh-dominant speakers in public services, government
offices, and employment.
One other factor relevant to Kazakhs recovery is that even in
the 1970s and 1980s (despite claims of the Kazakh language being
extremely sick or about to die), the situation was not really so dire.
After all, even in the late 1980s, two-thirds of all ethnic Kazakhs in
primary and secondary schools were enrolled in classes with Kazakh
as the medium of instruction, albeit mostly in rural areas. Moreover,
Kazakh had enjoyed considerable language corpus development dur-
ing the Soviet era, when scholars created many works (including dic-
tionaries, grammars, and a twelve-volume encyclopedia). Beyond this,
despite their limited audience in urban areas, Kazakh-language mass
media and cultural services did exist in the Soviet period.
Given the financial costs of RLS, it is also important that Kazakh is
spoken in a territory with substantial natural wealth, especially energy
reserves that attract foreign investment. Kazakhstans economy in the
early 1990s was in shambles, but since then the economy has recovered
168 william fierman

substantially. The improvement, combined with close links between


Kazakhstans government and the private sector, has made more
resources available for investment in RLS. Foreign corporations have
been sensitive to hints that they should assist development of Kazakh
language and culture: the Korean firm LG Electronics supported the
creation of a Kazakh-language karaoke CD.113 Parallel influence affects
domestic enterprises, even small ones: a Kazakhstan citizen who owns
a firm may not profit in any direct way by replacing a monolingual
Russian signboard in front of his store with one in Kazakh and Rus-
sian (let alone in Kazakh only). However, he is likely to be coopera-
tive if he is approached by a local political official who is seeking help
to deflect criticism that he (the official ) is doing too little to support
Kazakh in his district or town. In Kazakhstan, the good will thus cul-
tivated may be a critical factor determining the enterprises success.
Even though todays trends are no guarantee of future develop-
ment, Kazakhstans wealth and economic growth may also contribute
to efforts to expand use of Kazakh language by lessening financial con-
straints that might pinch RLS efforts. Fishman is certainly correct in
his assessment that focus on high-function RLS efforts is inefficient.
Nevertheless, the impact of these inefficiencies may be less serious in
a richer community.
Moreover, even with its inefficiencies, RLS high-function activity
has contributed to reversing language shift. After all, the importance
of the strong base in the family and neighborhood does not mean
that the influence between low and high domains is unidirectional.
That is, it does not mean that reversal of language shift in the domains
outside the home (those that have been supported by the Kazakhstan
government, Qtq, or Memlekettik til) cannot support RLS in the home.
Indeed, the earlier shift, i.e., Kazakhs loss to Russian, seems typical
in that the language of the home shifted as a result of educational,
employment, cultural, and political opportunities outside the home.
Kazakh-speaking parents often made conscious decisions to use Rus-
sian (even when poorly spoken) in the home because they saw greater
opportunities for their childrens upward mobility if those children
grew up speaking Russian instead of Kazakh. Today the situation
has altered somewhat. Although the benefits of knowing Kazakh in

113
Gulzeynep Sadirqyzy, Karaoke qazaqsha shyrqaydy, Egemen Qazaqstan, 5 April
2003, p. 6.
reversing language shift in kazakhstan 169

Kazakhstan today are generally far less than were the benefits of know-
ing Russian in the Soviet days, it must be recognized that even limited
improvement of Kazakh in the last two decades in public spheres and
mass media have also reduced the steep incline of the road of Kazakh
RLS in the urban home.
The bottom line, then, on the Kazakh case seems to be that thanks
to a rare and auspicious constellation of factors, RLS-ers could afford
to be inefficient and wasteful in their treatment of the disease, but still
contribute to restoring the patient to health. If Qtq efforts had focused
on the intimate community stressed by Fishman, they would likely
have been more productive in providing a base for future language
development. A low-function approach would also have seemed less
threatening to Kazakhstans non-Kazakh population as well as ethnic
Kazakhs who did not know their own language. It is impossible to
quantify the costs of the psychological discomfort among those who
are supposed to know Kazakh simply because of the recorded eth-
nicity in their passports; however, these costs should not be ignored
in a calculation of the effect of RLS on the populations welfare. In any
case, right now it is still too early to predict if there will be any long-
term disability resulting from the fact that those attending to the
Kazakh patient did not select the optimal course of treatment.
In their volume on the language situation and language planning in
Kazakhstan, Eleonora Suleimenova and Zhuldyz Smagulova stress that
government efforts to change language environments affect them, but
are not always decisive. They observe that over time people in Kazakh-
stan have come to recognize that . . . no changes in the functions of
languages are [merely] decreed, nor do they occur on their own and
in periods that are strictly indicated; rather, the inertia of linguistic
processes is an objective factor that must be considered in language
planning.114
In conclusion, it is worth noting that the achievements of Kazakh
RLS to date and prospects for the future appear more significant if seen
in the context of todays globalized world, where increasing numbers
of people regularly communicate with others from different cultures.
In this environment it seems inconceivable that Kazakh will acquire all
the functions that are currently fulfilled by Russian. More likely than

114
E.D. Suleimenova and Zh. S. Smagulova, Iazokovaia situatsiia i iazykovoe
planirovanie v Kazakhstane (Almaty: Qazaq universiteti, 2005).
170 william fierman

this is a different scenario, in which Russian remains an important


language of wider communication (LWC) for Kazakhs while another
LWC, probably English, also becomes more important.115 This has
been happening all over the globe, including, for example, in the for-
merly socialist countries of Eastern Europe and the Baltic region, and
in Georgia, and Azerbaijan.116 In this context, however, Kazakh seems
likely to acquire a stronger position in such domains as education and
other public services, the urban workplace (especially in government
and niches where concentrations of new migrants from rural areas
find employment), and mass media. Yet, as Fishman suggests, imple-
mentation of policies to effect such expansion will be smoother and
more efficient if conducted with due attention to language in the home
and recognition that in todays world the costs of pursuing a skys the
limit strategy will be very high.

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CHAPTER SIX

LANGUAGE POLICY AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT


IN MULTILINGUAL UZBEKISTAN

Birgit Schlyter

The balance between linguistic considerations and the political force


of a language reform drive varies with the language policy on which
the reform work is based and the relationship of this language policy
to the general political program of the body authorizing it. The aim of
the present report is to investigate the language situation in Uzbeki-
stan against a background of previous standardizations and language
reforms, with special attention being paid to recent political develop-
ments in the country.1 This investigation will help us understand to
what extent current Uzbek language policy has been integrated with
the ideology of national independence verbalized by the incumbent
regime.
One aspect to be considered in this connection is how present
Uzbek language reform has been conditioned by former Soviet lan-
guage policies. The Soviet agenda was part of a comprehensive centrist
political modernization program which brought about, among other
things, language standardizationregardless of social levelsfor the
purpose of mass communication and the accessibility of intellectual
capacity and labor supply. What will happen to language development

1
Studies and investigations for this work were conducted within the framework of
a research program funded by Stockholm University with an additional grant from
the The Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher
Education, during a stay from September to December 2005 as Visiting Professor at
the Institute of History of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Uzbekistan,
Tashkent. Scholars at academic institutes in Tashkent and Nukus to be acknowledged
for much help during my work on this report are Nemat Maxqamov, Ergash Umarov,
Baxtiyor Karimov, Aziz Dzhuraev, Shahnoza Madaeva, Mirzohid Raximov, Sarygul
Baxadirova, Tabysqan Qanaatov, Makset Karlybaev, and Zliha Tileuova. I would also
like to thank Dilorom Alimova, Director, and Valeriy Khan, Deputy Director, of the
aforementioned Institute of History for inviting me and providing me with a stimu-
lating environment for scholarly meetings and discussions at their Institute. An ear-
lier version of this paper was published as a research report at Stockholm University
(Schlyter 2007).
language policy and development in uzbekistan 177

in a country like Uzbekistan, with its language policy intimately tied


to centrist state ideology and with a Soviet-bred middle-aged genera-
tion still in charge of politics and administration, when this country
tries to become a member of a modern-world market economy chal-
lenged by globalization? How will this development, with perhaps still
more standardization and homogenization, affect non-standard envi-
ronments, such as minority language communities, bilingual speech
contexts, etc.?
After about twenty years of independence, Uzbek maintains its
position as both state and national language. In this period, the share
of ethnic Uzbeks of the countrys total population has increased from
73 to 80 percent, and nearly 80 percent of Uzbek public schools are
exclusively Uzbek-medium schools. At the same time, present-day
Uzbekistan is as much a multilingual society as it has ever been since
the establishment of the Republic in the 1920s, and Russian is a strong
and competitive partner at the state level.
In previous research I have referred to the notion of language
policy as that which an authority, for example, the government of
a country, both allows and stipulates as far as language practice is
concerned,2 acknowledging at the same time the fact that language
planning according to a given language policy and its implementation,
i.e. language reform,3 are dependent on a whole range of sociolinguis-
tic and non-linguistic factors.4 One such factor, and a most crucial
one, is manifested by the attitudes shown by the members of a society

2
Schlyter 1998, p. 144.
3
The following definition was provided in Schlyter 1998 (pp. 144f.) for a distinc-
tion between language policy and language planning, which have often been used
synonymously in the linguistic literature, and in order to distinguish both of these two
notions from that of language reform: A concrete manifestation of language policy is
language planning that involves decisions on what measures are to be taken and their
implementation. Together, language policy and language planning constitute the main
promotive stages of language reform and they are one of the forces that [. . .] spark
off changes in language practice and possibly also changes in linguistic structures.
For further discussions of issues and notions central to theories of language policy
and language planning, see, e.g., Appel and Muysken 1987, Schiffman 1996, Kaplan
and Baldauf 1997, Ager 2001, Schlyter 1998, 2003, and Wright 2004. For comments
on language policy and language planning at different societal levels, see e.g. Spolsky
2004, Shohamy 2006, and Baldauf 2008.
4
Dua 2008 (p. 191) writes: The theoretical and historical perspectives in the evo-
lution of language policy and language planning, and policy analysis and its evalua-
tion in different sociolinguistic contexts have clearly brought out that language policy
and planning are intricately involved with relations of power. Cf. articles in Ricento
2006.
178 birgit schlyter

towards the language situation in that society. Language attitudes are


formed and affected not only by personal experience but also by suc-
cesses and failures in launching and making people pay attention to
and possibly even accept the changes envisaged through the language
policy conducted by the authorities.5
Alphabet and vocabulary reform, both of which will be the focus in
some of the following sections, are two separate processes not neces-
sarily initiated at the same point in time or operating at the same pace.
On the other hand, they are the most concrete and visible manifesta-
tions of reform work carried out on the language corpus and thus
immediate indicators of the language policy behind it.

6.1. The Standardization of Uzbek as a Soviet Language

6.1.1. Turki/Uzbek
The term Uzbek for a particular language (not dialect) did not come
into frequent use until the period leading up to the national delimita-
tion of Turkestan and the establishment of the Republic of Uzbekistan
in 1924. Until then there had been no real uniformity as to the naming
of that language variety which would later be permanently referred to
as Uzbek.6 A term appearing in publications as late as the early 1920s
was Turk tili/Turki, which was then often used to refer to an envisaged
common literary language for the Turkic-speaking peoples of Central
Asia.7 However, this denomination has mostly been associated with
what has generally been called Chaghatay8 in Western linguistics
a Middle Turkic, now extinct, literary language of the south-eastern

5
This was referred to as language-reform awareness in Schlyter 1998 (pp.
161ff.).
6
The etymology of this word has not been determined with absolute certainty.
However, it has often been traced back to the name of a leader of the Golden Horde
in the 14th century, Ozbek Khan, a greatgrandson of Chingis Khan, and interpreted
as consisting of the two Turkic words oz, free/independent (here spelt in accordance
with the new Uzbek Latin alphabet adopted in 1995 (see below), where o // may be
pronounced as a rounded central-to-back mid vowel [~o]), and bek, lord/leader.
7
Borovkov 1940, pp. 6-24; cf. Fierman 1991, pp. 69-74.
8
This name originates from Chingis Khans second son. After the death of
Chaghatay in 12411242, his name was used in expressions referring to the people in
his former realm (Chaghatay ulus (nation), Chaghatay el (people), etc.) and even-
tually also the Turkic literary language of the Timurid Empire (Chaghatay tili (lan-
guage). Chaghatay lafz (word/language), etc.); see Eckmann 1966.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 179

(Karluk) branch of Turkic languages, to which among others the


modern literary Uzbek and Uighur languages belong. The term Sart
is another name that was used in connection with early attempts at
creating a literary norm corresponding to the Uzbek dialect spoken
in Turkestan at that time.9 With the preparations for the national
delimitation of Soviet Turkestan and the decision on names for the
new republics, Sart was abolished for both people (Ru. sarty) and
language (sartskiy/sartovskiy yazyk), while Chaghatay was renamed
Old Uzbek in Soviet linguistics.
The Middle Turkic Chaghatay language had been a well devel-
oped classical literary language, confined to a very small learned elite
of Turkestanis, most of whom were bilingual in both Persian and
Chaghatay and who had a traditional Islamic education. As reformist
ideas started to disseminate in the region in the latter part of the 19th
century, concern about the language situation focused on issues such
as how to establish a literary tradition where the subject matter to be
accounted for as well as the language in which this was to be expressed
would be closer to the language used by ordinary people. This ques-
tion was still at the forefront by the time of the October Revolution,
after which the ideology and administration of the new Union made
it imperative that information be made available to the great mass of
people. In order to accomplish this, new scripts were needed for a
large number of regional languages and illiteracy had to be eradicated.
This was the point of departure for the Soviet language policy that was
to be carried out during the following decades.10
Though a very small language in comparison to Russian, and a local
language with no wide distribution at the state level, Uzbek was in fact
the most numerous non-Slavic language in the Soviet Union and it

9
The name sart (Skr. srtha, caravan; cf. srthavha, leader of a caravan/traveling
merchant) was once the designation of a specific social class of sedentary urban peo-
ple living and in many cases traveling for business in the southern parts of Turkestan.
The Sarts spoke in dialects of either Iranian or Turkic origin or mixed Iranian-Turkic
idioms. As a linguistic term, Sart was eventually used for late, strongly Iranicised
Chaghatay and, finally, for the major Turkic dialect of the majority Uzbek popula-
tion of Western Turkestan. A number of language manuals and grammars in Russian
for the study of the Sart language were published around the turn of the century
1800/1900, whereas Uzbek was used less frequently for similar titles (one example
is S.V. Lapin, Kamennyy russko-uzbekskiy slovar, Samarkand 1895).
10
The most detailed account of Soviet language policy up to the time period when
it was published is Lewis 1972. Recent updates of a more summarizing and evaluating
character are among others Smith 1998 and Grenoble 2003.
180 birgit schlyter

remained a well consolidated literary language throughout the Soviet


period. Its share of the Soviet all-union speech community was a little
less than 4 percent. Already before the creation of the Central Asian
republics, Uzbek had been given the status of native language in the
Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic of Turkestan, on equal terms
with three other languages: Kazakh, Turkmen and Russian. Together
with a still greater number of languages, it was promoted by the nativ-
ization (korenizatsiya) policy of the 1920s, which aimed at combating
illiteracy and training local cadres in their native languages for service
in the Soviet bureaucracy.11 After the establishment of the UzSSR in
1924, Uzbek was the native language of far more than 70 percent of
the Republics population.

6.2. The Formation of Literary Uzbek

The Arabic script that had been used for Chaghatay, as well as in early
attempts at writing Uzbek literature, was revised on several occa-
sions between the end of the 19th century and the early 1920s.12 A
problem that was foregrounded as reformers started considering the
representation of vowels was what dialect base should be chosen as
standard. Furthermore, linguistically but also ideologically, this was
a question of how important it was to retain the Turkic character
of literary Uzbek. A typical Turkic language variety has a vowel sys-
tem bifurcated into two subsets of front and back vowels, respectively,
where the oppositional feature defining these subsets has no seman-
tic significance in vowel-harmonic morphemes. Due to long-standing
influence from non-Turkic, in particular Iranian languages, the pro-
nunciation of vowels in a large number of Uzbek dialects has changed
to such a degree that the front-back distinction has been blurred, as
a further consequence of which vowel harmonic variation based on
this feature has been distorted. Uzbek dialects in politically domi-
nant urban environments, such as the Tashkent region, belonged to
this group and were thus non-typical Turkic language varieties. Long
and ardent debates were held about the choice of dialect for standard
Uzbek. They were accompanied by another discussion concerning the
very type of script to be used for Uzbek. Along with these debates and

11
Fierman 1991, Smith 1998, Schlyter 2004.
12
Qari-Nijazij 1940, Ibragimov 1972, Fierman 1991.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 181

controversies, and before any decision had been taken, new school-
books were produced within the framework of all-union campaigns
to combat illiteracy. For example, one of the most prominent repre-
sentatives of the early 20th-century Turkestanian reform movement
( jadidlar, the Jadids), Abdurrauf Fitrat, was an active grammarian
and published two important works in this field: Sarf (Morphology,
1925) and Nhv (Syntax, 1930). In these works, the author was deeply
concerned about the deterioration of the literary Turkic language of
his day and the need for grammatical and orthographic norms. In his
own theory of Turkic/Uzbek syntax he argued that the predicate be
regarded as the primary node of the sentence structure.13 Fitrat and
others also took an active part in discussions concerning a switch to a
Latin alphabet for Uzbek.
At the all-Turkic Congress in Baku in FebruaryMarch 1926, a deci-
sion was taken on the Latinization of Turkic languages.14 The ques-
tion of dialect base and the representation of vowels was as crucial in
this context as it had been in connection with the revisions of Arabic
characters. In the first phase of the Uzbek Latinization process at the
end of the 1920s, vowel harmonic alteration was taken into consider-
ation. That is, a typically Turkic dialect was chosen for the formation
of standard Uzbek orthography, viz. Uzbek as it was spoken in the
vicinity of the city of Trkistan, situated on the Syr Darya in present-
day Kazakhstan, and all vowel signs proposed for the first Latinized
Turkic alphabet were adopted.15
Revisions of this alphabet were carried out on various occasions
later on in the 1930s. Most importantly, the number of vowel signs

13
Today Fitrat is remembered first and foremost through his literary works, but
he is still considered by some Uzbek linguists to be the founder of Uzbek grammar;
personal communication from Prof. Ergash Umarov, November 2005.
14
A report by Ashurali Zohiriy, one of the Uzbek delegates at the Congress, was
reviewed by Madamin Ibrahimov in Farghona gazetasi (The Ferghana Gazette, No.
384, 1 April 1926 (Turkiston qurultoyi tghrisida maruza [A report concerning
the Turkestanian Congress] available to the present author in Cyrillic script). For a
comprehensive report on the Latinization of Turkic languages, see Baldauf 1993.
15
Peculiarities in this alphabet were the Cyrillic for //, a back high unrounded
vowel, for //, a velar, fricative voiced consonant, and the use of in large and small
size (Bb) for capital B and non-capital b, respectively (this latter solution was probably
chosen in order to avoid the risk of confusing lower case b with the aforementioned
Cyrillic ). The letter // was the same as in the Turkey Turkish new alphabet from
1928, whereas c /t/ and //, confusingly enough, corresponded to Turkey Turkish
and c, respectively. A Western grammar of Uzbek where this version of a Turkic Latin
alphabet was employed is Gabain 1945.
182 birgit schlyter

was reduced16 and the script was adjusted to urban dialects in which
the opposition between front and back vowels had been distorted.17 By
this time, however, attempts at the centralization of language reforms
and the Russification of Uzbek and other Union languages were
already discernible. Not only were there great quantities of so-called
Soviet-international and Russian terms entering the Uzbek language,
but grammatical analysis, too, was to be carried out in compliance
with Russian grammatical tradition. For example, a new schoolbook
of Uzbek was published in 1939 with a preface explicitly stating that
this work had been composed on the pattern of Russian grammar.18 As
such it was in sharp contrast to the ideas that had been put forward by
the Turkestanian intellectual Fitrat in 1930 (above).

6.3. Russification

The nativization (korenizatsiya) policy launched in the first decade of


Bolshevik rule had in actual fact been completely phased out as early
as the middle of the 1930s, to the disadvantage of non-Russian indig-
enous populations as far as both professional careers and native lan-
guages were concerned. A few years later, in 1938, Russian was made
an all-union compulsory school subject. These circumstances, together
with the increasing quantity of Russian words in Uzbek, became con-
venient arguments for the advantage of yet another script change, this
time from Latin to Cyrillic: Uzbek school children would henceforth
have to learn just one, not two, alphabets for their obligatory bilingual
curriculum and the spelling of most words entering Uzbek through
Russian would not necessarily have to be altered. On 8 May 1940, a
law was passed by the Supreme Soviet of the UzSSR stipulating that a
new Cyrillic alphabet was to be in official use from 1 July of that year,

16
The three vowel letters //, y /y/, // were removed from the alphabet and
// was henceforth often replaced by a.
17
In a report in connection with the decision on the adoption of Cyrillic script for
Uzbek, Qari-Nijazij 1940 (p. 14) commented that the 1929 Uzbek Latin alphabet had
been the result of a bourgeoisie view of Uzbek not as a language in its own right but
merely as one of a number of Turkic dialects, without any recognition of Uzbek as an
independent literary language as it was used in leading industrial cities. Cf. Fierman
1991, pp. 129ff.
18
Grammatika uzbekskogo yazyka (Tashkent 1939), O. Usmanov and B. Avezov
(eds.), quoted in Umarov 2002, pp. 304f.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 183

while a two-year transition period was envisioned for the change-over


to the new script in all parts of the Republic.
All letters from the Russian alphabet except and were included
in the Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet. The two missing characters were not
needed for Uzbek words, given the standard orthography of 1934, and
whenever these two letters appeared in Russian loans, they were to
be replaced by and , respectively. Their exclusion was said to
be due to a desire to avoid too great a number of letters in the new
Uzbek alphabet, which had been provided with four extra characters
(, , , ) not existing in the Russian alphabet. Given this argument,
it is a mystery why the letter was retained, although this letter, too,
appeared only in Russian words and could as easily have been replaced
by a two-letter combination (), like . The Russian hard sign ()
and soft sign (), not needed for Uzbek words, were also retained.
The former was finally, after a number of spelling reforms19 from 1956
onwards, employed not only in Russian words but also in Arabic words
as a substitute for the original Arabic letters ayn and hamzah.20
The orthographic rules published during the next few decades dealt
mostly with issues relating to the distinction between phonetic and
phonological, or etymological spelling, and in the great majority of
cases a phonological/etymological approach was chosen. On the other
hand, there seems not to have been any definite decision on the choice
between alternative shapes for certain morphemes, such as -di/-dir
as a 3rd person singular ending after tensed verbs and -ki/-kim, an
enclitic particle corresponding to the English conjunction that or,
occasionally, an English relative pronoun.21 In these two cases there
was apparently a slow transition from a period when both alternatives
were in use to some time after the middle of the 20th century, when
the shorter variant of both pairs had been adopted as more or less the
only option.

19
Orfografiya qoidalariga kiritilgan zgartishlar haqida, in Qizil zbekiston (Red
Uzbekistan), no. 87, 12 April 1956, p. 3.
20
zbek orfografiyasining asosiy qoidalari, in Qizil zbekiston, no. 87, 12 April
1956, pp. 2-3.
21
It should be noted here that, whereas -di and -dir are one and the same ending
with the shorter form occurring after the elision of the final consonant of the longer
variant, the enclitics -ki and -kim have different sources; the former originates from
Persian ke (relative pronoun and conjunction with a number of different meanings)
and the latter from Turkic kim, an interrogative pronoun, who.
184 birgit schlyter

The linguistic Russification of native Uzbek speakers was accom-


plished through not only the lexical but also the phonetic, syntactic,
and phraseological interference of Russian into urban and official
Uzbek as well as through increased Russian language proficiency and
usage among non-Russians in the Republic, including Uzbeks. During
the first two decades of Soviet rule, the proportion of Russian words in
Uzbek newspapers increased from 1-2 percent to 10-5 pecent, whereas
Arabic and Persian words, including frequent and well assimilated
ones, decreased from about 35 percent to 25 percent.22 The Rus-
sian loan words at this stage included both everyday-language terms
( gazeta, newspaper, ostanovka, stopping place, pomidor, tomato,
etc.) and technical/political terms. Still greater proportions were even-
tually reached for certain types of text. Gradually, however, in par-
ticular with the promotion of Russian as a second mother tongue in
the 1970s, the mastering and usage of Russian among Uzbek speakers
grew into a more serious challenge to the autonomy of Uzbek than
was the integration of Russian lexemes into the vocabulary of the
language.23
The most aggravating drawback to the development of standard
Uzbek, and what has caused the greatest concerns in the Uzbek lan-
guage reform work since 1991, is the fact that the use of this lan-
guage, as with most other non-Russian languages in the USSR, was
heavily restricted in the fields of administration and science. In 1975,
a resolution was issued prescribing that only dissertations and disser-
tation abstracts (avtoreferat) written in Russian could be accepted by
the Higher Certifying Commission at the Council of Ministers of the
USSR (Ru. Vysshaya Attestantsionnaya Komissiya pri Sovete Ministrov
SSSR), a Soviet state body operating from 1974 till 1991, assigning the
degrees of Candidate of Science and Doctor of Science. This measure
together with the practice of adopting Russian coinages for new con-
cepts and inventions meant that Uzbek, like many other non-Russian
languages in the Union, was held back as far as intellectual termi-
nology formed on its own linguistic patterns was concerned. Russian

22
Qoriniyozov 1956 gives these values for contemporary Qizil zbekiston.
23
See Schlyter 2004, pp. 823-6, for a comment on The Aim of Soviet Language
Policy: Bilingualism or Language Shift? Cf. Grenoble 2003, who states that, especially
in the Brezhnev era, there flourished much Soviet party rhetoric about building com-
munism and a common language and the creation of a united Soviet people (ibid.,
p. 59). For Central Asia, however, the same author notes that, possibly due to Muslim
traditions, a Russian-based identity failed in the region (ibid., p. 138).
language policy and development in uzbekistan 185

morpheme structures became extremely dominant first and foremost


in the fields of science, but also to a high degree in most spheres of
official and public activities.

6.4. Uzbek as State Language and the Ideology


of National Independence

From the very first years of self-governance and, finally, independence


from the Soviet Union, the Uzbek language has been in a state of
reform. Soon after the State Language Law of 1989,24 which primarily
focused on status issues (concerning the function and actual use of the
language), with merely general comments on corpus planning (con-
cerning the structures and forms of the language), discussions started
with regard to the reform of both script and vocabulary.25

6.4.1. Alphabet and Vocabulary Reform


In 1993, the first law on a change-over to Latin script was passed by
the National Assembly of the Republic.26 The commission appointed
for the preparation of this law at first considered the option of intro-
ducing an alphabet as close as possible to the Uzbek Latin script prac-
tised in the 1930s.27 In the end, however, there appeared an alphabet
that deviated not only from previous Uzbek alphabets but also from
the all-Turkic Latin alphabet agreed upon by delegates from a major-
ity of Turkic societies, among them Uzbekistan, at conferences held at
various universities in Turkey in the 1990s.28
The 1993 Uzbek Latin alphabet simply meant a transliteration of
Cyrillic characters into Latin ones. This alphabet was revised in 1995,

24
zbekiston Sovet Sotsialistik Respublikasining Qonuni: zbekiston SSRning davlat
tili haqida (Law of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Uzbekistan: Concerning the State
Language of the Uzbek SSR). Tashkent 1989.
25
See Schlyter 1998 for a detailed report on Uzbek language debate in the years
from 1989, when a number of drafts of the aforementioned State Language Law were
launched before the final parliamentary decision, to 1997, when this report was com-
pleted and first published.
26
zbekiston Respublikasining Qonuni: Lotin yozuviga asoslangan zbek alifbosini
joriy etish tghrisida (Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan: Concerning the Introduc-
tion of an Uzbek Alphabet Based on the Latin Script). Tashkent 1993.
27
Personal communication from Prof. Baxtiyor Karimov, who was a member of
the commission, November 2005.
28
See Schlyter 1998, pp. 164-5, and Schlyter 2003, pp. 174-7.
186 birgit schlyter

to the effect that special letters created by means of diacritic signs


added to basic letters ( for //, etc.) but normally not found on a
standard Latin keyboard were changed into characters consisting of
two standard Latin letters or one letter followed by a single quotation
mark turned to the right.29 These complex characters (Oo //,Gg//,
Shsh //, Chch //, Ngng //) were put at the end of the alphabet.
One odd consequence of the 1995 revision is that the current Uzbek
Latin alphabet has a digraph ch (instead of the 1993 corresponding to
Cyrillic ), however, no single c. Another peculiarity is that, in contrast
to the right-facing apostrophes of the letters o and g, there is a left-
facing apostrophe which is to be used for ayn and hamzah in words
originating from Arabic. This type of apostrophe, which corresponds
to (the hard sign) of the former Uzbek Cyrillic alphabet and which
was noted in the 1993 Uzbek Latin alphabet, though not in the 1995
one, is dropped in words where it would follow immediately after one
of the former two letters (for example, , miracle, should be
rewritten as mojiza).
The first generation of school children to learn reading and writ-
ing in the new alphabet without previous training in the Cyrillic one
were those starting school in the fall of 1996. These children are now
teenagers, many of whom are cut off from the Soviet legacy of Uzbek
literature in the Cyrillic script. Projects on transliterating Soviet Uzbek
fiction to the new script have been started,30 at the same time as there
are courses in Cyrillic script separate from Russian language teaching
for primary and secondary school.
For the rest of the Uzbek population the Latinization process has so
far been very slow. Adult literature, including newspapers and peri-
odicals, is still being printed almost exclusively in Cyrillic and older
generations often complain about the difficulties in reading Latinized
Uzbek. With the 1995 law on a revision of the Uzbek Latin alphabet,

29
Ozbekiston Respublikasining Qonuni: Ozbekiston Respublikasining Lotin yozu-
viga asoslangan ozbek alifbosini joriy etish togrisida gi Qonuniga ozgartishlar kiritish
haqida (Law of the Republic of Uzbekistan: Concerning Changes to the Law on the
Introduction of an Uzbek Alphabet Based on the Latin Script of the Republic of
Uzbekistan). Tashkent 1995.
30
For example, the Sharq (East) Publishing House in Tashkent has introduced
a series of Classics (Asr oshgan asarlar), where so far a small number of novels have
appeared in the new Uzbek Latin alphabet, such as Kecha va kunduz (Night and Day,
2004) by Cholpon, from 1936, originally printed in the Uzbek Latin alphabet of the
1930s and later in Cyrillic, and Yulduzli tunlar: Bobur (Stary Nights: Babur, 2004) by
Pirimqul Qodirov from 1978.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 187

a gradual ten-year transition from Cyrillic to the new script had been
envisaged. Through an additional law on 30 April 2004, this transi-
tional period was extended till 2010. However, this deadline now seems
to have been consigned to oblivion.
As for the vocabulary of the Uzbek State Language, the first main
official measure taken after the passage of the State Language Law in
1989 was the inauguration of a committee for research and reform
work on terminology, generally referred to by the abbreviation
Atamaqm.31 No great activity can be discerned in this field at present
and public debates on lexical issues are not as frequent as they were
during the first few years of independence. Guidelines from the mid-
1990s regarding the choice of new terms seem still to be in force (see
below). The Atamaqm was dissolved in 2003. In its place, there is
now a commission subordinated to the Senate of the bi-cameral Uzbek
Parliament. From the year 2006 onwards, a new five-volume edition of
the Uzbek-Uzbek Ozbek tilining izohli lugati (An Explanatory Dic-
tionary of the Uzbek Language) was to be published with a corpus
of about 100,000 words. For this edition, five universities in different
parts of the country have collected dialect material and, furthermore,
Uzbek fiction published throughout the Soviet era has been processed
for the selection of words and phrases.32

6.4.2. State Ideology


Following independence in 1991, Uzbek played a significant symbolic
role in the work of consolidating the new country as a state in its own
right. Non-governmental political movements, e.g. Birlik (Unity),
and the Uzbek regime acted alike putting the language issue at the top
of their agendas. Proclaimed the state language of Uzbekistan, Uzbek
very soon turned into being a language also referred to as the national
language of this country. The word milliy (Arabic), national, which
in connection with the indigenous languages of Uzbekistan during
the Soviet era was associated with ethnic differentiation (milliy tillar
thus stood for nationality languages), has more and more become an

31
zbekiston Respublikasi vazirlar mahkamasi huzuridagi atamashunoslik qmitasi
(The Lexical Research Committee at the Council of Ministers of the Republic of
Uzbekistan); cf. Schlyter 1998, p. 159.
32
Personal communication from Prof. Nemat Maxqamov, one of the linguists in
charge of this project at the Institute of Language and Literature, Tashkent, December
2005. The previous 1981 edition of the dictionary consists of c. 60,000 entries.
188 birgit schlyter

epithet pertaining to the state of Uzbekistan as a whole. In the much


engaged and lively Uzbek language debate of the 1990s, there appeared
such expressions as milliy til, national language, milliy alifbo, national
alphabet, and milliy talaffuz, national pronunciation, meaning with
regard to Uzbekistan the Uzbek state language, a unique Uzbek alpha-
bet and the assimilation of foreign (mostly Russian) names and words
in Uzbek, respectively.33
The status of Uzbek as a national symbol was reinforced by the mea-
sures taken by President Islam Karimov in order to launch an ide-
ology of national independence (milliy mustaqillik goyasi), in slight
contradiction to a statement in the 1992 Uzbek Constitution prohib-
iting the establishment of any state ideology.34 In one of his works
(I.A. Karimov 2001), the Uzbek President states that, to this day, not
a single nation caring for its future has ever lived without an ideology
of its own. For the Uzbek nation he deems it necessary to formulate
a new ideology not only for a complete liberation from old dogmas
but also in order to fill the ideological vacuum resulting from this lib-
eration and to accomplish an ideological immunity, thus protecting
the nation against infringement by alien ideas. According to an earlier
statement by Karimov, this ideology is to be based on the centuries-
old traditions, customs, language, and spirit of our people.35
Despite the presence of a new non-socialist agenda for the resur-
rection of pre-Soviet indigenous life patterns, President Karimovs
formula bears great affinity to early Soviet views on nationhood and
the role of traditional life, language and peoples mentality in the defi-
nition of this concept.36 The bond between language and nation is a
theme dwelt upon as much in post-Soviet Uzbekistan as it was in the

33
See Schlyter 1998, pp. 169-71, on Uzbek Language Policy and Nationhood.
In B. Karimov 2003, a work by an Uzbek scholar actively taking part in the cur-
rent Uzbek language debate, sociopolitical and intellectual-spiritual development is
being discussed against a background of nation, man, and language, where national
language turns into a more or less inalienable component of the nation-state and
becomes synonymous with state language.
34
Article no. 12.
35
Quoted in Abdullaev 2005, pp. 274f., from I.A. Karimov, Pravovaya garantiya
nashego velikogo budushchego, Tashkent 1993, p. 13.
36
Cf. a statement by Stalin concerning the definition of nation and nationality,
quoted in English translation by Fierman 1991 (p. 70): [a] historically evolved stable
community of language, territory, economic life and psychological make-up . . .; see
also Smith 1998, p. 3.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 189

Soviet era, and current rhetoric on this topic builds on former Soviet
patterns.37
The same Soviet-style methods are also used for launching the post-
Soviet Uzbek state ideology of national independence as a more or
less undisputable mindset. The Presidents works are obligatory read-
ing in pre-graduate education as well as in graduate studies and post-
graduate training. Old societal structures are being imposed, first and
foremost of which are local communities of the mahalla type, where
the wisdom of elders is praised and the inhabitants are expected to
constitute a self-governing (ozini ozi boshqarish) neighborhood.38

6.5. Indecisiveness and Changing Language Attitudes

The post-Soviet trend in domestic politics has had its effects on peoples
linguistic behavior and attitudes towards language planning and lan-
guage reform. Those who would like to resuscitate pre-Soviet vocab-
ulary feel encouraged to do so under the prevailing circumstances.
Consequently, a large number of early 20th-century lexemes, often of
Arabic or Persian origin from the previous literary Turkic language
Chaghatay, have found their way back into Uzbek language practice.
In contrast to popular sentiments, however, Uzbek linguists and
other officials in charge of Uzbek vocabulary reform have tried to
take a much more moderate stance on this issue. The principles for
the treatment of Russian loans have so far been most clearly elabo-
rated in Hojiev 1996. This pamphlet is still valid and Uzbek linguists
refer to it when consulted in this matter.39 According to the recom-
mendations given, Russian words and expressions that have become
frequent in spoken and written Uzbek should be retained as well as
foreign (mostly Russian) words that are intelligible in international

37
For example, in a book on Til va el (Language and Nation; Qodirov 2005). the
former Soviet-Uzbek Peoples Writer (xalq yozuvchisi) and scholar of Uzbek history,
Pirimqul Qodirov (b. 1928) writes about the importance of the Timurid era for the
development of literary Uzbek. A previous work on the same topic, Til va dil (Lan-
guage and Soul) was published by this author during the Soviet period.
38
See, e.g., Sievers 2002; cf. Schlyter 2005a, pp. 88f. The status of national language
is discussed from the point of view of a specified set of linguistic, cultural, and politi-
cal dimensions and with regard to the Central Asian state languages in Schlyter 2010
and Schlyter, forthcoming a.
39
The principles advocated by Hojiev were summarized in detail in Schlyter 1998,
pp. 167-9.
190 birgit schlyter

circles. What was stressed in particular when this issue was discussed
during my stay in Tashkent during the fall of 2005 was that scientific
and technical notions should be maintained in an international shape
or, for new coinages, given such a shape.40
The current situation as regards vocabulary issues is thus character-
ized by caution and moderation on the part of responsible language
planners, perhaps with a certain amount of tolerance towards lexical
creativeness among the general public. This could, however, be inter-
preted as indecisiveness as to the choice between, on the one hand, tra-
ditional, or archaic vocabulary, at times accomplished by adding new
Turkic-language derivations, and, on the other hand, status-quo Rus-
sified and internationalizing vocabulary. In the absence of any definite
norm, great variation may be found in public textsscientific as well
as other types of non-fiction texts. Russian loan words of a permitted
international pattern may be used side-by-side with newly coined syn-
onymous or nearly synonymous derivations from Turkic roots (e.g.,
provintsializm/chekkalilik < chekka, border, edge, + -li (adj.) + -lik
(nominal ), i.e. marginality, unitar < Ru. unitarnyy/bolinmas < bolin-,
be divided, + -mas (neg. ptcl ), i.e. indivisible) or archaic Chaghatay
lexemes (for example, kommunikatsiya/aloqa < Arabic connection,
global < Ru. globalnyy/umumjahon = umum+jahon < Arabic all +
Persian world).
The political reorientation in Uzbekistan after the Andijan events in
May 2005 may in the long term have an effect on the language situa-
tion and language usage in the countrya development that shows the
sensitivity, or even lability, of the issue. Uzbekistans strained relations
with the US government after suspicion and accusations from both
sides due to the inaccessibility of information and uncertainty about
who and what instigated the demonstrations and military actions in
Andijan led to a more or less complete break with the West for many
years and a strong rapprochement with Russia. The status of Russian
in Uzbekistan will be commented on in a later section. It may suffice

40
One argument articulated in the course of these discussions was that there is
no Uzbek science, that all science is international and, consequently, that scientific
terms should as much as possible be international. For language development and
globalization in different parts of the world, including Central Asia, see Maurais and
Morris 2003, and from less specified geographical but broader cultural perspectives,
Coupland 2010.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 191

to note here that as a consequence of this political development, the


reform work on Uzbek may become still more slow and hesitant.
Even though language planners comment that the Latinization of
Uzbek is an irrevocable process and that Russian now has to compete
with English as the most appealing world language to younger genera-
tions, both common people and officials show more varied attitudes to
the status of Uzbek as state language and the Uzbek language reform
at large. For example, the Language Day on 21 October celebrating the
adoption of the 1989 State Language Law was given much less atten-
tion in 2005 than in previous years. In the same period, Uzbek State
Television, which is the medium where the most serious endeavors
have been made so far to introduce the new Latin script for Uzbek,
started showing more headlines and signs with Uzbek in Cyrillic letters.

6.6. Karakalpak

6.6.1. State Language


The Turkic language of Karakalpak has the status of state language in
accordance with the principle used in the region for determining state
languages. That is to say that on the territory where Karakalpak is the
titular language, it also enjoys the rank of state language. On the other
hand, being part of Uzbekistan, the Karakalpak Republic shares the
state name and, consequently, the Uzbek state language with the rest
of the country. The Autonomous Republic of Karakalpakistan thus has
two state languages, as is declared in the latest versions of the Con-
stitution and the State Language Law of Karakalpakistan.41 About 95
percent of all Karakalpaks live in Uzbekistan, most of them in Kara-
kalpakistan. However, they are a small minority constituting only two
percent of Uzbekistans total population and less than 40 percent of
the inhabitants of Karakalpakistan.

41
Qaraqalpaqstan Respublikasynyng Konstitutsiyasy (The Constitution of the
Republic of Karakalpakistan), 9 April 1993, Paragraph 4; Mamleketlik til haqqynda
(On [the Issue of ] State Language), a resolution passed by the Karakalpak Parliament
on 18 September 1996; cf. Schlyter 2005a. The Constitution of Uzbekistan has a spe-
cial chapter (XVII) on Karakalpakistan, however, without any mention of Karakalpak
or any second state language. It is stated, though, that Karakalpakistan has its own
constitution.
192 birgit schlyter

Like Uzbek and many other Central Asian languages, Karakalpak


has a long tradition of oral literature.42 The language received a script
of its own at a rather late date. The first Karakalpak alphabet was cre-
ated in 1924 from Arabic characters. The Karakalpak Latin alphabet,
which was introduced in 1928 and used in parallel with the Arabic
one, was revised twicein 1932, when the Arabic alphabet was finally
abolished, and then in 1938. Since 1940 the Cyrillic script has been
in use, with one major revision towards the end of the 1950s.43 This
alphabet is to be replaced by a new Karakalpak Latin alphabet (see
below).
Karakalpak appears to have a secure status in the Autonomous
Republic as the first language, and the most frequently used language,
in daily conversation among ethnic Karakalpaks. It furthermore seems
to have maintained its position at higher levels of education. There are
around 250 schools in Uzbekistan with Karakalpak as the only language
of instruction. All of these, except for a few in the Province of Navoi,
are found in Karakalpakistan. The number of Karakalpak schools in
this Republic slightly exceeds that of Uzbek schools. Their share of the
total number of schools in Karakalpakistan is 33 percent and 29 per-
cent, respectively. About 25 percent of the schools in Karakalpakistan
are bilingual or multilingual schools.44 Other regional languages taught
or used as media of instruction are Turkmen, Kazakh and Russian,
for which there are also teachers training programs at the university
level. The language used in dissertation abstracts (avtoreferat) varies
between Karakalpak, Russian and Uzbek, depending on the discipline.
Summaries accompanying such abstracts are supposed to be written
in one of the other two languages and in English.

6.6.2. Karakalpak Language Policy


Although Karakalpak maintains its position as an official language and
one of two state languages in the Republic of Karakalpakistan, there
need not be any doubt as to the requirement that Karakalpak language
reform should follow the same course and the same pace as the Uzbek
language reform delineated in Tashkent. This course of development
contrasts with earlier efforts made by the Karakalpak authorities in

42
See, e.g., Kamalov et al. 1994.
43
Nazyrov 1972.
44
Chernyavskaya 2005.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 193

order to take a stronger stance on autonomy, or even independence


politically as well as linguistically. On 1 December 1989, before the
dissolution of the Soviet Union and after the passing of state language
laws in the other Central Asian union republics except Turkmeni-
stan, the Karakalpak Supreme Soviet passed a law in Karakalpak and
Russian proclaiming Karakalpak the one and only state language of
Karakalpakistan and claiming the right for the Republic to manage by
itself all linguistic matters on its own territory.45 The following year, in
1990, the Karakalpak administration made an unsuccessful attempt at
declaring Karakalpakistan an independent state.
The first Karakalpak Latin alphabet from February 1994 was
moulded on the pattern of the aforementioned common Latin alpha-
bet launched for Turkic languages (see the sentence ended by footnote
28 above) and thus independent of the Uzbek one adopted half a year
earlier. From 1995, however, starting with the revisions of the alpha-
bets, it has become more and more obvious that Karakalpak language
reform will be synchronized with Uzbek language reform.46 The two
Latin alphabets of Uzbek and Karakalpak have been revised accord-
ing to the same principles, and the deadline (2010), now forgotten,
for their final adoption and the abolition of the Cyrillic script was the
same. In addition to this it could also be noted that, with the decline of
Russian as an academic language, it is Uzbek rather than Karakalpak
that has been promoted as a suitable language for scientific works.
Since 2005, PhD candidates in disciplines where Russian has held a
strong position (Archaeology, Agronomy, Chemistry, Biology, etc.)
have been urged to start using Uzbek for their dissertation abstracts.

45
Qaraqalpaqstan ASSRynyng mmleketlik tili haqqynda: Qaraqalpaqstan Avto-
nomiyaly Sovet Sotsialistik Republikasynyng nyzamy (On the State Language of the
Karakalpak ASSR: Law of the Autonomous Soviet Socialistic Republic of Karakal-
pakistan), 1990, Nukus: Qaraqalpaqstan.
46
Due to the different phonological systems of Uzbek and Karakalpak, their 1995
alphabets differ on a number of points. In addition to a few letters (a, u, w) not found
in Uzbek, Karakalpak has letter signs for both palatal i (i) and velar i (I) in the
same fashion as Turkey Turkish does. The 1995 Karakalpak alphabet thus contains two
letter signs that do not appear on a standard Latin keyboard. For / / the same alpha-
bet employs, not the digraph ng like Uzbek, but n, which is placed after non-nasal
n, and not at the end of the alphabet, as is the case in both of the 1993/1995 Uzbek
alphabets. In contrast to Uzbek, Karakalpak apparently does not make any functional
distinction between right- and left-facing apostrophes. For further comments on
Karakalpak and other minority languages in Uzbekistan, see Schlyter 2005a.
194 birgit schlyter

Karakalpak and Uzbek are mutually intelligible but belong to dif-


ferent branches of the Turkic language family, the former being a
North-Western, Kypchak language and very close to Kazakh, the lat-
ter a South-Eastern, Karluk language. Phrase and sentence structures
as well as morpheme structures being quite uniform across this lan-
guage family, the main differences between Karakalpak and Uzbek are
found in the phonology and morphophonemics of the two languages.
Given that the two languages developed in partially distinct cultural-
historical contexts, it is but natural to find certain lexical differences
between them, too.
In the Uzbek State Language Law of 1989, the Karakalpak Autono-
mous Republic was granted the right to solve by itself all language
issues confined to its own territory. In the 1995 revised version of this
law, provisions to this effect are made with reference to language use
only, to the exclusion of corpus issues. However, Karakalpak linguis-
tics is de facto conducted more or less exclusively in Karakalpakistan,
or to be more precise, in Nukus, the capital of the Republic. This is a
significant fact with regard to the reform and development of present-
day Karakalpak, not least in the lexical field. Thus, despite the strong
tendency towards a centralized all-state language policy in Uzbekistan
and the impact of Uzbek-language reform strategies on other language
communities, Karakalpak vocabulary reform and Karakalpak literary
trends may after all have a chance to develop at least partly within its
own local context, independent of Uzbek.

6.7. Russian

6.7.1. Minority Language and Lingua Franca


Within the state borders of Uzbekistan, Russian has no other formal
status than that of a minority language. In the 1989 State Language Law
it was given the role of a language for interethnic, or cross-national
(Uzb. millatlararo) communication and was referred to as such in
several articles of the law. This epithet was not repeated in the 1995
revised version of the language law, where Russian was mentioned
only onceand merely as one of a number of available languages.
Despite these formal conditions, Russian is far from having lost its
former position as the leading language in many spheres of Uzbek
social and public life, not least in the fields of administration and edu-
cation. After a decision in the middle of the 1990s allowing PhD theses
language policy and development in uzbekistan 195

to be written in either Uzbek, Russian or English (as well as Kara-


kalpak in Karakalpakistan), the proportion of Uzbek-medium and
Russian-medium dissertations, respectively, seems at present to be on
an equal footing.47 The choice of language for ones thesis work may
be decided not only by the skill of the PhD candidate himself and the
type of subject. It may also be influenced by the linguistic compe-
tence and preference of the supervisor, who is still more often than
not a senior scholar educated during the Soviet era with Russian exclu-
sively as his academic language. As to their own scholarly work, senior
scholars who are ethnic Uzbeks feel pressured by the current state
language policy of promoting Uzbek as a scientific language. In cases
where they have not yet acquired the skill to write scientifically in this
language, they simply have their original Russian versions translated
into Uzbek.
With the rapid increase of literacy across the young Soviet state,
which was a prerequisite for the system of mass communication
needed in order to obtain a comprehensive dissemination of the com-
munist ideology enforced by the Bolshevik rulers, Russian was the
unrivalled candidate to become a lingua franca between republics and
nationalities, due to its size and the circumstance that it was at that
time the most modernized language as regards technical, political, and
economic terminology.48 Given such a role, Russian soon acquired the
status of a primus-inter-pares language and it eventually de facto
became the one-and-only state language of the Soviet Union49 with a
growing demand for proficiency in this language among the citizens
of the country, regardless of ethnicity and especially in urban, pro-
fessional environments. This linguistic order and the language habits
generated by it could not, of course, be nullified merely through the
disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991. Be it that Russian is no lon-
ger either a state language or even an official language in Uzbekistan,

47
Personal communication from Dr. Mirzohid Raximov at the Institute of History,
Tashkent, December 2005. Within the previous three years, 3 out of 5 dissertations
from his own Department of International Relations had been written in Uzbek and
the remaining two in Russian.
48
Schlyter 2004, p. 822.
49
According to Bolshevik rhetoric, all languages in the Soviet Union were of equal
value and, therefore, the status of official language (offitsialnyy yazyk) or state lan-
guage (gosudarstvennyy yazyk) was not attributed to any language, when the Union
was established after the October Revolution in 1917. Not until April 1990, i.e., the
very last moment of Soviet existence, was Russian proclaimed the official language of
the USSR (Schlyter 2005b, p. 87, the second footnote).
196 birgit schlyter

it is nevertheless a language that a great number of people are used


to meeting in everyday life and even comfortable with in their own
linguistic communication. Thus, Russian is still far from having lost its
position as a lingua franca in this country. To give but one example, a
great many monolingual Russian and bilingual Uzbek-Russian news-
papers and periodicals continue to be published. Also, newspapers
which have appeared in both an Uzbek and a Russian version, among
others Xalq sozi/Narodnoe slovo, Voice of the People, and Toshkent
oqshomi/Vechernyy Tashkent, Tashkent Evening, are still issued in
this fashion.

6.7.2. The Changing Status of Russian


Russian proficiency among Uzbeks has dropped dramatically. As was
noted above, there is now a generation of Uzbek teenagers who have
been brought up with not only a new Latin alphabet for Uzbek but
also with much less Russian than what was offered to the generation
of their parents. These children have no literature and they are cut
off from a large part of Uzbek history, was a comment made on sev-
eral occasions by colleagues during my stay in Tashkent in the fall of
2005. What these colleagues were hinting at was the fact that there are
currently young people entering the universities or professional life
without knowing Russian and thus without access to Soviet literature
in Russian, and still worse, maybe without the ability to read Uzbek
literature in the Cyrillic script.
Russian is no longer an obligatory school subject in Uzbekistan.
After the dissolution of the USSR, there was for many years a tendency
to reduce the amount of school hours for Russian language training
and to devote more time to the teaching of Western languages, above
all English. Teaching in Russian has also been reduced. The number
of schools in Uzbekistan with Russian as the sole medium of instruc-
tion is fairly small, c. 121, constituting merely 1 percent of all schools
in the country. When all schools are counted where Russian is used
for teaching, either as the sole medium of instruction or together with
other languages, the number rises to 770, which is about 7 percent of
the total number of schools in the country.50

50
According to calculations made on the basis of data from Chernyavskaya 2005.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 197

Naturally enough, the Russian language issue is not as sensitive as it


was immediately after the dissolution of the USSR. With a more relaxed
approach to the former Soviet Russian dominance together with the
discovery of what drawbacks too drastic a breach with the countrys
near past may have on the enlightenment and cultural knowledge of
future generations, there may be some reassessment of the significance
of Russian in Uzbek education and public life. Moreover, given the
political development in the country after the Andijan events of May
2005 and, as a consequence of that, the Uzbek rapprochement with
Russia, there are already indications of a more benevolent attitude
towards the Russian language and culture on the part of Uzbek author-
ities. As a result of the new Uzbek-Russian intimacy, a branch of the
Moscow University was established in 20052006 at the National Uni-
versity of Uzbekistan in Tashkent.
The former status of Russian as an unequalled prestige language in
Uzbekistan, however, has been extinguished once and for all. Due to a
number of obvious factors, its usage domain will inevitably continue
to be increasingly constricted, no matter what course the new political
development may take. The Slavic minoritynow c. 1 million consti-
tuting around 4 percent of the Republics total populationhas been
reduced by more than one third since independence and is not likely
to grow in the future. The integration of remaining native Russian
speakers in the Uzbek society through intermarriages and socializa-
tion with ethnic Uzbeks shows a downward trend for the post-Soviet
period.51
As regards corpus issues, Russian is steadily losing ground to
Uzbek, as the vocabulary of this language is expanding in fields for-
merly reserved for Russian. For example, in November 2005, an Uzbek
newspaper wrote: Linux speaks Uzbek (Linuks zbekcha gapiradi),
reporting that work was being done for the translation of the Linux
operating system into Uzbek and for the production of Uzbek-
language computer manuals, which could then replace the manuals in
Russian which had been used so far.52
Neither is Russian a source language any longer in Uzbek word for-
mation. Russian morphemes are not employed for the derivation of
new Uzbek words, as they were during the Soviet era. Likewise, the

51
Arutyunyan 2003; cf. Ilxamov 2002.
52
Adolat (Justice), 11 November 2005, p. 2.
198 birgit schlyter

number of new Russian loan words in Uzbek will most certainly be


kept at a much more moderate level than before.

6.8. Minority Languages and Vestiges of Diglossia

6.8.1. Multilingualism
The non-Uzbek minorities constitute around 20 percent of Uzbeki-
stans population. Half of these are immigrants or deportees to Central
Asia from the Soviet era and their descendents. The rest are people
who have lived in the region as long as and in some cases even longer
than ethnic Uzbeks, such as various small communities of Iranian and
Arabic stock.
There are more than 130 nationalities living in the country at present
and almost as many languages are spoken there. Seven languages serve
as media of instruction in Uzbek public schools. Besides the three lan-
guages already reviewedUzbek, Karakalpak, and Russianthe four
so-called brother languages (qardosh tillar)Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Turk-
men, and Tajikare used for teaching in 4-5 percent of all schools.53
All of these languages are represented in the mass media (newspapers,
magazines and/or television and radio broadcasting), together with
a small number of other languages, such as Uighur, Tatar, Crimean
Tatar, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Korean. A still greater number of lan-
guages, including some of the aforementioned ones, are sustained by
means of native-language courses at National Cultural Centers operat-
ing in different parts of the country.
In the Uzbek Constitution of December 1992 there is no reference
to any other official language besides the State Language nor is any
other language mentioned by name.54 However, in both the Language
Law of 1989 and the 1992 Constitution, provisions are made for the
non-discriminatory use and development of all nationality languages
spoken within the territory of Uzbekistan. This position is in accord
with traditional attitudes towards multilingualism in this part of the
world. In a region like Central Asia, characterized by multilingualism
since time immemorial, there is generally great tolerance and respect

53
According to calculations made on the basis of data from Chernyavskaya 2005.
54
As for Karakalpak, see footnote 41.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 199

for languages other than ones own, and many people are used to hear-
ing and even communicating in different tongues.

6.8.2. Uzbek As High Language


The main change brought about by the new language situation in
Uzbekistan is not so much the restrictions placed on the use of cer-
tain languages, primarily Russian, or a radical change of language atti-
tudes. A circumstance of more fundamental importance is the fact that
Uzbek is after all not only a state-wide, superethnic official language,
but alsowithin the same geographical domainstill an ethnic lan-
guage as it has always been and to a much greater extent than Russian
was ever perceived to be. In a previous work I have commented that
the adoption of Uzbek as a state language is a measure of national re-
identification that affects non-Uzbek nationals as much as, and in one
important sense, even more than it does ethnic Uzbeks, since these
are now expected to become Uzbeks both where state loyalty and
national (= nation-state) identity are concerned.55 For non-Uzbeks,
many of whom are acquainted with an Uzbek language variety of their
own home community, this may not only lead to sensitive shifts of
balance in the relationship between ethnicities. It may also cause a
diglossic division between their own dialect of Uzbek and standard,
literary Uzbek, which they will now have to master as their state, or
even national language.
The Soviet Standard Uzbek language has been described as a non-
vernacular high language contrasting with the spoken dialects of this
language.56 Given such a statement, the Uzbek language could be char-
acterized as diglossic in the original (Ferguson 1959) definition of this
concept, i.e. the functional split occurs between varieties of one and
the same language. The Soviet standard variety of Uzbek differed from
its dialects functionally as well as from a lexical and phonetic point
of view. It was a language acquired not with the development of the
childs language-processing capacity but by later training at school or
through formal communication. As regards vocabulary and pronun-
ciation, Soviet Standard Uzbek was also a russified language to a much
higher degree than any of its dialects.

55
Schlyter 1998, p. 170; cf. Schlyter 2004.
56
Lewis 1972, p. 171, has a brief comment on the co-existence of a general stan-
dard (written) and a more regional standard [Uzbek]. . . .
200 birgit schlyter

The diglossic differentiation of Uzbek is also complicated by the cir-


cumstance that the standard variety of this language developed apart
from the spoken dialects under the strong influence of Chaghatay,
which was a formal and not casually spoken literary language (see
above). The language of the earliest Uzbek novels, plays, and
non-fiction texts published by Turkestanian reformists (the Jadids;
jadidlar) around the turn of the previous century was in actual fact
Chaghatay sentence structures with an increased share of indigenous
Turkic words instead of the usual Arabic-Persian words of Classical
Chaghatay. With the subsequent Soviet language reform, Uzbek was
more and more differentiated from Chaghatay through the simplifica-
tion and unification of grammatical forms andmost significantly
first and foremost through the Russification of the vocabulary but also
to a considerable extent through patterns of expression and reasoning
calqued on the Soviet Socialist Russian language.
With the moderate pace of vocabulary reform demonstrated by lin-
guists and officials in charge of Uzbek language planning, the distinc-
tion remains between a Russified Uzbek state language and dialects that
are much less Russified. However, the diglossic relationship between,
on the one hand, a formal Uzbek state language and, on the other,
spoken varieties of this language and, for that matter, other languages
used for informal communication57 may be blurred and perhaps finally
extinguished, as this state language variety is spread to larger popula-
tion strata through education and public communication.

6.9. Foreign Languages

Although foreign language teaching was considered important dur-


ing most of the Soviet era,58 proficiency in foreign languages as well
as the motives for learning a foreign language seem to have varied
greatly among citizens. There may also have been great differences in
this respect between different parts of the huge Soviet state. One cir-
cumstance indicating a generally low degree of proficiency in Western
languages in Uzbekistan, for example, is the difficulty that adults, even

57
For broader definitions of the notion of diglossia including functional splits
between more than one language, see e.g. Fishman 1972 and Fasold 1984.
58
As to foreign language teaching during the first few decades of Soviet rule, see
Ornstein 1958; cf. Lewis 1972, pp. 203-8.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 201

academics, have had in adopting and learning the new Latin alphabet
introduced for Uzbek in 19931995 (see above). Due to their isolation
during the Soviet period, Uzbeks and Central Asians in general had
very little contact with Westerners. At present, however, the availabil-
ity of these languages as well as peoples interest in getting in contact
with Westerners is very strong.

6.9.1. The Popularity of English


After independence, English has gained a status it never had before in
Uzbekistan. It is employed as second to the State Language not only
in contexts with strong international links (airport signs, passports,
etc.), but also in official domestic documents, such as diplomas and
ID cards. In dissertation abstracts (avtoreferat), English is one of the
languages required for a brief, one- or two-page summary at the end of
the abstract. The standard of English in these abstracts varies; appar-
ently there is so far no requirement that the text be scrutinized and
edited by a professional or native English-speaking person. The same
disparity in standard can be noted for local- or state-language periodi-
cals, some of which publish from time to time articles in non-edited
English either written or translated by local contributors. However, the
ambition to have English become a widely used and comprehensive
foreign language among the citizens of Uzbekistan is obvious. There is
still a great scarcity of both teachers and course material, particularly
in rural and poor urban areas, but great efforts are being made by
state-owned institutions as well as foreign organizations to improve
the knowledge of English.59 Uzbek State Television, for example, is
actively taking part in not only launching the new Latin alphabet but
also in promoting English. During the fall of 2005, the present author
could watch news programs presented in excellent English by young
Uzbeks, from the same studio and with the same equipment as was
used in regular adult Uzbek-language news programs.

59
For several years the British Council and the Public Affairs Section of the US
Embassy in Tashkent have been very active in supporting English language teaching
in the country; see articles in Coleman et al. 2005. These activities may have taken on a
different character as a consequence of the strained relations between Uzbekistan and
the West after the Andijan events in May 2005. On the other hand, peoples attitudes
towards English as the most important world language do not seem to have been
much influenced by this development. For further comments on international com-
munication, world language, and related concepts, cf. Ammon 2010 and Ricento
2010, as well as other articles in Coupland 2010.
202 birgit schlyter

Anglicisms enter Uzbek as they do other languages of the world,


now with the difference that they are not to the same extent as
before reshaped under the impact of Russian pronunciation or spell-
ing. Whereas previous loans were so-to-speak Russian imports (e.g.,
gospital, trener, tredyunion for hospital, trainer and trade union,
respectively), new words from English may be pronounced and writ-
ten more in accordance with their original English shape (treyder,
trader,60 sheyping, shaping (with training apparatus in a gym), etc.).
Russian morphology in well-established loan words (internatsio-
nalizatsiya, internationalization, with Ru. -izatsiya corresponding to
Eng. -ization, etc.) generally remains unchanged, whereas derivations
from more recent loan words are more often than before accomplished
by means of Uzbek morphology (e.g., globallashuv, globalization, with
Uzb. -lash (verbal ending) + -uv (nominal ending) corresponding to
Eng. -ization).

6.9.2. Foreign vs. Minority Language


The second most taught Western language in Uzbekistan at present is
German. Classes in French and a couple of other European languages,
for example Spanish, are offered on a much smaller scale.
As much as the former Soviet Central Asia was the entrance gate
for official visits from Asian and Muslim countries, this region was
also commissioned by the central Moscow government to teach Asian
languages,61 such as Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Chinese, Arabic, and Per-
sian. A number of special bilingual (Uzbek-Russian) schools for pri-
mary and secondary education were set up in the new (Russian)
part of Tashkent, where one of these Asian languages was taught to
the pupils. Examples of such schools are 22-nchi arab maktabi, The
22nd Arabic School, and 24-inchi Shastri nomidagi maktab, The
24th School in the name of Shastri,62 with courses in Hindi. Many
of these schools are still working with the same choice of foreign lan-
guage in their syllabus.

60
Ozbekiston Ovozi (Voice of Uzbekistan), 11 October 2005, p. 2: Xitoydagi
eng katta treyder sifatida . . . (in Cyrillic script). As the biggest trading partner in
China. . . .
61
Ornstein 1958, p. 388.
62
This school was established in honor of the Indian Prime Minister Shastri, who
died of a heart attack during an official visit to Tashkent in 1966.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 203

Since Uzbekistan is a multiethnic and multilingual society, some of


the above-mentioned languages could perhaps be counted among the
minority languages of the country. For example, with small enclaves
of culturally and to some extent also linguistically Arabic populations,
the Arabic language could be given such a status. An even stronger
case can be made for Persian. In fact, many do consider this language
to be part of Tajik studies, and Persian is thus closely associated with
the countrys minority languages. Another language not mentioned so
far, and not much attended to during the Soviet era, is Turkey Turk-
ish. As a result of increased contact between Central Asia and Turkey,
through students studying in Turkey during the first half of the inde-
pendence period and Turkish businessmen and teachers working in
Central Asia as well as through Turkish-language broadcasts to the
region from the Turkish State Television, Turkey Turkish has become
familiar to and even used by many Central Asians. Now, in Uzbeki-
stan at least, Turkish is not taught as a foreign language but, rather, is
considered to be part of the common linguistic culture63 of the Turkic
peoples.

6.10. Concluding Remarks

Uzbek language reform provides a good illustration of the complexity


and intricacies of language planning and language reform carried out
in a societybe it a new state or notwhere the most immediate task
is not to teach people how to read and write or to develop for the first
time education programs for the purpose of including such categories
as have not been accustomed to any education except perhaps some
elementary schooling.
At the time of break-up from the Soviet Union, the Uzbeks were
a well-educated people with literacy scoring close to 99-100 percent.
The primary aim of language reform thus was notas in early 20th-
century Soviet Union or Turkeyto help establish a modern society
with a majority of the population taking part or being included in
the sociopolitical discourse of the state through education and mass

63
For extensive comments on the notion of linguistic culture, see Schiffman
1996.
204 birgit schlyter

communication.64 Rather, Uzbek language reform has been made part


of a transition process from one sociopolitical discourse to another,
where the subjects of the state are not first-time trainees but already
trained people urged to reevaluate their old patterns of language
behavior for the sake of abandoning them and adopting other pat-
terns.65 Given this situation, language reform is not tied to the basic
needs of modernization but a tool for political reorientation. As such,
language development is more than ever before under the spell of pub-
lic opinion, more sensitive to political vascillation and, consequently,
more unpredictable, regardless of being promoted by a highly central-
ized language policy and controlled by such a totalitarian authority as
the Karimov regime in Tashkent.
Language reform is not a major political issue in Uzbekistan at pres-
ent and it is proceeding at a rather moderate pace. After a period of
intensive work on laws and regulations together with a flourishing lan-
guage debate during the first half of the 1990s, the issue of language
has entered a phase of relaxation, if not indifference. Attitudes towards
the formerly so dominant Russian language have become more appre-
ciative and, more generally speaking, the traditional tolerance towards
multilingual communication lingers on. As regards language reform
strategies, on the other hand, little has changed, even in comparison
to pre-independence Soviet language policy.
The former Soviet view on language as first and foremost an ideo-
logical tool still plays a role in Tashkent. This can be discerned not
only in the official rhetoric, butmore importantlyalso in the very
comprehension of what language is in relation to the state and its
people. For President Karimov, with his training as a Soviet politi-
cian, it may seem difficult and perhaps not even desirable to define the
notion of state as simply an administrative body regulated by laws and
detached from ideology. In his ideology of national independence, the
Uzbek language becomes the pillar upon which the history and culture
of the Uzbek nation-state can, and should, rest.

64
For Soviet language policy, recall works referred to earlier in this article. For
comments on the Turkish language reform from the point of view of state- and
nation-building, see e.g. Doanay-Aktuna 1995 and Schlyter 2006.
65
For a broader survey of the language situation and language policies in all of the
ex-Soviet Central Asian states, see Landau and Kellner-Heinkele 2001; cf. Schlyter
2003, 2004, and forthcoming b.
language policy and development in uzbekistan 205

After merely two decades of autonomy and independence it is small


wonder that Soviet-style paradigms are still operating in the minds of
Uzbek language planners, the great majority of whom are Soviet-bred
linguists and politicians. However, it should not be forgotten that this
state of affairs is transitory and will inevitably change in just another
decade or two. The transition will be shaped by and is already fuelled
by the new political conditions under which Uzbekistan is devel-
oping as a state. What makes the language situation in present-day
Uzbekistan differ the most from that of the pre-independence period
is the fact that Uzbekistan as a sovereign state also has to relate to an
international context. The internationalization of Uzbek vocabulary,
especially in science and business, is already taking new shape and,
significantly enough, Uzbek is becoming more and more independent
of Russian as a mediator of international terminology. This is a pro-
cess that will be accelerated when the presently adolescent and future
post-Soviet Uzbek generations are old enough to become the masters
of language development in their country.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

THE FATE OF UZBEK LANGUAGE IN THE


OTHER CENTRAL ASIAN REPUBLICS

William Fierman

Prior to the collapse of the USSR, the population of Soviet Central Asia
had been ruled by a regime that for decades had attempted to con-
vince them, and other citizens of the USSR, that their most meaningful
links with other human beings were not ethnic, linguistic, religious, or
racial; rather, such links, though important in certain contexts, were
supposed to be secondary to common Soviet citizenship. Although this
most important bond of shared Soviet citizenship lost its political
meaning with the establishment of independent countries on former
Soviet territory, the fundamental problem of establishing a basis for
patriotismthis time in newly independent statesremained. In the
changed world, the new states that emerged from the USSR faced the
complex problem of determining the nature of the glue that would
hold together the population and territory that they inherited.
In the Soviet era, the Communist Party had promoted the Russian
language as one of the primary bonds shared by the countrys popula-
tion. Indeed, Russian was referred to as the second mother tongue
of the Soviet Unions non-Russians. According to Soviet ideology, the
links among the USSRs population were constantly increasing, and
although individual cultures and languages were enjoying a period of
flourishing (rastsvet), the process of sblizhenie (rapprochement) was
proceeding, and somewhere on the distant horizon was the prospect of
sliianie (merger). Although Soviet ideologists disagreed on some fine
points, the writing between the lines in some works clearly implied
that the non-Russian languages of the USSR were doomed to ever
smaller domains or even disappearance.
A tension always existed in Soviet policy between maintaining or at
least tolerating the non-Russian languages and cultures of the peoples
inhabiting the USSR, and the promotion of Russian language and cul-
ture as the foundation of the Soviet people. The balance of policies
promoting rastsvet and sblizhenie varied both over time and from
region to region. Furthermore, contradictory policies were often at play
the fate of uzbek language 209

simultaneously, though out of sight. Both Russian and non-Russian


writers, historians, and other members of the creative intelligentsia,
frequently took advantage of cracks in policies to deliver messages
that were at variance with implicit or explicit directives from the cen-
tral party apparatus that emphasized rapprochement. Nevertheless, in
the decades leading up to the Gorbachev era, Moscow emphasized the
need to instill in Soviet citizens a sense that their strongest allegiances
should be to the Soviet homeland and, as reflected in the words of a
popular Brezhnev-era song, their address was not a house number or
street, but the Soviet Union.
The Soviet collapse radically changed the relevant actors creating
policies related to identity and, in particular, language throughout the
USSR, including in Central Asia. The changes, of course, affected both
the Russian language and the titular language in each of the five newly
independent Central Asian states. For most members of titular nation-
alities in the Central Asian countries, the dominant language was that
which matched their nationality; in their eyes, in accordance with
basic principles of Soviet nationality policy, the division of territory
also implied the division of linguistic space. Indeed, this had been rec-
ognized to some extent in the language laws that most Soviet republics
adopted in 1989 and 1990. The laws as adopted in each Central Asian
republic all maintained a special role for Russian. Each republic law
also provided at least a nod in recognition of other minority languages
spoken in the republic.
Despite the aspirations of some of the most ardent nationalists,
even after independence in 1991, all Central Asian countries were still
obliged to use Russian in many domains within the new states, not
to mention for communications with other former Soviet republics.
Many members of the political, economic, social, and cultural elite
in the newly independent countries had been educated in Russian
and did not know the state language of their suddenly independent
country. This above all applied to Slavs and other members of non-
titular groups. However, even many members of the titular elite had
been educated in Russian; a sizeable share could not write or read
their own language; some could not even conduct a conversation
in it. Even today, Russian continues to be used in many government
offices throughout Central Asia despite the fact that representatives of
the titular nationality dominate. This is certainly true in Kazakhstan
and Kyrgyzstan; and has also been true at least until recently in certain
institutions in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
210 william fierman

The situation faced by the other languages of Central Asia, i.e.,


the non-titular languages besides Russian, was very different when the
USSR collapsed. These languages, unlike Russian, were generally spo-
ken only by members of individual ethnic groups carrying the same
name as the language. In some cases, particularly other Slavic groups,
Koreans, and those less numerous living dispersed among other nation-
alities, the nationality language was restricted to the home and certain
monoethnic social settings; Russian had become the dominant lan-
guage for many of these people, and they were educated overwhelm-
ingly in Russian-medium schools.
While most of the other languages just described were quickly
losing ground and had very limited domains, the story was different
for a second category of other languages that were more widely used.
This was primarily the case with languages of other, neighboring Cen-
tral Asian countriese.g., Tajik in Uzbekistan, Uzbek in Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyz in Tajikistan, etc.
Despite the fact that these languages were used in a larger number
of domains than, say, Korean or Tatar in Central Asia, they were nev-
ertheless vulnerable in a way that Russian was not. Furthermore, they
represented the titular ethnic group of neighboring countries with
which relations were often problematic.
This chapter will examine questions related to the most widespread
other Central Asian language, Uzbek, in the other four newly inde-
pendent countries of Central AsiaTurkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyz-
stan, and Kazakhstan. It will focus on the domains of education and
mass media. We will begin by examining factors that have affected
the entire region, presenting some caveats that must be kept in mind
when using the names of ethnic groups and languages in the region,
and some background on the status of Uzbek in the late Soviet era. In
the next section we will consider the status, one by one, in each of the
other Central Asian countries. Following this we will consider the
likelihood of Uzbek surviving in education and media environments
in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. We will
conclude by reconsidering the link between ethnicity, territory, and
language that seems to be part of the popular understanding in Central
Asia, the possible impact of technology on the control of information
in minority languages produced beyond a states borders, and the pros-
pects for preserving language in the family outside of Uzbekistan.
Turkistan
Bishkek
Chimkent
Nukus Sayram KYRGYZST

Tashavuz UZBEKISTAN Tashkent Namangan Andijan


Urgench Ferghana Osh
Khojand

Samarkand
TURKMENISTAN Bukhara Panjikent
Turkmenabad Dushanbe TAJIKISTAN
Karshi Kulab
Tursunzoda
the fate of uzbek language

Kurgantepa

Map 1. Along with the very largest cities of Uzbekistan, this map contains names of certain cities in surrounding
former Soviet republics; substantial numbers of Uzbeks live in or nearby these cities. A large number of
Uzbeks also lives in northern Afghanistan, but the cities are not shown because this chapter concerns only
Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan. (See also the map of the Ferghana Valley on the next
211

page, which contains names of additional cities in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.) Names of cities with common
English spellings have been rendered in that form. Because this chapter is about Uzbek language, the spelling
of cities in neighboring countries reflects Uzbek pronunciation (thus Tashavuz rather than Dashoguz).
Bishkek
212

Chimkent KYRGYZST
Sayram

Tashkent Namangan Jalalabad Uzgen


Kokand Andijan
Ferghana Osh
Khojand Konibodom Kizilkiya
william fierman

Samarkand
Panjikent

Dushanbe TAJIKISTAN
Tursunzoda

Map 2. Along with the very largest cities in Uzbekistans part of the Ferghana Valley, this map
contains only names of the capitals of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, plus those cities in surrounding
countries with large Uzbek populations inside them or in their environs. Names of cities with
common English spellings have been rendered in that form. Because this chapter is about Uzbek
language, the spelling of cities in neighboring countries reflects Uzbek pronunciation (thus
Jalalabad rather than Jalalabat).
the fate of uzbek language 213

7.1 Factors

In order to understand the changes in language status, we will begin


by looking at some of the political, social, economic, and technol-
ogy context of the late Soviet era which, when changed, profoundly
affected language.

7.1.1 Factor 1: Borders


By definition, the collapse of the USSR in 1991 meant the creation of
international borders between the Central Asian countries. Until the
last years of Soviet power, Soviet international borders were relatively
tight, with passage across those borders controlled from Moscow. This
applied to the movement of people, goods, and to a considerable extent
even to information. Travel abroad for Soviet citizens was very limited,
and often required going through Moscow even if it was far out of the
way.1 With the economy controlled by the state, there were no private
firms or individuals legally able to transport large amounts of goods
across the Soviet border. Soviet authorities attempts to control infor-
mation from abroad included radio jamming and customs controls
at borders, which limited the freedom to import or export books or
recordings or even transport personal letters across the frontier.
Internal administrative borders between Soviet republics, on the
other hand, were extremely porous. Except for informational signs or
the same sort of road police controls that also existed within repub-
lics, travelers moving from one republic to another would generally
be unaware that they were moving into another administrative unit.
Indeed, roads and railroads between Central Asian cities of the same
republic often crossed through another republic.2
These republic borders acquired importance of another magnitude
in post-Soviet Central Asia, though their significance varies across
the region. At one extreme, Turkmenistan attempts to maintain strict
control of the movement of people, goods, and ideas to or from any
location abroad. Nevertheless, people, goods and information move
across Turkmenistans border with Iran in ways that were unthinkable

1
In the 1970s, Aeroflot had flights from Tashkent to Delhi, but in order to fly to
Delhi, inhabitants of Uzbekistan would have to travel to Moscow to get on this flight,
which would make a stop in Tashkent on its way to Delhi.
2
This was true, for example, with the roads between Tashkent and Samarkand
(Uzbekistan) or Frunze (later named Bishkek) and Osh.
214 william fierman

in most of the Soviet era. Today it is far easier than in the Soviet era
for inhabitants of Turkmenistans border areas to go to Iran. Mean-
while, citizens of Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan wishing to visit each
others country must receive visas, a complex and time consuming
process that is not always even successful. The same is true for Tajiki-
stan residents wishing to go to Uzbekistan. Yet in the Soviet era there
was very tight integration of the economies and transportation grids
of the Uzbek SSR and Tajik SSR.

7.1.2. Factor 2: Nationality Policy and BordersChange from Central


to Individual Policies
As illustrated in the discussion of sblizhenie above, the tight borders
separating Soviet territory from the outside world and the relative
lack of barriers to movement within Soviet space were reflected in the
kind of homogenous community that was supposed to be developing
inside the USSR, one that was qualitatively different from that beyond
Soviet borders. Especially from the 1930s onward, the substance of the
culture and language binding the Soviet people together was Russian.
Although rooted in the initial Bolshevik internationalist convictions
and expectations of a world proletarian revolution, the word interna-
tional in Bolshevik parlance came increasingly to mean Russian as
hopes for socialist revolution in Europe faded. In terms of language,
the Russian-based sblizhenie affected the vocabulary, writing and pho-
netic systems, and even syntactic patterns of other languages.
Although the Party never distanced itself from the view that eventu-
ally national differences would disappear, it is especially important in
considering Central Asia to note that the territorial units that became
independent countries in 1991 were in fact Soviet creations that began
to take a more concrete form with the delimitation of territory and
populations in 1924. Through the delimitation, embryonic nation-
alities moved a critical important step towards gaining claim to dis-
tinct territories, histories, cultures, and languages. In accordance with
Marxist-Leninist theory, this process had to be conceived as a step on
the road towards a future when ethnic and linguistic differences would
vanish; that is, the established divisions were intended to be only a
detour on the way to a homogenous society.
Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, it became
clear that the creation of republicseach with its own unique name
and indigenous people, who in turn had their own discrete language,
culture, and history, was much more than a brief diversion on the way
the fate of uzbek language 215

towards communism. From the 1920s onward, the lines created by the
delimitation brought the establishment of distinct literary languages,
each assigned to a particular population. Those individuals classified
as ethnic Turkmen, for exampledespite significant differences in
the form of Turkic they usedwere exposed to a uniform standard
of Turkmen language that was determined by an officially sanctioned
body, and was promoted by the state, most importantly through mass
media and schools. In this way, language played a central role in con-
tributing to what Brubaker and Cooper have termed commonality
and to some extent even groupness.3
Although language policies for X-ish were of most immediate
importance for the population of the X-istan republic, the norms
established for X-ish also applied to Y-istan and Z-istan repub-
lics where X-men irridenta or diaspora populations lived.4 This was
because language policy was directed through the centralized Soviet
governmental apparatus. There could thus not be one set of Uzbek
norms created by and for Uzbek speakers in Uzbekistan and another
set for those, say, in Kyrgyzstan or Kazkhstan. As a consequence,
Uzbek-medium schools in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, or
Kyrgyzstan used the same textbooks with the same language as those
in Uzbekistan; the form of Turkic used in these books was at least offi-
cially determined in Tashkent, though always in accordance with cer-
tain principles determined in Moscow, and often with input from local
Russian scholars. It goes without saying that the policy of promoting
Russian as second mother tongue was also directed from Moscow,
though implemented through the party and state in each republic.
Independence for the Central Asian countries meant the end of
Moscows central direction of policies related to creating identities.
Each new regime that inherited power faced the task of developing a
sense of common belonging in the independent state that it governed.
All of the new states policies emphasized that the titular nationality

3
Brubaker and Cooper, who eschew the term identity, prefer the term com-
monality to refer to shared common attributes and groupness to describe indi-
viduals sense of belonging to a single, distinctive solidarity group (Rogers Brubaker
and Frederick Cooper, Beyond identity, Theory and Society vol. 29, [Feb. 2000],
p. 31).
4
I use an adapted form of the notation adopted by Joshua Fishman to refer to any
language as X-ish, and X-men as the speakers of that language. By analogy, I use
X-istan to refer to any republic (Joshua Fishman, Reversing Language Shift: Theoreti-
cal and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages. Philadelphia:
Multilingual Matters, 1991, Chapter 4).
216 william fierman

was in some way first among equals. However, the way in which
this principle has been applied has varied greatly across the region.
Thus, for example, Turkmen culture has been promoted almost to the
exclusion of all others in Turkmenistan, whereas in Kazakhstan, and
to some extent Kyrgyzstan, the leadership has frequently emphasized
the multi-ethnic nature of the state and the rights of minorities living
on its territory.

7.1.3. Factor 3: Instruments of Implementation and Level of Repression


The Soviet regime possessed an extremely powerful set of instruments
to promote Russian and uniform standard languages for the Central
Asian peoples. Among the most important were the Partys control
of educational institutions and the mass media; the Party also shaped
policy in the military, cultural institutions, and mass organizations
such as DOSAAF.5 In somewhat less direct ways, the regime also pro-
foundly affected language processes through management of an eco-
nomic system in which it shaped incentives for individuals to learn
Russian (or, in the case of non-Russian areas of the USSR, sometimes
other languages), and created a wide array of incentives (and disincen-
tives) for migration. In the Central Asian region, the linguistic envi-
ronment, especially but not only in urban areas, was transformed by
population movement. This was especially true in the case of Kazakh-
stan. The republics demographic composition radically changed as a
result of the flight of Kazakhs abroad during collectivization and sed-
entarization, the arrival of deported nationalities in the 1940s, the
dumping of political prisoners from the 1930s until the 1950s, and the
campaigns to send settlers to the virgin lands during the Khrushchev
era.6 All of these processes, of course, were facilitated by the hierarchical
structure of the single political party, which duplicated the state

5
DOSAAF was a paramilitary society in the Soviet Union with many activities for
young people. The initials stood for Voluntary Society of Assistance to the Army, the
Air Force and the Navy.
6
As a result of such processes, Kazakhstans population, which had been about 57
percent Kazakh in 1926, was only 30 percent Kazakh in 1959. At that time, less than
9 percent of the population of capital city, Alma-Ata, was Kazakh (Data for 1926 from
Robert J. Kaiser The Geography of Nationalism in Russia and the USSR [Princeton:
Princeton U. Press, 1994], p. 116; data for 1959 from William Fierman, Language
Vitality and Paths to Revival: Contrasting Cases of Azerbaijani and Kazakh, Interna-
tional Journal of the Sociology of Language vol. 198 2009, pp. 82-6).
the fate of uzbek language 217

structure, including the military and police structures, and which had
special responsibility for personnel appointments.
CPSU language policy affected not only the choice of language for
particular domains, but the corpus of language as well. The most obvi-
ous example of this is the shifts of alphabets, but the Party also imple-
mented policies which affected terminology and other vocabulary, the
dialect norm used in radio and television, and other fields. The abil-
ity to affect the corpus is clear from the massive russification of the
vocabulary beginning in the 1930s. The Central Asian languages as
represented in the mass media and in educational materials reflected
the decision that Russian words borrowed by the Central Asian lan-
guages were to be written and pronounced the same as in Russian;
this was true even if the Russian pronunciation of such words violated
phonetic rules otherwise generally observed in the Turkic and Iranian
languages. The enormous volume of translation into the Central Asian
languages from Russian meant that not only Russian vocabulary, but
Russian syntactic patterns as well, permeated the language of mass
media. More indirectly, but perhaps of greatest importance, the educa-
tion of a large share of the Central Asian elite was through the Russian
language.
This is not to say that the CPSUs control of the language used by
Soviet citizens was limitless. One reason is that Soviet borders, though
tight, were not impermeable. In the post-World War II era, a small
number of citizens had access to foreign radio broadcasts which in
subtle ways challenged Soviet linguistic policy. For example, the Radio
Liberty services broadcasting to Central Asia used language at variance
from established norms.7 Even inside Soviet borders, however, control
was far from complete. The Party regulation over language in schools
and economic enterprises was likely much less effective in remote vil-
lages than in major urban areas. Probably with very rare exceptions,
schools used only approved textbooks written in Russian or the official
standard languages. Nevertheless, the Party had relatively little control
over the use of non-standard dialects or the wrong language used
by teachers in remote schools, let alone by pupils. Thus, for example,
it is highly likely that, despite a Party a policy promoting Russian

7
The very tall barriers that stood between Central Asians and those abroad who
used language that was at variance from established norms did not exist everywhere.
For example, the population of the Moldavian SSR had relatively easy access to the
Romanian spoken in Romania.
218 william fierman

days in Uzbek schools (when all instruction as well as informal com-


munication in the school was to be only in Russian), compliance was
far from complete. The Partys control over language use in the family
was likely even much less pervasive than in schools: this is particularly
plausible given that several generations often lived under one roof, and
younger people treated their elders with great deference.
The regimes which came to power in the wake of the Soviet collapse
have many of the same channels through which to influence language,
and they also face some of the same limitations. The level of control
and ability to affect language varies across the region. For example,
the media are under stricter control in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan
than in the other three states. Likewise, the first two allow almost no
private schools, book publishers, or mass media organizations; such
institutions do exist in the other three states, though only within lim-
its set by powerful governments, indeed, limits which have generally
grown tighter in recent years. The level of fear of arbitrary exercise
of government is also greater in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. All
of this, combined with demographic realities, a continued heavy state
hand in economic control, and policies designed to build a nation state
strongly favoring the titular group, means that minority languages are
especially vulnerable.

7.1.4. Factor 4: No Arbiter


One other extremely important change ushered in by the Soviet col-
lapse was the end of the era when Moscow served as arbiter in matters
of dispute among ethnic groups or republics in Central Asia, includ-
ing questions of history, nationality relations, and language. To illus-
trate: in the Soviet period, fundamental decisions about the portrayal
in published histories, films, or art of Russias conquest of Central Asia
were made in Moscow, and enforced throughout the USSR. In par-
allel fashion, Moscow was the arbiter on issues of which particular
historical figure belonged to which nationality. Likewise, of course,
the center determined policies concerning the roles of the Russian and
other languages in Central Asia. In the post-Soviet period Russia does
not play such a role; indeed, there is no arbiter. Consequently, deci-
sions on such issues are contested in much more open fashion, and
without Moscows direct intervention.
One aspect of this change is particularly relevant to this chapter: it
concerns the alphabet used to write the Uzbek language. Uzbekistan
began to shift the Uzbek orthography from Cyrillic to Latin in the
the fate of uzbek language 219

mid-1990s. Without Moscow to dictate a unified standard for writ-


ing the language throughout the Central Asian region, countries other
than Uzbekistan have chosen not to make this shift. An example of
the consequence of this situation is that although materials for Uzbek-
medium primary and secondary schools inside Uzbekistan are being
printed only in the Latin script, schools in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and
Kazakhstan continue to use Cyrillic-based materials.8
Moscows disappearance as arbiter had a profound impact within
the individual countries. This is perhaps most apparent in Tajikistan,
which within one year after the Soviet Unions collapse sank into civil
war. None of this is to say that Russia today is without influence in the
region. However, it is currently of a lower magnitude than throughout
the 1970s and 1980s.

7.1.5. Factor 5: Economic Change


Much of the dramatic transformation throughout the former USSR,
including in Central Asia, is related to economic change. In the Soviet
era, individual republics had minimal control of their own resources,
and fiscal and economic policies, which were determined in Moscow.
This meant, for example, that the hard currency paid to the USSR for
the export of Central Asian cotton went to Moscow rather than Central
Asia, and that it was Moscow which then determined the allocation of
such funds; it also meant that through a complex system of subsidies,
the central budget supported a standard of living in Central Asia that
was far higher than in such nearby countries as Afghanistan, and (at
least according to Soviet accounting) represented a substantial transfer
of funds from the center to the region. Central management of the econ-
omy was also responsible for the relatively low level of exploration and
extraction of hydrocarbon fuels in the region. The lack of opportunities
for individual republics to exploit and benefit from their own resources,
combined with the subsidies, meant that living standards in the
resource-rich and resource-poor republics were relatively similar.
The relative level of equality among republics was to some extent
replicated at the individual level. Although certain segments of the
Soviet population in each Central Asian republic were economically

8
As will be explained below, Turkmenistan no longer has Uzbek schools or print
media. The added difficulty caused by different alphabets does not mean that text-
books from other countriesespecially on such a subject as historywould be accept-
able if the same writing system were used in all countries.
220 william fierman

better off than others in the same republic, the magnitude of differ-
ence was relatively small. This was partly a result of state ownership
and control of the means of production and of a kind of social safety
net provided by the state to all Soviet citizens.
Some of the most impressive achievements of Soviet power in Cen-
tral Asia relate to education and culture. Among other things, the
Soviet regime developed an extensive network of educational institu-
tions. The guidelines for the education they provided, of course, were
determined in Russia rather than in the republics. Nevertheless, even
if one discounts the Soviet claims of practically 100 percent literacy
in the region, it remains true that the vast majority of Soviet Central
Asian adults could read and write in a standardized language. Fur-
thermore, these were languages which at the beginning of the Soviet
era had not been standardized, which lacked authoritative dictionaries,
and for which vocabulary required to represent many political, social,
and economic concepts were lacking. Furthermore, the speakers of
these forms of Turkic and Persian had been mostly illiterate.
Maintaining control over what was printed or broadcast, the Soviet
government provided a vast array of subsidies to cultural products
in Russian as well as in other languages of the USSR, especially those
of Union republics. Subsidies supported publication and distribution
of periodicals on a wide range of subjects, including oblast and raion
newspapers. In Central Asia, besides publishing newspapers in Rus-
sian and the republic titular language, a number of oblasts and raions
produced some in minority languages. The regime also subsidized
schools even when small numbers of pupils lived nearby; others were
sent to boarding schools.
Thanks to such subsidies, Soviet citizens had access to free textbooks
and other inexpensive publications, theatre and cinema at low prices,
and television and radio without commercial interruptions. Although
the greatest accessibility to cultural and educational activities for every
language were in the titular republic, the access of irredenta groups
in neighboring republics of Central Asia was enhanced through such
practices as exchanges of films and theatre troops, and republic tele-
vision stations occasionally showing broadcasts (especially cultural
performances) from neighboring republics. The curricula and text-
books for schools in the Central Asian languages of irridenta popula-
tions were the same as in the home republic and, critically, there were
no significant barriers to continuing education in the titular republic.
Thus, for example, it was very common for Uzbeks from neighboring
the fate of uzbek language 221

republics to enter higher educational institutions in the Uzbek SSR or


for Tajiks from Uzbekistan to enter universities and institutes in the
Tajik SSR.
The factors described above have radically changed since indepen-
dence. Moscow does not direct the economies of Central Asia. Some
republics are much richer than others: Kazakhstan and Turkmeni-
stan, thanks to their hydrocarbon energy resources, have been able to
attract investment and sell their products and have been able to keep
the majority of their population from poverty. The situation is differ-
ent in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, who lack hydrocarbons and whose
populations are very poor.9 Today much of the economy throughout
the region is in private hands, especially in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyz-
stan. This has aggravated inequality. Citizens of modest means suffer
because the governments in all the countries are less generous in pro-
viding a social safety net than the USSR had been under socialism.
Among the areas that have suffered most are education and cul-
ture. School books are no longer free, mass media and performances,
if subsidized at all, are not subsidized to the extent they were under
Soviet power. Today there are private schools and mass media orga-
nizations in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.
Nevertheless, in all of the countries, and especially under the more
authoritarian regimes, there is substantial government control of the
press, radio, and television.

7.1.6. Factor 6: Technology


In addition to the changes above, one other fundamental factor
technological changemust be considered in order to understand the
status of the Uzbek language in media and education in Uzbekistans
neighboring former Soviet republics. As we will see below, techno-
logical change has a major impact on the domains of Uzbek language
use in the post-Soviet era outside of Uzbekistan. The Soviet regimes
imperfect control of transfer of information across borders was much
tighter than exists anywhere in Central Asia today. This even applies
to Turkmenistan, where it is difficult to access print media from out-
side the country, where both citizens and foreigners alike are subject
to strict control when coming into and out of the country, and where

9
Uzbekistan produces much of its own energy, but does not export much.
222 william fierman

internet access is still very limited. Despite the Turkmenistan govern-


ments ability to crack down on the flow of media from abroad, the
regime has apparently permitted (or been unwilling to take policies to
stop) Uzbek audiences within Turkmenistan from listening to Uzbek-
language radio or viewing Uzbek-language television from Uzbekistan,
or from watching Uzbek musical clips or films on DVDs which were
produced in Uzbekistan (or translated into Uzbek from originals pro-
duced in other countries in other languages). We will return to this sub-
ject in the conclusion, where we will consider whether the communities
outside Uzbekistan where Uzbek is used are examples of bilingualism
without diglossia (which would suggest Uzbek is likely to disappear), or
whether diglossia (and hence bilingualism) is likely to persist.

7.2. Caveat on Terminology

Although throughout this article I refer to Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, and


Turkmen both as ethnic groups and as discrete languages, it should be
emphasized that the situation on the ground is far more complex than
my use of these terms suggests, and also more complex than might be
suggested by census categories and authoritative dictionaries issued
in countries that are the home of each language. Behind the single
name of an ethnic group are often prominent differences based in geo-
graphical region, or a blood-based bond (e.g., horde, or tribe); further-
more, sometimes the ethnic categories are fluid. Igor Savin reports
of families near the town of Turkestan (Kazakhstan) where siblings
choose different nationalities, or where adults in their 40s or 50s have
changed their reported nationality.10
The lines with regard to language are equally complex. With the
partial exception of Kazakh, each of the Central Asian languages
displays a great deal of dialect variation, even in the home country.
Thus, for example, the varieties of Turkmen, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and
Tajik spoken in certain regions bordering Uzbekistan (or the varieties
spoken inside Uzbekistan) contain certain elements which differ from
the official standard of the titular home language and are shared with
standard Uzbek. For example, the Kyrgyz language of Osh or Jalalabad

10
Igor Savin, Etnichnost kak faktor povsednevnoi zhizni v selskikh raionakh
Iuzhnogo Kazakhstana, Neprikosnovennyi zapas, no. 4 (66), 2009, accessed through
http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1258925460 28 Nov. 2009.
the fate of uzbek language 223

(in the south of Kyrgyzstan) differs from the standard Kyrgyz based
on dialects of the north; some of the distinguishing elements of this
southern Kyrgyz are shared with Uzbek. Thus, for example, an initial
voiced labial ([b]) in the literary standard (which is based on northern
dialects) is pronounced voiceless ([p]) in southern dialects, as is also
the case in Uzbek. Likewise, many words used by Kyrgyz in the south
of Kyrgyzstan but not used in the north are also used in Uzbek: Kyr-
gyz in the north use the word jumurtka for egg, but in the south the
word tukhum is used, which is also the Uzbek word.
Such phenomena, along with contact between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz
that facilitates a high level of bilingualism, means that southern Kyr-
gyz and local Uzbeks who speak to each other in their own respec-
tive languages have a high level of mutual intelligibility. Likewise, the
variety of Uzbek spoken in the Khorezm region of Uzbekistan bor-
dering on Turkmenistan shares many phonetic and other elements
with dialects of the Turkmen language that it does not share with the
standard literary Uzbek based on the dialects of the Ferghana Valley.
For such reasons, in the discussion of minority languages below, it is
important to keep in mind that the story is really much more compli-
cated than suggested by the use of a single term for each of the literary
languages and the juxtaposing of their names; furthermore, we must
recognize that the use of names of ethnic groups is convenient, but
only a kind of shorthand also hiding as much as it reveals.11
In this context, it is worth pointing out that the status of Uzbek
in Turkmenistan likely differs from that in the other Central Asian
countries where, for the most part, most of the Uzbek-speaking popu-
lation speaks a language fairly close to standard Uzbek. Indeed, in the
case of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, many of the Uzbeks are neigh-
bors living in close proximity in the Ferghana Valley. The majority of
Uzbeks of Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan are also fairly close
to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan. Although Tashkents dialect
also differs markedly from the Ferghana Valley-based standard, as the
capital it is the center for production of much of the literary and other
cultural Uzbek-language output. By contrast, Turkmenistans Uzbek
speakers are geographically remote both from the Ferghana Valley and

11
This kind of transition from one language to the next has been described by Harold
Schiffman in the case of German to Dutch, (http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540
/langdial/limburg.html ).
224 william fierman

Table 1. Percentage of pupils in Uzbek-medium schools


and Uzbeks in population
Percent of Uzbek- Percent of Uzbeks Percent of Uzbek
medium pupils in in X Republic medium/ percent
X Republic schools population of Uzbeks in
population
Kazakhstan 2.1 2.0 1.05
Kyrgyzstan 12.1 12.9 0.94
Tajikistan 23.8 23.5 1.01
Turkmenistan 6.2 9.0 0.69
Data for pupils from Vestnik statistiki are for academic year 19901991; data on popu-
lation are from 1989 Soviet census.

Tashkent, and their culture and language are far removed both from
the standard Uzbek norm and from the dialect of the capital.
Before proceeding to look at the status of Uzbek in other republics
after 1991, it will be useful to give a brief overview of easily acces-
sible evidence about the presence of Uzbek-medium schools and mass
media in the late Soviet era. In general, Uzbek-medium education was
widely available throughout the areas of Central Asia where Uzbeks
lived, and a high proportion of Uzbek pupils in the neighboring Cen-
tral Asian republics studied in Uzbek schools or classes. According to
the data below, the Uzbek school enrollment in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz-
stan, and Tajikistan was approximately proportional to the share of
Uzbeks in each of those republics population. In Turkmenistan, how-
ever, the share of Uzbek-medium pupils was substantially less than
the share of Uzbeks in the Turkmen SSR population, which were 6.2
and 9.0 percent, respectively. These figures are particularly interesting
in light of the fact that in Kyrgyzstan and (especially) Kazakhstan, the
share of the titular nationality in the republic far exceeded the share of
pupils in the titular language medium.12

12
Data for population taken from John Dunlop, Marc Rubin, Lee Schwartz, David
Zaslow Profiles of Newly Independent States Joint Economic Committee, US Govt
Printing Office Washington 1993, pp. 1094-103. Data for share of pupils are taken from
Novaia informatsiia Goskomstata SSSR, Vestnik statistiki, no. 12, 1991, pp. 47-9. It
should be kept in mind that, given the high Uzbek birthrate, and the much lower rate
among the large Slavic population in the Kirgiz SSR and Kazakh SSR, it is likely that
the share of Uzbeks among the school-age population was substantially larger than
among each republics total population. It should also be kept in mind that some
non-Uzbeks may have studied in Uzbek-medium schools; however, I am unaware of
any reason to believe that the number was very large.
the fate of uzbek language 225

7.3. Uzbek in Education and Media of Other Republics


at the End of the Soviet Era

Not surprisingly, Uzbek-medium higher education was much less


available than primary and secondary education in republics outside
Uzbekistan. The Turkmen SSR offered no higher education in any lan-
guage besides Turkmen and Russian; the Kazakh SSR offered none
in Uzbek (though it had a very small number of higher education
students studying in Uyghur); even in the Kyrgyz and Tajik SSRs,
where 12.8 and 22.8 percent of school pupils attended Uzbek-medium
classes, Uzbek-medium higher educational enrollments were only 0.3
and 7.7 percent respectively of the total republic enrollments. It is
highly plausible that many of the Central Asian students who com-
pleted their own titular language school in a republic not bearing
their nationalitys name in fact entered higher education where the
medium of instruction was their own languagei.e., Tajiks from
Uzbekistan studying in Tajikistan (and analogous situations for Turk-
men and Kyrgyz from Uzbekistan), and Uzbeks from all of the other
republics studying inside Uzbekistan.
It is much more difficult to determine availability of minority
language periodical publications during the late Soviet era than to
determine the number of school pupils attending classes in various
languages. One reason is that, despite restrictions in some years, in the
USSR it was generally possible to subscribe to periodicals published
in other republics.13 Nevertheless, it is clear that minority language
newspapers were published in Central Asia, often at the oblast, city,
or raion level rather than at the republic level.14 Two republic-level
newspapers appeared in Tajikistan in Uzbek, plus over a dozen more
issued by oblasts, cities, and raions. However, in Turkmenistan,
Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, it appears that only one or two raion

13
For a description of trends see Roman Szporluk, The Press and Soviet Nationali-
ties: The Party Resolution of 1975 and its Implementation, Nationalities Papers vol.
14 (1986), pp. 47-64.
14
Data I have are from the second half of the 1970s, but it is likely that these
publications continued to be published during the next decade. Uzbekistan, in turn,
published a republic Tajik-language newspaper called Haqiqati Ozbekiston; several
raion newspapers were published in Kazakh. Kazakh-language papers I have identified
were from Bukhara, Jizzakh, and Tashkent oblasts. (Vsesoiuznaia knizhnaia palata.
Letopis periodicheskikh i prodolzhaiuishchikhsia izdanii 19711975. Chast II. Gazety
[items 3043, 3058, 3062, 3136]).
226 william fierman

newspapers were published in Uzbek.15 In the Soviet era, Central


Asian republic television channels occasionally exchanged television
programs. These may have also offered a limited amount of native
language programming to Central Asian minorities living in other
republics of the region.

7.4. Uzbek Language in Post-Soviet Education and Media

7.4.1. Turkmenistan
Before looking at Uzbek-language schools or mass media in Turkmen-
istan, it is necessary to say a few words about the size of that coun-
trys Uzbek population. As noted above, according to the 1989 Soviet
census, Uzbeks comprised approximately 9 percent of Turkmenistans
population. More recent reports, however, suggest that this has shrunk
to only 5 percent.16 Some of Turkmenistans Uzbek population has
certainly left for Uzbekistan. Some others, however, recognizing their
Uzbek ethnicity as a liability, have changed their official registration
to Turkmen.17
In any case, all available information suggests that the status of the
Uzbek language in education and media in Turkmenistan is much
worse than in the other three countries discussed here. Although in
the first years after the Soviet collapse, Uzbek-medium schools con-
tinued to operate in Turkmenistan, by the mid-1990s, as part of
turkmenization, schools or streams of students with Uzbek as the lan-
guage of instruction were coming under heavy pressure. Thus, for exam-
ple, an elite specialized school with enriched mathematics and physics

15
From Vsesoiuznaia knizhnaia palata . . . Letopis. It is not clear whether any of the
newspapers referred to here were issued entirely in Uzbek, or individual issues mixed
languages, or whether perhaps the language of publication varied.
16
The confusion about the size is evident from the CIA Factbook, which indicates
that 5 percent of Turkmenistans population is Uzbek, but also shows that 9 percent
of the population speaks Uzbek as a native language. Given that few non-Uzbeks in
Turkmenistan would likely claim to speak Uzbek, it is highly implausible that both
of these figures would be correct. Central Intelligence Agency World Factbook, Turk-
menistan, https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/tx.html,
accessed 24 Nov. 2009.
17
Twilight Existence for Uzbek Illegals, Institute for War Peace Reporting, (RCA
No. 530), 7 Feb. 2008, accessed at http://iwpr.net/?p=rcas=fo=342550apc_state=henh
on 24 Nov. 2009. As will be illustrated below, this practice of changing ones nation-
ality is not unique to Turkmenistan.
the fate of uzbek language 227

curriculum in Tashavuz (Dashouz) that had previously provided Rus-


sian-, Uzbek-, and Turkmen-medium instruction reportedly dropped
Uzbek entirely in 1997. The elimination of the Uzbek-language track
is said to have taken place despite protests from parents and teachers.18
In a pattern that appears to have been widespread or even universal,
beginning in about 2000, Uzbek-language schools or tracks ceased
accepting new pupils while allowing those in other grades to continue
in Uzbek. Consequently, as of fall 2006, Uzbek-medium classes appar-
ently remained only for the sixth through ninth grades.19 To judge from
a report on formerly Kazakh-medium schools in Turkmenistan (where
only two hours weekly of Kazakh language remained as a subject in
these schools curriculum), Uzbek language may have also remained as
a subject, with a small number of hours of instruction.20
At least in schools for Uzbek pupils the shift to Turkmen may in
fact not have been quite as radical as suggested in the above account.
According to an informant who observed a formerly Uzbek-language
school in Turkmenistan around 2006 (one that had supposedly shifted
to Turkmen-medium instruction), in fact many of the teachers contin-
ued to teach in Uzbek.21 Part of the reason for this, of course, may have
been that teachers and pupils alike had weak Turkmen skills.
Uzbek has also apparently ceased to be a language of newspaper pub-
lication in Turkmenistan. The publication of Uzbek-language newspa-
pers was drastically reduced in the 1990s. One reason is that, with
the exception of a single Kazakh-language raion newspaper, in 1995
all raion newspapers were closed. In 1997, Tashavuz citys surviving
Uzbek-language newspaper was combined with the Russian- and
Turkmen-language papers, leaving only one page in Uzbek.22 Five

18
N. Mitrokhin, V. Ponomarev, Turkmenistan: Gosudarstvennaia politika i prava
cheloveka 19951998. (Moscow, 1999). accessed through http://www.centrasia.ru
/newsA.php?st=1105368360.
19
Uzbekskie shkoly, Khronika Turkmenistana, 3 Aug. 2006, http://www.chrono-
tm.org/?id=682, accessed 4 Nov. 2009.
20
Sotrudnichestvo mezhdu Respublikoi Kazakhstan i Turkmenistanom v oblasti
obrazovaniia i nauki, no date, accessed at http://www.edu.gov.kz/index.php?id=rk
_and_turkmenistanL=1, accessed 24 Nov. 2009. The undated report from Kazakh-
stan appears to have been written in 2003. Unconfirmed reports from Uzbek areas of
Turkmenistan suggest that if there were Uzbek lessons six years ago, they may have
nevertheless ceased in the interim.
21
Personal communication from American observer in a Turkmen school.
22
N. Mitrokhin, V. Ponomarev, Turkmenistan: Gosudarstvennaia politika i prava che-
loveka 19951998. (Moscow, 1999), accessed through http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA
.php?st=1105368360.
228 william fierman

years later, the only remaining Uzbek-language newspaper, Dostlik


bayrogi, was also closed.23 The timing of the newspapers closing
strongly suggests that it was connected to an alleged plot on the life of
then President Niyazov, a supposed foiled assassination that, Turkmen
authorities claimed, Uzbekistan had supported.
Uzbek-language periodical publications from Uzbekistan are only
rarely available in Turkmenistan. It is extremely difficult, if not impos-
sible, for residents of Turkmenistan to subscribe to publications from
Uzbekistan. Furthermore, it appears that Ashgabat offers no Uzbek-
language radio or television programming.24 Indeed, authorities at the
national television allegedly issue strong criticism of Turkmen jour-
nalists who interview individuals from regions near Uzbekistan and
fail to assure that the interviewees avoid use of words that authorities
in Ashgabat consider Uzbek.25
Despite all the restrictions, Uzbek media do come into Turkmenistan
from Uzbekistan. Uzbek print media that are somehow transported
across the border are said to be in high demand.26 More importantly,
it is easy to listen to and watch Uzbek radio in such areas as Tashavuz
and Turkmenabad (formerly Charjou), areas near Turkmenistans
border with Uzbekistan where most of Turkmenistans Uzbeks live.
Although TV picture quality is vastly improved in some of these areas
with an antenna, reception is often possible without such a device;
moreover, because antennas are not expensive or difficult to obtain,
concerts, serials, and other entertainment originating in Uzbekistan
seem to enjoy a large audience. DVDs and CDs with Uzbek music and
films are also freely available and popular in these regions; though the
supply is more limited, Uzbek music is also available at kiosks else-
where in Turkmenistan, such as in Ashgabat.27
Turkmenistan, unlike Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan,
lacks a national-cultural center for Uzbeks (or any other Central

23
Najot: etnicheskie uzbeki v Turkmenistane reguliarno podvergaiutsia diskrim-
inatsii, Independent News Agency Harakat, 11 Sep. 2009, accessed at http://harakat
.net/el_news.php?id=3216, accessed 4 Nov. 2009.
24
Uzbekskoe radio zagovorilo na turkmenskom, Khronika Turkmenistan, 29 July
2006, http://www.chrono-tm.org/?id=846 accessed 4 Nov. 2009.
25
Nazar Saparov, Vizit zavershen, problemy ostalis, Khronika Turkmenistana
23 March 2008, http://www.chrono-tm.org/?id=894, accessed 4 Nov. 2009.
26
Institut media polisi v Kyrgyzskoi Respublike, Ob uzbekskikh i turkmenskikkh
SMI, 22 Aug. 2007, accessed www.media.kg?pid-3cid=8nid=211, 4 Nov. 2009.
27
Information on Turkmenistan collected from e-mail communications to author
in October 2009.
the fate of uzbek language 229

Asian nationalities).28 In recent years there have been some cultural


exchanges between Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan which have, for
example, brought Uzbek films and plays to audiences in Turkmeni-
stan. However, these have reportedly not been allowed in regions of
Turkmenistan with substantial Uzbek populations.29
It should be also be noted that unlike Central Asian non-titular
groups in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, Uzbeks (and other non-
Slavic minorities) in Turkmenistan generally lack access to a variety
of domestically produced Russian-language programming or locally
transmitted Russian-language media produced abroad. Furthermore,
unlike Central Asian minorities in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan (as well
as Tajikistan and Uzbekistan), Central Asian minorities in Turkmeni-
stan generally lack opportunities to attend the few schools offering
Russian-medium education.30
The virtual disappearance of Uzbek from education and the mass
media are a reflection of the strong turkmenization policy of the regime
in Ashgabat. Credible reports allege that Uzbeks have been subjected
to harsh job discrimination based on ethnic criteria, and some even
forcibly resettled to remote regions of Turkmenistan.31 Some citizens
of Turkmenistan who were previously registered as Uzbeks have appar-
ently changed their documents to show they are Turkmen.32 This is
likely at least part of the explanation of why official Turkmenistan data
from 2004 show Uzbeks as comprising only 4.5 percent of the popula-
tion, i.e., only half the share at the time of the last Soviet census (1989).
The fact that large numbers of Uzbeks would choose this step is in itself

28
Uzbekskie shkoly, Khronika Turkmenistana, 3 Aug. 2006, http://www.chrono-
tm.org/?id=682, accessed 4 Nov. 2009. The lack of such institutions is, however,
disputed on a blog post. See http://www.turkmeniya.info/index.php?option=com
_contenttask=viewid=664Itemid=1.
29
Alty, Pustite uzbekov k uzbekam, 10 Oct. 2009, http://www.turkmeniya.info
/index.php?option=com_contenttask=viewid=664Itemid=1.
30
According to one report, even when Russian-medium schools are available,
Uzbeks have been refused permission because such schools were said to be avail-
able only to Ukrainians and Koreans (sic) (V. Volkov, D. Nazarov and O. Saryev,
Pritesneniia natsionalnykh menshinstv, Uzbeki protestuiut, Nemetskaia volna 9 Jan.
2005, http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1105368360).
31
V. Volkov, D. Nazarov and O. Saryev, Pritesneniia natsionalnykh menshinstv,
Uzbeki protestuiut, Nemetskaia volna 9 Jan. 2005, http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA
.php?st=1105368360.
32
Najot: etnicheskie uzbeki v Turkmenistane reguliarno podvergaiutsia diskrim-
inatsii, Independent News Agency Harakat, 11 Sep. 2009, accessed at http://harakat
.net/el_news.php?id=3216, accessed 4 Nov. 2009.
230 william fierman

an indication of the power of Turkmenistans regime. Furthermore, the


regimes success in eliminating Uzbek schools and publishing is tes-
timony to the authoritarian nature of the political system, which allows
no formal or informal institutions to protect those out of favor with the
countrys rulers. At least in part thanks to its great fossil-fuel natural
wealth, Turkmenistan has been able to ignore foreign criticism of its
harsh policies, including questions affecting ethnic minorities.
Since the death of Turkmenistans first president in 2006 and the
accession of Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov, a few signs of a slight
relaxation have appeared with regard to non-Turkmen schools in
Turkmenistan. Although the main impact of the moderation seems to
be the increase in the number Russian-medium classes and of pupils
attending them, Kazakhstans President Nazarbayev announced dur-
ing a visit by Berdymukhammedov to Kazakhstan that Turkmenistan
had promised to open a Kazakh-medium school.33

7.4.2. Tajikistan
Before proceeding to examine its condition, however, it is appro-
priate to note two issues concerning the Tajikistan context. First of
all, as in the case of Turkmenistan, it is impossible to determine the
size of Tajikistans Uzbek population. The 1989 Soviet census data
purport that Uzbeks comprised approximately 23.5 percent of the
total.34 This is far higher than the figure of over 15 percent in the
2000 census. The census data show not only a decline in percentage,
but an absolute decline as well, from almost 1.2 million to less than
950,000. Some of the loss is due to changes in the scheme of classifica-
tion (i.e., some tribal groups counted as Uzbeks in 1989 were listed
as separate categories in 2000); another part of the drop is attributable
to the departure of some Uzbeks from Tajikistan. In addition, however,
an unknown number of individuals who in 1989 had claimed to be
Uzbeks, finding themselves in an independent country named Tajiki-
stan, undoubtedly reported themselves as Tajiks.35 In discussing any

33
Press-konferentsiia Prezidentov Kazakhstana N. Nazarbaeva i Turkmenistana
Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedova, 28 May 2007, accessed through http://www
.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1180429080, 28 Nov. 2009.
34
Mikhail Tulskii, Itogi perepisi naseleniia Tadzhikistana 2000 goda: natsionalnyi,
vozrastnoi, polovoi, semeinyi i obrazovatelnyi sostavy, Demoskop Weekly, Nos. 191-
192, 21 Feb.-6 Mar. 2005.
35
Richard Rowland, National and Regional Population Trends in Tajikistan:
Results from the Recent Census, Eurasian Geography and Economics, vol. 46 no. 3
the fate of uzbek language 231

matter relevant to independent Tajikistan, it is also necessary to keep


in mind that, alone among the newly independent Central Asian states,
Tajikistan endured a civil war. This conflict, which lasted from 1992
until 1997, inflicted a great blow to Tajikistans economy, and is one of
the underlying reasons for the countrys extreme poverty.
Tajikistan is also unique in the Central Asian context in that its
state language is not a Turkic language, but rather an Iranian language
very close (especially in literary forms) to Dari and Farsi. Although
Uzbek has many words borrowed from Persian (i.e., they are identi-
cal or almost identical in Uzbek and Tajik), Tajiks grammar is radi-
cally different from Uzbeks, and the order of words in a sentence
is generally very different. This fact probably makes communication
between monolingual Uzbek and Tajik speakers more difficult than
between speakers of Uzbek and Kyrgyz; an Uzbek speaker and a Kyr-
gyz speaker, whose respective standard languages are quite different
from one another phonetically, can nevertheless learn to understand
each other rather quickly with some practice. Despite the similarity of
vocabulary, this would be more difficult in the case of a monolingual
Tajik- and monolingual Uzbek-speaker.
Despite this context, the Uzbek language has fared much better in
Tajikistan than in Turkmenistan. Data for the total number of schools
or pupils studying in the Uzbek language in the entire country are
not available; however, data pertaining to Soghd oblast provide insight
into the overall picture. There, according to the 2000 census, Uzbeks
accounted for 19.1 percent of the population.36 The data for schools in
the oblast show that of the total 883 schools in the oblast in academic
year 20072008, 212 (24 percent) offered instruction only in Uzbek,
and another 111 (13 percent) offered both Tajik- and Uzbek-medium
instruction. Another 17 schools (2 percent) offered Uzbek-medium
instruction along with two other languages (Tajik/Russian, Kyrgyz/
Russian, or Tajik/Kyrgyz). In terms of medium of education, the share
of Uzbek only schools was higher than the proportion of Uzbeks in
the oblast recorded in the census. The share of pupils in Uzbek only
schools was about 19 percent, roughly equal to the share of the oblasts
population recorded in the census. With an undetermined number

(2005 ), pp. 202-23. As noted above, analogous phenomena have been reported in
Turkmenistan.
36
Soghd oblast was the home of 31.3 percent of the total number of Uzbeks liv-
ing in Tajikistan.
232 william fierman

of additional pupils studying in mixed schools, the share of pupils


educated in the Uzbek medium certainly exceeded the share of Uzbeks
in the oblast reported in the census.
A number of higher educational institutions in Tajikistan offer Uzbek-
medium instruction. Khojand State University has a fakultet devoted
specifically to Uzbek language, and most of its other fakultety also have
one or two Uzbek groups (depending on the number of Uzbek-speaking
students entering that fakultet).37 Tajik State Pedagogical University has
a section (otdelenie) of Uzbek language and literature, and according to
a statement in 2007 by Tajikistans President Rahmon, 1400 students in
that university were studying eleven teaching specialties in the Uzbek
language.38 At least one other university, the Tajik Agrarian University,
accepts students who take entrance exams in Uzbek even though it
offers instruction only in Russian and Tajik.39
In contrast to Turkmenistan, there have been high-profile activities
in Tajikistan to demonstrate that Tajikistan is offering Uzbek-medium
educational opportunities. The September 2007 opening of an Uzbek-
medium school in the city of Tursunzoda featured President Rahmon,
who highlighted the improving supply of Uzbek-language textbooks
published for Tajikistan schools, and the achievements in Uzbek-
medium higher education.40 Significantly, the president emphasized
that in accordance with Tajikistans constitution, every citizen of the
country was entitled to education in their native language. He further-
more reminded his audience that it was the command of the Supreme
Being.41

37
My thanks to Nasiba Mirpochoeva of Khojand for providing this information.
38
Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Tadzhikistan Emomali Rahmona na tser-
emonii otkrytiia novoi obshcheobrazovatelnoi shkoly v gorode Tursunzade, 11
Sep. 2007, accessed at www.president.tj/rus/vistupleniy110907.htm#. The website of
this university indicates that in addition to philology, three of the other ten fakultety
(biology, physics, and foreign languages) also offer instruction to Uzbek groups.
(Tadzhikskii gosudarstvennyi pedagogicheskii universitet im S. Ayni, http://www
.tgpu.tj/, accessed 7 Nov. 2009.)
39
Tadzhikskii agrarnyi universitet, http://tau.freenet.tj/enter.html accessed 7 Nov.
2009.
40
Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Tadzhikistan Emomali Rahmona na tser-
emonii otkrytiia novoi obshcheobrazovatelnoi shkoly v gorode Tursunzade, 11 Sep.
2007, accessed at www.president.tj/rus/vistupleniy110907.htm#.
41
He also emphasized that Tajiks and Uzbeks were neighbors, sharing friendship
and kinship. Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Tadzhikistan Emomali Rahmona
na tseremonii otkrytiia novoi obshcheobrazovatelnoi shkoly v gorode Tursunzade,
11 Sep. 2007, accessed at www.president.tj/rus/vistupleniy110907.htm#.
the fate of uzbek language 233

While the status of Uzbek in Tajikistans educational system is clearly


higher than in Turkmenistan, it encounters very serious problems.
Critics of Tajikistans policies in this area have claimed that Tajiki-
stani Uzbeks are subjected to discrimination, and that Tajik language
is being pushed on them aggressively. Some have even accused Tajiki-
stan of genocide.42 One Uzbek recounted the work of a commission
that had come to inspect an Uzbek-medium school as an example of
the aggressive policy: One of the commissions members took issue
with the use of Uzbek even on a bulletin board (stengazeta) devoted
to Uzbek literary figures. The following scene supposedly ensued as the
commission member allegedly upbraided an Uzbek literature teacher
at the school:
Commission member [CM] Do you know what country you are living in?
Teacher [T] . . . [silence]
CM: Didnt I ask you what country you are living in?
T: Tajikistan
CM: What language is the state language in Tajikistan?
T: Tajik
CM: So why is the bulletin board in Uzbek?
After this visit, the school was reportedly obliged to replace the Uzbek-
language materials with Tajik translations.43
Tajikistans poverty has meant inadequate funding for textbooks,
teacher salaries, heating and repairing schools. Sometimes parents
have not sent their children, especially girls, to school because they
(the children) lacked warm clothing and shoes, or because they were
needed to help earn a living for the family. In the early years of inde-
pendence, schools found informal channels to import Uzbek-language
textbooks from Uzbekistan, using their own school resources and
without any assistance from Uzbekistan.44 However, this became less
feasible as Tajikistans civil war aggravated that countrys poverty, and
as Uzbekistan began to print its textbooks in the Latin script. Further-
more, for certain subjects (especially history or other subjects with

42
A. Zununii, Spasenie repressiruemykhdelo ruk samikh repressirovannykh?
14 June 2007 www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1181817420.
43
Chingiz Boy, Siz qayerda yashayotganingizni bilasizmi? . . . Blog on BBCUzbek
.com, 14 Oct. 2009, accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/uzbek/news/story/2009/10
/091014_small_nations.shtml, accessed 4 Dec. 2009.
44
Olivier Ferrando, The Education of Minorities: Between State Policy, Ethnic
Framing and Individual Strategy, paper presented at Central Eurasian Studies Society
annual conference, Seattle, Oct. 2007.
234 william fierman

explicit and implicit promotion of Uzbekistani patriotism) these books


were ideologically unacceptable. Due to the lack of other options, some
schools continue to use textbooks published in the Soviet era.45
In recent years Tajikistan has undertaken some steps to address
the textbook problem, though funding for education in that coun-
try remains very limited. At the beginning of the 20072008 school
year an announcement hailed the printing of six new textbooks with a
total of 215,000 copies.46 It should be kept in mind, though, that this
achievement provided an average of less than one textbook per grade
level. Furthermore, there are indications that the design and quality of
Uzbek textbooks is inferior to those in Tajik.47
The Uzbek-language textbook situation is undoubtedly even more
serious in higher education. I have found no evidence that Tajikistan
continues to import any higher education textbooks from Uzbekistan
where, until quite recently, almost all educational materials in univer-
sities and institutes were still published with Cyrillic letters. It is highly
unlikely that Tajikistan could afford at this stage to publish Uzbek lan-
guage materials for universities and institutes. Indeed, instructors of
many subjects taught in Tajikistans universities in the Tajik language
are still obliged to assign their students Russian-language materials
because no Tajik translations have been published, or because they
are of poor quality.48
In considering availability and enrollment in Uzbek-medium classes
in Tajikistans educational system, it is important not to assume that
all of Tajikistans Uzbeks desire education in the Uzbek language. As
Olivier Ferrando argues, some Tajikistani Uzbeks express a preference
for Tajik-language instruction. In Ferrandos opinion, parents choos-
ing Tajik- over Uzbek-medium education for their children today may
simply be a matter of common sense.49

45
E-mail communication from Nasiba Mirpochoeva 1 Nov. 2009.
46
Vystuplenie Prezidenta Respubliki Tadzhikistan Emomali Rahmona na tser-
emonii otkrytiia novoi obshcheobrazovatelnoi shkoly v gorode Tursunzade,
11 Sep. 2007, accessed at www.president.tj/rus/vistupleniy110907.htm#. According to
an e-mail communication from Nasiba Mirpochoyeva, a new Uzbek-language math
textbook was published for 2009 (e-mail of 1 Nov. 2009).
47
See Christopher Whitsel, Growing Inequality: Post-Soviet Transition and Edu-
cational Participation in Tajikistan, unpublished PhD dissertation, Indiana Univer-
sity, 2009.
48
Whitsel, p. 44.
49
Olivier Ferrando, The Education of Minorities: Between State Policy, Ethnic
Framing and Individual Strategy, paper presented at Central Eurasian Studies Society
annual conference, Seattle, Oct. 2007.
the fate of uzbek language 235

For reasons described above, it appears that educational materials


produced in independent Uzbekistan occupy a small and decreasing
share of those in circulation in Tajikistan. The situation is very dif-
ferent in the case of mass media. Although Uzbek-language mass
media are produced within Tajikistanaccording to one report
tens of publications and newspapers50it appears that media from
Uzbekistan are of greater significance, especially in terms of elec-
tronic media. Evidence suggests that Uzbek-language media pub-
lished inside Tajikistan are less important than those which come
across the border. There are reportedly only three state-sponsored
Uzbek-language newspapers in Tajikistan.51 One of them is Soghd
haqiqati, which is published for Soghd Oblast.52 Very limited Uzbek-
language radio and television programming is produced in Tajiki-
stan. Until 2008 Tajikistan State Radio broadcast only one program
a day in Uzbek, a news program. In 2008, however, a new one-
hour Uzbek program with news, analysis, and cultural features was
created; although its primary target audience is Uzbek speakers
outside Tajikistan, it is also widely available inside the country.53 It
does not appear that any private radio stations regularly broadcast
in Uzbek from inside Tajikistan, although many offer their audiences
musical performances in Uzbek, as well as Turkish and other lan-
guages. One local informant reports that national State television reg-
ularly offers only one thirty-minute weekly Uzbek-language broadcast
per week; however, a local station in Tursunzoda broadcasts a quarter
of its programming in Uzbek.54

50
Farhodi Milod, Oghozi barrasii tarhi navi Qonuni zabon, 15 Sep. 2009, accessed
at http://www.ozodi.org/content/article/1823221.html, 8 November 2009.
51
Nosirjoni Mamurzoda, Tojikiston dar oyinai matbuoti kishvar, Radioi Ozodi,
6 March 2008, accessed http://www.ozodi.org/content/Tajikistan_press_review/1046413
.html, accessed 8 Nov. 2009.
52
The edition size for Soghd Haqiqati listed on the official Soghd Oblast website
is 2200. Other publications listed on the site with names that suggest they are also in
Uzbek are Tong (edition between 700 and 1500), Proletar tongi (1710), and Qishloq
hayoti (20002100). Two other publications which may be in Uzbek have names which
make it impossible to determine the language of publication, Mehnat and Zarbdor
(Rasonahoi khabariii chopii violoyat, website of the Sogd oblast executive committee,
http://www.sugd.tj/index.php?option=com_contentview=articleid=256:2009-02-24-
09-38-30catid=15:2008-11-19-04-39-51Itemid=10, accessed 9 Nov. 2009).
53
A recording of this program is repeated, thus providing fourteen hours of broad-
cast time in Uzbek. Special thanks for obtaining this information to Abdulfattoh
Shafiev.
54
Thanks to A. Shafiev for this information.
236 william fierman

Because of media coming into Tajikistan from Uzbekistan, the


above description far understates the availability of Uzbek-language
publications and programming in Tajikistan. A spring 2007 report on
a temporary ban on importation of publications from Uzbekistan into
Soghd Oblast quoted an oblast official who spoke of on the order
of twenty to thirty periodicals. It is likely that a substantial share of
these publications were in Uzbek. The Soghd Oblast ban was said to
be necessary because oblast authorities had not been informed how
the publications were being brought into Tajikistan, nor who was sell-
ing them.55According to another report, the penalty for unauthorized
import or sale of printed or electronic materials was to be up to five
years of imprisonment.56 It is unclear whether this regulation for-
mally remains in force. However, informants both in Khojand (Soghd
Oblasts capital) and in Dushanbe indicate that today Uzbek-language
publications from Uzbekistan are not hard to find.
Not long after announcement of the ban on import of periodicals,
police in Khojand allegedly began confiscating Uzbek music at the
central market, claiming the raid was being conducted on direct orders
of President Rahmon.57 The frontal attack on Uzbek music (i.e., pre-
sumably music imported from Uzbekistan) seems to have subsided
fairly quickly, within a year. Perhaps it is because the leadership of
Tajikistan came to recognize quickly the difficulty of preventing dis-
tribution of DVDs and CVDs with recordings from Uzbekistan, and
that even an effective ban on importing would not stop viewers and

55
Untitled report under rubric Aktualno, 31 May 2007, originally provided by
regnum.ru, accessed through Obzor tsentralnoi Azii, http://www.c-asia.org/akt/index
.php?cont=longid=2748year=2007today=31month=05. The official cited in this report,
an employee of the oblast organization or Tojikmatbuot (Tajik Press) stated that in
the future, those supplying and selling the publications would need to receive per-
mission after providing information required by the Tajikistan Ministry of Culture
(Natsionalnaia Assotsiatsiia nezavisimykh SMI Tadzhikistana, Monitoring narushenii
svobody slova v Tadzhikistane v mae 2007 goda, accessed at http://www.nansmit.tj
/monitoring/?id=49).
56
S. Khikmatov, Polnyi khaos, ili absoliutnaia tadzhikizatsiia Tadzhikistana,
Obzor tsentralnoi Azii 25 Sep. 2007, accessed at http://www.c-asia.org/post/index
.php?cont=longid=9938year=2. Although Khikmatov implies the regulations on the
press from Uzbekistan affected the entire country, another source refers to the restric-
tions only in the context of Soghd Oblast (Natsionalnaia Assotsiatsiia nezavisimykh
SMI Tadzhikistana, Monitoring narushenii svobody slova v Tadzhikistane v mae 2007
goda, accessed at http://www.nansmit.tj/monitoring/?id=49).
57
S. Sanginov, Chakmok chakar: V Tadzhikistane zapretili pesni na uzbekskom
iazyke, 14 Aug. 2007 accessed on 8 Nov. 2009 at http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA
.php?st=1187950860.
the fate of uzbek language 237

listeners near Tajikistans borders with Uzbekistan from viewing pro-


grams from the neighboring country. This is especially true in parts of
some of Tajikistans largest cities and nearby areas with large ethnic
Uzbek populationsKonibodom, Khojand, and Tursunzodawhere
it is possible to watch two Uzbekistan television channels, Ozbekiston
and Yoshlar.58 In some cases, audiences in Tajikistan even participate
in call-in shows broadcast from the other side of the border.59 In many
areas reception is good enough that no special antenna is required.
Those living further from the border who have the means sometimes
install dishes to watch television from Uzbekistan.
Local media inside Tajikistan have warned that the popularity of
electronic media from Uzbekistan is a problem. One report illustrat-
ing this tells of a school child in one of the border areas where the
population often tunes in to Uzbek television. When the school child
was asked to name the president of Tajikistan he named Islam Kari-
mov (president of Uzbekistan). Radio from Uzbekistan, presumably in
Uzbek, is also said to be very popular.60 Besides radio and television,
and whether in violation of import regulations or not, DVDs with
Uzbek films and musical clips are very popular items at markets in
many places in Tajikistan.
It is worth noting that the standard literary Uzbek used in radio and
television broadcasts from Uzbekistan is much closer to most of the
Uzbek spoken in Tajikistan (and Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) than it is
to the dialects used in Turkmenistan. This may contribute to penetra-
tion of Uzbekistans mass media into Tajikistan (and Kyrgyzstan and
Kazakhstan), in a way that it does not contribute in Turkmenistan.

7.4.3. Kyrgyzstan
Although Kyrgyzstan did not suffer a civil war, in some important ways
the context affecting the Uzbek language in Kyrgyzstan is similar to
that in Tajikistan. One important reason may be the approximate share
of the two states respective Uzbek population. According to official

58
I thank Farruh Yusupov for providing the information on reception of Uzbeki-
stan-based television.
59
Khurshedi Hamdam, Nigaronii az amniyati fazoi ittilooti Radioi Ozodi 25 Sep.
2009, http://www.ozodi.org/content/article/1836431.html, accessed on 9 Nov. 2009.
60
See Khurshedi Hamdam, Nigaronii az amniyati fazoi ittilooti Radioi Ozodi
25 Sep. 2009, http://www.ozodi.org/content/article/1836431.html, accessed on 9 Nov.
2009.
238 william fierman

data, Uzbeks comprise about 13 to 14 percent of Kyrgyzstans popula-


tion. As in Turkmenistan and Tajikistan the actual size of the Uzbek
population is contested: some representatives of the Kyrgyzstans Uzbek
community claim that the size is in the range of 20 percent.61 In any
case, like in Tajikistan, the share of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstans population
is much larger than the share in Turkmenistan. Furthermore, unlike
in Turkmenistan, the Uzbek populations in both Tajikistan and Kyr-
gyzstan live near densely populated regions in the heart of Uzbekistan
(i.e., near heavy concentrations of their co-ethnics speaking something
close to the Uzbek literary standard of Uzbekistans Ferghana Valley
and near Tashkent, Uzbekistans capital). Both Tajikistan and Kyr-
gyzstan are poormuch poorer than Turkmenistanand, also unlike
Turkmenistan, their geography makes them both very dependent on
Uzbekistan. Geography also makes it much more difficult for authori-
ties in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan to maintain control over what crosses
their borders. The political regimes in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
are authoritarian; however, the level of state control of mass media and
education in these two countries is far less than in Turkmenistan.
One of the most important differences between Tajikistan and
Kyrgyzstan is the status of the Russian language in the two countries; this
inevitably also affects the status of Uzbek. Despite the decline of Russians
status in both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan over the last twenty years, Rus-
sian legally has enjoyed the status of official language in Kyrgyzstan;
it is also the language of a much larger Russian ethnic minority in
Kyrgyzstan than in Tajikistan (about 10 percent in Kyrgyzstan com-
pared to only 1 to 2 percent in Tajikistan), and is the dominant lan-
guage for a large share of ethnic Kyrgyz in northern regions of the
country. This is not to imply that Russian is unimportant in Tajikistan.
It is indeed important there, despite recent moves by Tajikistans leader
to curtail the domains of use for Russian. Among the key reasons that
Russian remains particularly important in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan
(as well as Uzbekistan) is that many of their able-bodied citizens go to
Russia (and Kazakhstan) to seek employment, and send back remit-
tances that are critical for the national economy.

61
Alisher Khamidov, Kak vosstanovit uzy doveriia: uzbekskaia obshchina i vlast
v Kyrgyzstane, accessed at www.ipp.kg/ru/analysis/294/. This chapter was written
before the spring 2010 inter-ethnic violence between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in southern
Kyrgyzstan. Conditions for the Uzbek language in Kyrgyzstan have greatly deterio-
rated since then.
the fate of uzbek language 239

Like their counterparts in Tajikistan, Uzbek children in post-Soviet


Kyrgyzstan have continued to have considerable access to schools and
classes with Uzbek-medium instruction. As of 20042005, 13.5 percent
of Kyrgyzstans school children attended Uzbek-medium classes.62 If
one accepts official government data that Uzbeks are under 14 percent
of the countrys population, it appears that the overwhelming majority
of Kyrgyzstans Uzbek pupils are in Uzbek-medium classes. Indeed,
even if Uzbeks comprise 20 percent of Kyrgyzstans population, most
Uzbek children still likely attend Uzbek-medium classes. Although
the share of pupils in Uzbek schools appears to have remained fairly
steady, prominent representatives of Kyrgyzstans Uzbek community
have complained that the authorities in their country have reduced the
number of schools offering Uzbek-medium education.63
As in Tajikistan, graduates of secondary schools in Kyrgyzstan have
some options, though limited, to continue their education at the univer-
sity level in Uzbek groups. One of the institutions where this is possible
is the Kyrgyz-Uzbek University in Osh. Some of the students at this
institution study in such fields as education, history, political science,
Uzbek literature, and journalism in Uzbek.64 The other major institution
with Uzbek-language groups is the Friendship of the Peoples University
in Jalalabad. In fall 2009, 226 students (out of the total university enroll-
ment of 1,480) were studying in Uzbek. These students were in the fields
of education, Uzbek language, and Uzbek literature.65
In the first years after the Soviet collapse Uzbek schools in Kyr-
gyzstan, like those in Tajikistan, continued through informal chan-
nels to obtain books from Uzbekistan.66 However, as in Tajikistan, this
became undesirable for ideological reasons, and later unfeasible after
Uzbekistan shifted textbook publication to Latin.
Leaders of the Uzbek community in Kyrgyzstan have claimed that
the number one problem in Uzbek schools is textbooks. Not until
20062007 did Kyrgyzstans Ministry of Education allocate money for

62
F.I. Ryskulueva and E.V. Kazarinova, O sostoianiii i putiakh razvitiia
Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki, Obrazovanie v SNG. Problemy i perspektivy, no. 1 (Jan.) 2005,
accessed Nov. 11, 2009 through http://cis.bsu.by/second.aspx?uid=50type=Article.
63
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Voprosy obrazovaniiapredmet dlia obsuzhdeniia,
no ne dlia spekuliatsii, 4 Sep. 2009, http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6128.
64
Personal e-mail communication from Ilhomjon Abdullaev, 25 Nov. 2009. The
situation appears to have changed since 2002 when, according to Ferrando, only the
pedagogical faculty offered education in Uzbek.
65
Personal e-mail communication from Jyldyz Aknazarova 25 Nov. 2009.
66
Ferrando, The Education of Minorities . . ..
240 william fierman

publishing a textbook for Uzbek-medium schools.67 However, local


Uzbek public organizations have been active in this area for a lon-
ger time. The Jalalabad branch of the Uzbek National Cultural Center
(UNCC) undertook publication activity in 1996, but this stopped in
2000. Meanwhile, in 1998, on the initiative of the UNCC a Center for
the Publication of Uzbek-Language Textbooks (CPULT) at the Kyrgyz-
Uzbek University in Osh began operation. It started with publica-
tion of fifty Uzbek textbooks for the first through fourth grades, and
planned to publish another 164 titles for secondary schools, along with
80 methods books for teachers [metodicheskie posobiia] and 38 sets
of curricula [uchebnye programmy].68 By 2004 the total print run of
Uzbek textbooks produced by this center was 250,000;69 by 2007, this
center had published practically the entire set [komplekt] of textbooks
for primary schools.70 According to Ferrando, tight funding has
constrained publication, which the publisher has passed on to parents.
The high cost of the books has put the books beyond the means of
many families.71 Despite these problems, this center was still operating
a decade after its founding.72
Kyrgyzstan education officials have on occasion proudly pointed to
data suggesting that the textbook situation for Uzbek schools has in
large measure been resolved. For example, an official of the Kyrgyz
Ministry of Education claimed that as of 2004, the supply textbooks
for Uzbek-medium schools had reached 75.2 percent of need (obes-
pechechennost shkol uchebnikami), more than a 5 percent increase
over 1999. Indeed, according to the official, the 2004 figure lagged

67
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Uzbekskaia obshchestvennost Kirgizii pytaetsia
samostoiatelno reshit problemy shkolnogo obrazovaniia, http://www.ferghana.ru
/article.php?id=4983.
68
Data are from a website of the Kyrgyz-Uzbek University. It is not possible to
ascertain the date when this was written, but it appears to be no earlier than 2005.
(http://www.kuu.kg/struktura-universiteta/Obschie_svedeniya). In any case, it appears
that original plans for publication had to be scaled back. A report which appears to
have been written in 2003 stated that the center was to have published 150 titles of
textbooks by 2005.
69
OshKUU: Uchebniki dlia shkol . . . Vsiak sushchii v nei iazyk, Ekho Osha May,
2004, accessed on 12 Nov. 2009 through www.echoosha.narod.ru/May04/uchebnik
.htm.
70
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Uzbekskaia obshchestvennost Kirgizii pytaetsia
samostoiatelno reshit problemy shkolnogo obrazovaniia, http://www.ferghana.ru
/article.php?id=4983, 16 March 2007.
71
Ferrando, The Education of Minorities . . .
72
Personal visit to center, June 2008.
the fate of uzbek language 241

only 8 percent behind the indicator for Kyrgyz schools, 83 percent.73


In fact, in 2006 the governor of Jalalabad Oblast claimed that that
Uzbek schools were actually better supplied with textbooks than
Kyrgyz schools.74 These claims, however, must be viewed with great
skepticism, both in terms of the statistics presented and the quality of
the books. As for the numbers, a 2008 report stated that textbooks in
Kyrgyz-medium satisfied only 39 percent of need, just over half the
figure cited two years previously!75 Whatever the number, the qual-
ity of the Uzbek books is also questionable. One member of parlia-
ment speaking in 2007 claimed that some of the books still in use in
use in Uzbek schools were left over from before independence and
so contained not only the ideology of Uzbekistan, but Soviet ideol-
ogy as well . . .76 There is also a quality problem with some of the new
textbooks. According to one report, some of the new books issued by
CPULT contain mistakes.77
Against the background of overall decline of education in Kyrgyz-
stan, there is a widespread perception, especially in the north of the
country, that Russian-medium schools are superior to both the Kyrgyz-
and Uzbek-medium ones. Indeed, this perception is probably justified.
One of the reasons concerns availability of better textbooks in Russian.
This has prompted a number of leaders in Kyrgyzstans Uzbek com-
munity to suggest that in the current situation, Uzbeks would be bet-
ter off if much of their education were in Russian. This is the opinion
of Kadyrzhan Batyrov, founder and patron of the Friendship of the
Peoples University in Jalalabad, someone who has repeatedly spoken

73
F.I. Ryskulueva and E.V. Kazarinova, O sostoianiii i putiakh razvitiia Kyrgyzskoi
Respubliki, Obrazovanie v SNG. Problemy i perspektivy No. 1 (Jan) 2005, accessed
Nov. 11, 2009 through http://cis.bsu.by/second.aspx?uid=50type=Article.
74
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Uzbekskaia obshchestvennost Kirgizii pytaetsia
samostoiatelno reshit problemy shkolnogo obrazovaniia, http://www.ferghana.ru
/article.php?id=4983.
75
Pri Ministerstve obrazovaniia i nauki budet sozdan tsentr po sozdaniiu
uchebnikov, Novosti Kyrgyzstana, 7 April 2008, accessed http://www.for.kg/goid
.php?id=62098print.
76
A school director, responding to the member of parliament, stated that impor-
tation of textbooks from Uzbekistan had ceased a few years earlier. Abdumomun
Mamaraimov, Uzbekskaia obshchestvennost Kirgizii pytaetsia samostoiatelno reshit
problemy shkolnogo obrazovaniia, http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=4983,
16 March 2007.
77
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Uzbekskaia obshchestvennost Kirgizii pytaetsia
samostoiatelno reshit problemy shkolnogo obrazovaniia, http://www.ferghana.ru
/article.php?id=4983, 16 March 2007.
242 william fierman

out on the need to raise the status of Uzbek in Kyrgyzstan. To help


promote Russian-medium education for Kyrgyzstans Uzbeks, Baty-
rov has secured support from the government of Russia, which he
says is willing to finance a center at his university to prepare teach-
ers (presumably to teach in the Russian language) for Uzbek schools
in Kyrgyzstan. Batyrov favors teaching the basic school subjects
[osnovnye shkolnye predmety] in Russian, while raising the teaching
of Uzbek and Kyrgyz languages as school subjects to an entirely new
level.78 To those who think he may be adopting a stand unfavorable
to his own language he responds, Our initiatives do not at all mean
turning our backs on our own native language. The preservation and
development of the Uzbek language will remain one of the main direc-
tions of activity both of the Uzbek National Cultural Center and our
university.79
Uzbek language is very prominent in the mass media available in
south Kyrgyzstan. However, its prominence owes more to products
coming from Uzbekistan than from what is produced inside Kyrgyz-
stan. Although a number of Uzbek-language newspapers are published
inside Kyrgyzstan, their editions are small and some appear only irreg-
ularly. Osh sadosi, which may have the largest circulation and be the
most regular, prints only 2,500 copies; and some of the others, such as
Mezon, Axborot and DDD have runs of 1,000 or less. In 2009, a new
Uzbek-language newspaper named Pozitsiia appeared.80 Even though
print media do not move across borders as easily as radio and televi-
sion signals, Uzbek-language newspapers are brought into Kyrgyzstan
from Uzbekistan and are said to be very popular; according to one
report this is because they carry television program schedules, jokes,
crossword puzzles, and news in Uzbek.81
The electronic media situation with domestically and Uzbekistan-
produced broadcasts, is generally parallel to that for newspapers and

78
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Voprosy obrazovaniiapredmet dlia obsuzhdeniia,
no ne dlia spekuliatsii, 4 Sep. 2009, http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6128.
79
Abdumomun Mamaraimov, Voprosy obrazovaniiapredmet dlia obsuzhdeniia,
no ne dlia spekuliatsii, 4 Sep. 2009, http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=6128.
80
Pozitsiia ozbekcha chiqa boshladi, Ozodlik radiosi 7 May 2009, http://www
.ozodlik.org/content/article/1623436.html. For a list of newspapers published in Osh
as of March 2008, including Uzbek ones, see Pechatnye izdaniia, http://osh.kg/index
.php?Itemid=316&id=59&option=com_content&task=view.
81
Uzbekskii iazyk v Kirgizii: Faktor riska, Report.kg, 20 May 2009, http://www
.report.kg/analitic/269-uzbekskijj-jazyk-v-kirgizii-faktor-riska.html, accessed 11 Nov
2009.
the fate of uzbek language 243

journals; however, Kyrgyzstani Uzbek electronic media seem to be


somewhat more successful than printed ones.82 The two most popu-
lar channels broadcasting a substantial share of their programming in
Uzbek are Osh TV and Mezon TV. As of 2007, the non-Uzbek broad-
casts of these stations were mostly or entirely in Russian;83 however, in
mid-2008 Kyrgyzstan adopted a law on television and radio broadcast-
ing which mandated that as of some date in the fairly near future, over
half of all broadcasts would have to be in Kyrgyz.84 Representatives
of stations broadcasting primarily in Russian and/or Uzbek claimed
that this would drive them out of business, since there was insufficient
Kyrgyz-language programming for viewers to watch, and it would be
expensive to produce it quickly in sufficient quantities.85
The channels broadcasting in Uzbek from Uzbekistan are, of course,
less under Bishkeks control than those inside Kyrgyzstan. Moreover,
at least in the south of Kyrgyzstan they appear to be much more
popular, especially among Uzbeks, than anything broadcast domesti-
cally. Three main Uzbekistan channels are said to constantly broad-
cast Uzbek translations of television serials, which are fantastically
popular, not only in Uzbekistan, but in the south of Kirgizia, even
among ethnic Kirgiz. One can tell this from everyday conversations
on the street, at work, and at evening social gatherings. In addition,
viewers in various southern areas of Kyrgyzstan can watch oblast tele-
vision from Uzbekistans neighboring cities of Andijan, Ferghana,
and Namangan. In some mountainous areas of Kyrgyzstan viewers
can watch television channels from Russia and Uzbekistan, but none
that are broadcast from within their own country.86 The picture with
regard to radio is similar. The majority of [Kyrgyzstans] southerners,
regardless of their ethnic membership [prinadlezhnost], are said to be
more familiar with the Uzbek radio stations Ekho doliny, Zamin,

82
This may, however, just reflect a greater popularity of electronic than print media.
83
A. Mamaraimov, V Kirgizii nabliudaetsia ekspansiia uzbekskoi kultury.
Chto predprimut vlasti? Ferghana.ru, 24 July 2007 http://www.ferghana.ru/article
.php?id=5247, accessed 13 Nov. 2009.
84
O novykh resheniiakh prezidenta Kirgizii, DW-World.de, 3 June 2008, accessed
at http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=5247 on 13 Nov. 2009.
85
Kyrgyz Authorities to Cut Uzbek Language Programs, Ferghana.ru, 13 Aug.
2008, http://enews.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=2446 accessed, 14 Nov. 2009.
86
Despite its Russian name, Ekho doliny broadcasts not only in Russian, but
Uzbek as well (A. Mamaraimov, V Kirgizii nabliudaetsia ekspansiia uzbekskoi
kultury. Chto predprimut vlasti? Ferghana.ru 24 July 2007 http://www.ferghana.ru
/article.php?id=5247, accessed 13 Nov. 2009).
244 william fierman

Diydor and others than they are with the Kyrgyzstan stations, whose
broadcasts are mainly in Russian.87
Uzbek DVDs and CDs are said to enjoy unprecedented popularity
in the south of Kyrgyzstan, and are sold and rented throughout Kyr-
gyzstan, even in the north. According to one report, even in Bishkek,
where Russian language dominates, the kiosks that rent or sell films
dont offer customers new Uzbek films to buy as a last choice. [These
films] are increasingly squeezing western hits and Russian films out of
the market, which come to the region in smaller numbers than the pro-
duction of Uzbekfilm. In the words of the compact disks sellers on
every corner of large and mid-sized towns . . . Kyrgyz people buy Uzbek
films as much as Uzbeks do. This is even though all the films from
Uzbekistan come in Uzbek [postupaiut na uzbekskom iazyke].88
This would suggest that even if a significantly larger share of Uzbeks
begins to attend schools in Russian, the Uzbek language may be hold-
ing its own or expanding its domains in the south of Kyrgyzstan. In
the opinion of an ethnic Bashkir journalist in Osh, the Uzbek and
Kyrgyz languages are so mixed up in Kyrgyzstans south that local
Kyrgyz simply cannot get by without a knowledge of the everyday
Uzbek language.89 It appears that electronic media are playing an
important role in the growing knowledge of Uzbek among Kyrgyz,
who are said to speak better Uzbek today than five years ago and be
more tolerant towards Uzbek, less often insisting that Uzbeks speak
in Kyrgyz.90
Despite this reported tolerance, many of my own informal conversa-
tions with Kyrgyz in Kyrgyzstan have revealed a sense of alarm about
expansion of Uzbek culture and language. Many Kyrgyz are extremely
worried by repeated demands that Uzbek be made a state language,

87
A. Mamaraimov, V Kirgizii nabliudaetsia ekspansiia uzbekskoi kultury.
Chto predprimut vlasti? Ferghana.ru 24 July 2007 http://www.ferghana.ru/article
.php?id=5247, accessed 13 Nov. 2009.
88
One of the signs of these films popularity is said to be the posters with pictures
of Uzbek stars in any kiosk or office supply shop. (A. Mamaraimov, V Kirgizii
nabliudaetsia ekspansiia uzbekskoi kultury. Chto predprimut vlasti? Ferghana.ru
24 July 2007 http://www.ferghana.ru/article.php?id=5247, accessed 13 Nov. 2009).
89
Uzbekskii iazyk v Kirgizii: Faktor riska, Report.kg, 20 May 2009, http://www
.report.kg/analitic/269-uzbekskijj-jazyk-v-kirgizii-faktor-riska.html, accessed 11 Nov.
2009.
90
A. Mamaraimov, V Kirgizii nabliudaetsia ekspansiia uzbekskoi kultury.
Chto predprimut vlasti? (Ferghana.ru 24 July 2007 http://www.ferghana.ru/article
.php?id=5247, accessed 13 Nov. 2009).
the fate of uzbek language 245

at least on a regional basis in Kyrgyzstan.91 Some view the demands,


which were openly voiced even before independence,92 as a step towards
regional autonomy, one that could eventually lead to Kyrgyzstans loss
of control over southern regions of the country. In fact, however, as
Fumagalli notes, only a small fraction of Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks appear
to be attracted by separation, let alone incorporation into the neigh-
boring state of Uzbekistan.93 However, under certain circumstances,
a certain political constituency might appropriate a confrontational
frame to language.94 If this were to happen, language could become
an important dimension of struggle and a potent symbol.

7.4.4. Kazakhstan
Like Uzbeks in Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan, Uzbeks of
Kazakhstan for the most part inhabit areas of their country imme-
diately contiguous to Uzbekistan. However, the situation of Uzbeks
in Kazakhstan is very different from those in the other three coun-
tries. One of the reasons is that Kazakhstans economy has performed
much better than those of other Central Asian states. Another impor-
tant reason is that in Kazakhstan, Uzbeks constitute a small though
growing minority of the countrys total population. In 1989 Uzbeks
comprised about 2 percent of Kazakhstans population, by 1999 almost
2.5 percent, and in 2008, 2.9 percent.95 Related to this is the fact that
another of Kazakhstans ethnic minoritiesthe Russiansfar outnum-
ber Kazakhs. Around 90 percent of Kazakhstans Uzbeks live in South
Kazakhstan Oblast (SKO); most of the rest are in Zhambyl Oblast

91
Vlasti Kirgizii sozdali karmannoe obshchestvo uzbekov v protivoves Uzbekskomu
natsionalno-kulturnomu tsentry, Ferghana.ru, 6 Sept. 2006 http://www.ferghana
.ru/article.php?id=4578, accessed 14 Nov. 2009. For a discussion of demands see
Mononatsionalnoe upravlenie ne opravdalo sebia . . . (k voprosu o meste uzbekskogo
iazyka v Kyrgyzstane), http://www.analitika.org/article.php?story=20060613004734479,
accessed 14 Nov. 2009.
92
Eugene Huskey, The Politics of Language in Kyrgyzstan, Nationalities Papers
vol. 23, no. 3 (Sep. 1995), pp. 558-9.
93
Matteo Fumagalli, Framing Ethnic Minority Mobilisation in Central Asia: The
Case of Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, Europe-Asia Studies vol. 59, no. 4 (June
2007), pp. 582-4.
94
Fumagalli Framing . . ., p. 588. This indeed occurred in spring 2010.
95
Qazaqstan Respublikasynyng statistika zhonindegi agenttigi, Qazaqstan Res-
publikasy khalqynyng ulttyq quramy (Tom 1). Almaty, 2008, pp. 6-8 and Qazaqstan
Respublikasynyng statistika zhonindegi agenttigi, Qazaqstannyng demografiyalyq zhyl-
namalygy, Astana 2008, p. 26. These figures are cited for the beginning of 2008.
246 william fierman

and other oblasts in Kazakhstans south. Although Uzbeks comprise


almost two-thirds of the population of Sayram Raion96 and over half
the population of the town of Turkistan, they represent under 20 per-
cent of the SKOs total population.97
Available data suggest that most Uzbek children attend Uzbek-
medium schools, and that this has remained the case since indepen-
dence. In 19951996, for example, approximately 2.3 percent of all
school children in Kazakhstan attended Uzbek-medium classes.98 In
2003 the analogous figure was 2.8 percent;99 Savin provides the figure of
3.1 percent for 2009.100
Without much closer examination, it is impossible to know the
quality of the textbooks available for Uzbek-medium primary and
secondary schools in Kazakhstan, especially the quality of translation.
However, the situation in Kazakhstan appears to be much better than
in Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. The price list of the publisher Mektep,
which produces many of the books for Kazakhstans schools, offers
80 titles of textbooks, manuals, workbooks, etc. for the tenth grade
of Uzbek schools, and approximately the same number for the elev-
enth grade.101 Although the cost of production is undoubtedly more
per book than for Kazakh or Russian books (printed in much larger
runs), the publishers pricelist for the Uzbek (and Uyghur) books indi-
cates identical costs for Uzbek (and Russian and Kazakh) versions of

96
Sayram audany Qazaqstan ulttyq entsiklopediya, vol. 7, p. 521 (2005).
97
Nurtai Mustafaev, Osobennosti etnicheskogo sostava naseleniia Kazakhstana,
Demoskop Weekly, nos. 235-236, 20 Feb.5 March 2006, accessed 3 December 2009
at http://demoscope.ru/weekly/2006/0235/analit09.php. Savin places the share of
Uzbeks in the oblast population at 20 percent; however, the 1999 census shows under
17 percent, a figure cited by Uzbeki Kazakhstana . . . (Igor Savin, Etnichnost kak
faktor povsednevnoi zhizni v selskikh raionakh Iuzhnogo Kazakhstana, Neprikos-
novennyi zapas, no. 4 (66), 2009, accessed through http://www.centrasia.ru/newsA
.php?st=1258925460; Uzbeki Kazakhstana i kazakhi Uzbekistana. Diasporyeto
khorosho, no topornyi podkhod Tashkenta k granitsamplokho, Kontinent, 18
Oct. 2002 accessed at www.centrasia.ru/newsA.php?st=1034910480).
98
Data provided by the Kazakhstan Ministry of Education and Science.
99
Nauka i obrazovanie, Ofitsialnyi sayt Prezidenta Respubliki Kazakhstan,
http://www.akorda.kz/www/www_akorda_kz.nsf/sections?OpenFormid_doc=0E6CE6
88C288B389462572340019E827lang=ru.
100
Savin qualifies his data saying this refers to secondary schools supported by the
state budget. Because the number of private schools is very small, we can assume that
the figure of 3.1 is close to that for all schools (Etnichnost kak faktor . . .).
101
Price list for Mektep Publishers at mektep.kz. The numbers vary slightly between
the respective tracks for humanities and math/science, each of which has some unique
books of its own.
the fate of uzbek language 247

books; thus, production costs do not seem to be passed on to stu-


dents in a way that disadvantages them relative to their counterparts in
Russian- and Kazakh-medium schools.102
Those who study in Uzbek-medium schools suffer some disadvan-
tages if they seek to proceed to higher education. One reason is that
available evidence suggests that only one educational institution, the
Kazakh-Uzbek Humanitarian University (established in 1999), has
ever offered a higher education in the Uzbek language in independent
Kazakhstan, and that this has been discontinued.103 Today students
completing Uzbek- and other minority-language schools are permitted
to take the exam which offers the most direct route to higher educa-
tion; however, even now it is offered only in Kazakh and Russian.104
Uzbek-language mass media are available in Kazakhstan, both
domestically produced and from Uzbekistan. In 1991, as the USSR was
collapsing, an official Uzbek-language oblast newspaper was opened in
Shymkent (today South Kazakhstan) Oblast.105 Since then, and espe-
cially in the last decade, the volume of Uzbek-language mass media

102
A report at the beginning of 2007 referred to an apparently recent meeting
between representatives of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan where the sides reached agree-
ment on the exchange of textbooks for Uzbek schools in Kazakhstan and Kazakh
schools in Uzbekistan. (Den nezavisimosti Respubliki Kazakhstan, Official Site of
the Embassy of the Republic of Kazakhstan in the Republic of Uzbekistan, 31 Jan.
2007, accessed at http://kazembassy.uz/press-show-19.html 18 Nov. 2009. If true, this
is a very strange development, given that textbooks for Uzbekistans Uzbek-medium
schools are in a different alphabet from those in Kazakhstan.
103
Personal communication from Shakhnoza Yakubova.
104
A survey referred to in a 2007 report suggests that few Uzbeks or Uyghurs would
be likely to take the Kazakh or Russian version of the exam even if permitted, since
they recognize their skills in the language of the exam are inferior. (Liubov Dobrota,
Tolko trinadtsat protsentov vypusknikov uzbekskikh shkol Shymkenta vyskazalis za
uchastie v edinnom natsionalnom testirovanii, Kazakhstanskaia pravda, 13 March
2007, reproduced http://www.assembly.kz/idea_lang_stat.shtml?f=showtype=31id=14
3763869873). On the other hand, some spokesmen who were calling for the change
in regulation said that minority parents and pupils were not demanding privileges
and were not afraid to take the exam in Kazakh or Russian, despite the fact that
they received their education in their native language (A. Tilivaldi, Vypuskniki
uigurskikh shkol v Kazakhstane lisheny prava uchastiia v edinom natsionalnom tes-
tirovanii, 1 April 2008, Voice of Freedom, accessed through http://www.centrasia.ru
/newsA.php?st=1207077540).
105
N. Oka, Transnationalism As a Threat to State Security? Case Studies on
Uighurs and Uzbeks in Kazakhstan, in Empire, Islam, and Politics in Central Eurasia
(Sapporo, Japan: Slavic Research Center, 2007) accessed 18 Nov. 2009 through http://
src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/coe21/publish/no14_ses/14_oka.pdf. p. 354. As Oka also
points out, even before this Uzbek-language local papers were printed in Turkestan
and in Sairam raion.
248 william fierman

produced in Kazakhstan appears to have increased considerably,


reflecting, as Natsuko Ota has noted, the growing distance between
the Uzbek communities in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.106 This phe-
nomenon is also reflected in a 2005 statement by the chairman of
a Kazakhstan-based Uzbek cultural center who told Radio Liberty
that in recent years, cultural relations with Uzbekistan have totally
ceased.107 Today a considerable variety of Uzbek print publications
appear in Kazakhstan, some with articles in more than one language,
and some for special audiences, such as Maktabdosh, which made its
debut in 2001 with a target audience of school children.108 Some of the
publications have fairly large press runs, such as the oblast paper Janu-
biy Qozogiston and the raion paper Sayram oqshomi, with reported
editions of 10,000 and 6,318, respectively.109
Kazakhstan Uzbeks also have a state-supported oblast drama theatre
(in Sayram) which was established in 2003. Amateur Uzbek literary
clubs active in SKO are another indication of the vitality of the Uzbek
language on the oblasts cultural scene.110
Uzbek radio and television broadcasts from inside Kazakhstan are
very limited, with programs produced in Sayram and Shymkent. Even
this appears to be subject to interruption: a recent reference to an
Uzbek-language broadcast on oblast television is said to have stopped
(perhaps temporarily) due to the lack of sponsors.111
Although only a limited number of Kazakhstan-based radio and
television stations provide regular Uzbek-language programming,
it appears that media produced inside Uzbekistan have a very large

106
On this, see Oka Natsuko, Transnationalism . . .
107
Mehribon, Qozogiston ozbeklari qanday yashayapti? Ozodlik Radiosi, 3 Oct.
2005, accessed through http://www.ozodlik.org/content/article/1311358.html on 18
Nov. 2009.
108
V IuKO poiavilas novaia gazeta na uzbekskom iazyke, Kazakhstan Today,
10 May 2001, accessed 18 Nov. 2009 through http://newspaper.kz/art.asp?aid=1105.
109
Data taken from Gazetter, accessed at http://ontustik.kz/files-kz/ataposting
/222/gazet kaz.doc). Another source provides somewhat different figures on size
of editions, i.e., 8,000 for Janubiy Qozogiston and 7,000 for Sayram sadosi (SMI
Kazakhstana, http://www.adilsoz.kz/smi/ accessed 18 Nov. 2009). There are also dis-
crepancies between the sources on frequency of publication, but the data in Gazetter
seem more plausible, namely that these papers are respectively issued twice and once
weekly.
110
Mehribon Bekieva, Janubiy Qozoghistonda ananaviy Nazm yulduzlari
anjumani bolib otdi, Ferghana.ru, 24 Nov. 2006. http://uzbek.ferghana.ru/article
.php?id=671, accessed 18 Nov. 2009.
111
V IuKO proshel respublikanskii kurultai uzbekkov, Kazakhstan segodnia, 12
June 2008, accessed through http://www.nomad.su/?a=19-200806130516, 18 Nov.
2009.
the fate of uzbek language 249

audience in Kazakhstan. In the areas closest to the border between


Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, it is possible to listen to stations from
Tashkent without any special antenna.112 However, even with a fairly
inexpensive antenna or dish it is possible to watch programs broadcast
from Tashkent in the vicinity of all of major areas of Uzbek settle-
ment in KazakhstanSayram, Shymkent, and Turkistan. DVDs with
Uzbek films and music are plentiful at the markets in SKO and, despite
the statement cited above regarding attenuation of cultural contacts
between Uzbeks in Kazakhstan and those in Uzbekistan, it appears
that it is not difficult to find a variety of publications in Shymkent that
have been imported from Uzbekistan.113

7.5. Prospects for Uzbek in Education and Media, and


Implications for Use in Informal Domains

As demonstrated above, the status of Uzbek language in education


and media has undergone great change in the other former repub-
lics of Central Asia. However, the situation in each country is unique,
reflecting a particular constellation of geographical, political, economic,
social, cultural, and linguistic factors. In this section we will reconsider
the trends identified above, with a view to assessing whether things are
likely to change, and whether the future trends suggest that Uzbek as a
family language in other republics of Central Asia might be at risk.

7.5.1. Tajikistan
Besides being the poorest former Soviet country in the region, Tajiki-
stan has the most difficult job in disentangling its history and culture
from that of Uzbekistan, which in turn seeks to minimize the role of
Iranian-speaking peoples historical contribution to development in
the region. The debates between the two countries based in the regions
history aggravate other disagreements on current political, economic,

112
Indeed, in some villages of Kazakhstan near the border, the only television pro-
gramming available without a special antenna or other device is from Uzbekistan
(V aulakh, kuda ne dokhodit kazakhskoe televidenie, populiarny uzbekskie tele-
kanaly, Radio Azattyq, 15 Oct. 2009, accessed at http://rus.azattyq.org/content
/Zhinishke_village_TV/1851097.html 19 Nov. 2009.
113
It is unlikely that there is much interest in the publications that carry official
news, but publications about music, fashion, and health are likely much more popular.
(Local sources reporting by e-mail from Shymkent.)
250 william fierman

and environmental issues.114 In such an atmosphere, large-scale coop-


eration between the two countries in the field of education is hard
to imagine: Tajikistan is unlikely to use Uzbek-language educational
materials from Uzbekistan (even if the Uzbek language of Tajikistan
should shift to the Latin alphabet), and higher education in Uzbeki-
stans universities is unlikely to become widely available for citizens
of Tajikistan.
Uzbek-medium higher education in Tajikistan will likely continue
to suffer even more than Tajik-language higher education. Some par-
ents who aspire for their children to attend universities are bound to
consider this in choosing the language of education for their offspring.
In some cases, where available, they will choose to send children to a
Russian-medium school. Some others, hoping that a solid knowledge
of Tajikistans state language will offer advantages, will base a decision
on what Ferrando terms common sense in selecting a Tajik-medium
education.
At present, however, the benefits of a Tajik-medium education for
most Uzbeks probably do not seem very strong. The level of Tajik
skills provided by an Uzbek-medium school in Tajikistan, combined
with Tajik skills developed from contact in other domains, may be
sufficient for many jobs even in areas where Uzbeks live in dispersed
fashion among Tajiks. A quarter to a third of Tajikistans Uzbeks
already have substantial skills in the state language.115
As illustrated above, although textbooks no longer come to Tajiki-
stan from Uzbekistan, mass media, especially in electronic forms,
enjoy a large audience in Tajikistan. Distribution of Uzbek CDs and
DVDs will likely continue in Tajikistan. Sustained efforts to stop it
would certainly fail, and could even backfire by making the forbidden
fruit only sweeter.
In the USSR, the Russian language displaced other languages in
the home among substantial segments of non-Russian populations in
urban areas of mixed ethnic populations. This was no doubt due largely

114
On some of the challenges of Tajikistans relations with Uzbekistan and other
neighbors see Saodat Olimova, Sobir Kurbonov, Grigory Petrov and Zebo Kahhorova,
Regional Cooperation in Central Asia. A View from Tajikistan, Problems of Eco-
nomic Transition, vol. 48, no. 9 (Jan. 2006), pp. 6-86.
115
According to Tajikistan census figures, over 30 percent of Uzbeks in Tajikistan
claimed to have a good command of Tajik (Richard Rowland, National and Regional
Population Trends in Tajikistan: Results from the Recent Census, Eurasian Geogra-
phy and Economics, vol. 46 no. 3 [2005], p. 217).
the fate of uzbek language 251

to the social and economic mobility offered to those who went a long
way to become Soviet men and Soviet women, including linguistic
russification. An analogous scenario for language shift seems unlikely
in Tajikistan. It would be plausible only over a very long period, in a
new economic and political environment, and perhaps accelerated by
intermarriage. The benefits to those Uzbeks willing to tajikify today
are likely of a much smaller magnitude than the benefits of linguistic
russification in the USSR. A large share of Tajikistans Uzbeks live in
areas where their ethnic group is the largest one or a large minor-
ity. Consequently, even if Uzbek is excluded from functions which fall
under state purview, the language seems likely to maintain a strong
position in many informal and even business settings.

7.5.2. Kyrgyzstan
Most of the above factors concerning Tajikistans Uzbeks also apply
to those in Kyrgyzstan. One difference may be that the prestige of the
state language is even weaker among Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan than in
Tajikistan, and (not unrelated) its geographic and thematic domains
smaller. One of the reasons for the lower prestige is that the literary
language Farsi, which Tajiks claim as their own, was widely used as a
written language in the region for centuries. Although Kyrgyz claim
that ancient Turkic monuments are part of their heritage, prior to the
twentieth century, their culture was transmitted almost exclusively in
oral fashion. The territorial spread of Farsi, the literary form of Tajik
(i.e., including Iran and Afghanistan) is also much larger than that
of Kyrgyz.116 Furthermore, Kyrgyz linguists have been much slower
in addressing questions of terminology development than their col-
leagues in Tajikistan; this may be partly because they do not have the
option of wholesale importation of vocabulary from a very closely
related language, i.e., the Farsi of Iran.117

116
See for comparison the article by Spooner on Persian, this volume.
117
Kazakh, as a language closely related to Kyrgyz with a somewhat more devel-
oped set of terminology, could serve as a source of Kyrgyz words. However, Kazakh
vocabulary itself is currently in a state of flux, and it is doubtful that many Kyrgyz
language planners would welcome this approach. Although Turkey has been very
active on the educational scene in Central Asia, there is a sense of resentment among
some Central Asians (including in Kyrgyzstan) about Turks who have come to the
region and assumed that they are the new elder brother for other Turkic speak-
ers. Although theoretically Kyrgyz could borrow vocabulary, for this reason it seems
252 william fierman

In this context it is not difficult to understand that some prominent


Uzbeks in Kyrgyzstan have used common sense to come up with a
solution to the school problem that differs from Uzbeks in Tajikistan
i.e., seeking to expand Russian-medium education while maintaining
an enriched program in Uzbek language and literature. In Kyrgyzstan,
as in Tajikistan, Russian skills are very desirable, among other reasons
because they make it easier to find work in Russia or even Kazakhstan.
There is no evidence that substantial numbers of Uzbeks are attending
Kyrgyz schools. Regardless of how many parents might find opportu-
nities to send their children to Russian-medium schools, the position
of Uzbek in the family and neighborhood in the south of Kyrgyzstan
seems very strong.
Uzbek parents disinclination to send their children to Kyrgyz
schools may also be related to cultural stereotypes. There is a wide-
spread view among Uzbeks that they are the descendants of ancestors
who, among other things, built great cities with spectacular monu-
ments and left a rich written culture. This mindset of cultural superior-
ity may also reduce the attractiveness of Kyrgyz-medium education for
Uzbeks. (By contrast, many Uzbeks, especially among the intelligentsia
and in the population of Bukhara and Samarkand, recognize Persians
role in the high culture of civilizations that have lived on the territory
of todays Uzbekistan.)
Kyrgyzstans relations with Uzbekistan are somewhat better than
Tajikistans. However, at present it seems highly unlikely that large
numbers of Kyrgyzstani Uzbeks would go to Uzbekistan for higher
education. Indeed, because of the poor quality and high cost of higher
education in Uzbekistan, many Uzbeks come from Uzbekistan to
Kyrgyzstan for university studies, some in the institutions offering
education in Uzbek; others study in Russian-medium groups. Unless
the quality and accessibility of higher education in Uzbekistan changes
radically, Uzbek-medium schools in Kyrgyzstan may lose out to Rus-
sian-medium ones among parents who want their children to go on to
higher education. However, this process does not appear to have taken
on a mass character yet.
Uzbek popular culture, both domestically produced and (especially)
that which enters from Uzbekistan and spreads inside Kyrgyzstan over

unlikely that Kyrgyz language planners would look to modern Turkish as a model or
primary source for vocabulary.
the fate of uzbek language 253

the airwaves and through CDs and DVDs, enjoys a large audience.
Kyrgyzstans mass media are hard pressed to comply with new laws
mandating that half of broadcast time be in the state language. In this
domain Kyrgyz electronic mass media are in a much weaker position
than their counterparts in Tajikistan, where the state language domi-
nates the airwaves. Until and unless the quality of Kyrgyz-language
radio and television programming greatly improves, it will not be in a
position to compete with Uzbek-language media, especially that com-
ing from Uzbekistan.

7.5.3. Kazakhstan
Paradoxically, even though opportunities for Uzbek-medium higher
education in Kazakhstan are more limited than in Kyrgyzstan or Tajik-
istan, it appears that the best Uzbek primary and secondary education
outside Uzbekistan is in Kazakhstan. This is almost certainly related to
the fact that Kazakhstan is blessed with resources that allow it to invest
much more in education than Kyrgyzstan or Tajikistan. Although per-
haps only a consequence of the sources I have consulted, it is sugges-
tive that I found no reports of demands for expanded Uzbek-medium
higher educational opportunities in Kazakhstan; rather, it appears that
the goal for many is not higher education in Uzbek, but the chance to
take entrance exams in Russian or Kazakh, and improved pedagogy
for teaching Russian and Kazakh languages so as to raise chances for
success in university entrance.118 A lack of demand for Uzbek-medium
education may also be related to the high status and widespread use
of Russian in Kazakhstan. Even today, the majority of Kazakhstans
students in higher education are in Russian tracks.119
Kazakhstans relatively strong economic development has pro-
foundly affected the dynamics of movement between Tashkent and
Shymkent, the district capital of the oblast where most Kazakhstani
Uzbeks reside. In the early 1990s, when economic reform was producing
a lower standard of living for people in Kazakhstan than Uzbekistan,
citizens of Kazakhstan would frequently speak of how much better

118
As noted above, until 2009 it was not possible for graduates of schools that were
not Russian- or Kazakh-medium to take the ENT.
119
William Fierman, Language Vitality and Paths to Revival: Contrasting Cases
of Azerbaijani and Kazakh, International Journal of the Sociology of Language,
vol. 198 (2009), p. 95.
254 william fierman

life was in Uzbekistan than at home. The situation today is reversed.


Instead of people traveling from southern Kazakhstan to Uzbekistan
for purchases, the traffic is in the opposite direction, and until very
recently (when the economic crisis hit Kazakhstan), has included a
large number of guest workers from Uzbekistan.
Despite the economic malaise which affects Uzbekistan more than
Kazakhstan, most Uzbeks in Kazakhstan are still not choosing to send
their children to Kazakh-medium schools. Moreover, because Kazakh-
language education is likely for some time to continue to be associated
with lower quality than Russian-medium training, this seems unlikely
to change soon. It is plausible that among the mobility-conscious,
a substantial share of Uzbek parents might choose Russian schools.
However, given the concentrated settlement of Kazakhstans Uzbeks,
and the availability of mass education that does not appear markedly
inferior to what is available in the state language, a mass move to
Kazakh-medium education seems improbable.
Furthermore, the availability of Uzbek-language mass media from
Uzbekistan, especially in electronic form, appears likely to support
the position of Uzbek in southern Kazakhstan. The improved qual-
ity and greater quantity of Kazakh-language television and radio in
recent years is likely to mean that among Kazakhs in the south of
Kazakhstan, Uzbek media will not enjoy the same popularity that it
does among Kyrgyz in the south of Kyrgyzstan.
As noted above, a widespread stereotype among Uzbeks is that
Kazakh (along with Kyrgyz) culture is inferior to their own. Kazakh-
stans relatively strong economic performance may be eroding this
perception. Nevertheless, Uzbek ethnic identity in Kazakhstan is quite
strong, and language appears to be a major element in it. In view of
this and the broader context described above, the position of Uzbek in
the home and in Uzbek informal social settings seems secure.

7.5.4. Turkmenistan
In some sense, the Turkmenistan case is the easiest of all to assess. As
described above, there are no Uzbek-medium classes and no domesti-
cally produced Uzbek mass media. The accessibility of Russian-medium
education has improved in Turkmenistan in recent years, but this does
not seem to imply a shift in the policy towards Uzbek schools. Russian,
after all, is a subject officially taught in all schools in Turkmenistan, and
is a bridge, among other things, to scientific and technical knowledge
and economic opportunities. The same does not apply to Uzbek.
the fate of uzbek language 255

Questions concerning the vitality of Uzbek in other domains in


Turkmenistan are more difficult to answer, in part because of the diffi-
culty in obtaining reliable information about what is happening inside
Turkmenistan and the remoteness of the region where Uzbeks live
from the Uzbekistan heartland. Moreover, not only is Turkmenistans
Uzbek linguistically distant from the dialect of the capital and the
literary standard; it is also very close to the Turkmen dialect spoken
by the neighboring Turkmen population, which is in turn very distinct
from the official Teke standard. Tribal and dialect differences (which
to a great extent coincide in Turkmenistan) are extremely salient in
both social and political spheres today. Consequently, to the extent
that linguistic turkmenization is taking place among Turkmenistans
Uzbeks in their areas of great concentration, it may well be to a dialect
that still marks them as residents of a particular region in Turkmeni-
stan, a region looked down upon by those in power in the capital city
today. All of this would seem to suggest that there are obstacles to
linguistic assimilation into the favored form of the state language for
Uzbeks living in concentrated fashion near the border with Uzbeki-
stan. Furthermore, because there may be marginal utility in speaking
a dialect of Turkmen associated with low prestige, it seems unlikely to
displace Uzbek in the home or social settings.
It is impossible to determine the effect of Uzbek mass media, which
apparently enjoy a broad audience in Turkmenistan. However, given
the other factors discussed here, and particularly in light of the unat-
tractive nature of Turkmen radio and television, it would seem that the
Uzbek-language mass media, even if in a dialect distant from the local
one, might play a significant role in sustaining Uzbek in the regions
of Tashavuz and Turkmenabad (formerly Charjou). Even if Turkmen-
istans policies in the spheres of education and media continue to deny
a domestically provided Uzbek-language alternative to the countrys
Uzbeks, Turkmenistans Uzbeks may still not move towards a state
of bilingualism without diglossia, which could in turn lead towards
the disappearance of the Uzbek language in Turkmenistan.120 Some
form of Uzbek seems likely to survive in the home and social spheres,
though it could become even closer to the local Turkmen dialects.
Furthermore, a different form of Uzbek, that used in the mass media
coming from Uzbekistan, seems destined to survive for the medium

120
Joshua Fishman, Bilingualism With or Without Diglossia: Diglossia With or
Without Bilingualism, Journal of Social Issues, vol. 23 (1967).
256 william fierman

term, at least as long as there is reason for audiences in Turkmenistan


to tune in to Uzbek mass media.

7.6. Conclusion

The prospects for Uzbek in the Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan,


and Kazakhstan relate to a broader and very contentious question in
Central Asia: Do members of Central Asian nationalities as divided
and defined by Soviet power live in their homeland only if they live
in the state which bears their name? Or are they in their homeland
even if their ethnicity does not match the name of the state, but their
ancestors have lived in the same territory for many generations or
even centuries? The persistence of the Leninist-Stalinist idea that terri-
tory, ethnicity, and language should all coincide incline many Central
Asians, especially the titular nationality in each republic, to answer
affirmatively to the first statement and negatively to the second.
In summer 2008 I had occasion to speak with the akim (mayor) of
a town in the south of Kyrgyzstan where a large share of the popula-
tion is Uzbek. Our conversation centered on questions of domains for
various languages. I mentioned to this official that I had noticed that
there were no public signs in Uzbek, despite the fact that much of
the local population consisted of Uzbeks. I asked him how he would
view a situation in which someone in his town opened a restaurant
with menus in three languagesKyrgyz, Russian, and Uzbek. His
response was immediate and categorical. We would close it down, he
answered. When I challenged him, explaining that Uzbeks had lived in
this area for many centuries, he insisted that Kyrgyzstan was not their
homeland, and that in Kyrgyzstan Uzbeks were only diasporas.
Analogous feelings are common throughout the region.
It is clear that state borders in Central Asia have become very impor-
tant in shaping the domains of Uzbek language use in the region, par-
ticularly through policies affecting education and print media. This
applies particularly to the most authoritarian state, Turkmenistan,
which not only has overseen the elimination of domestically produced
Uzbek-language media, but has made it difficult for citizens and print
media to cross the border with Uzbekistan. However, in the age of
powerful television antennas and dishes as well as CDs and DVDs,
it would be very difficult for even Turkmenistan to prevent people
from using Uzbek in other spheres. Strict regulations on computers,
the fate of uzbek language 257

players, antennas, and dishes might be effective in the short run, but
such measures would be extremely unpopular (not only with Uzbeks)
and costly. Even in a state like Turkmenistan, the digital revolution
has given individual citizens the opportunity to select media that
the powerful leadership would prefer they avoid. Moreover, both in
Turkmenistan and the other Central Asian states, even where Uzbek
might lose ground in the educational domain, technology seems to
support its maintenance in certain other areas, including the home.

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SECTION III

THE NORTHWEST FRONTIER PROVINCE


AND PASHTO, PUNJABI, AND BALOCHI
CHAPTER EIGHT

PASHTO LANGUAGE POLICY AND PRACTICE


IN THE NORTH WEST FRONTIER PROVINCE

Robert Nichols

Pashto is a regional language spoken by ethnic Pashtuns in Afghani-


stan, 38-44% of an estimated 28.7 million Afghan inhabitants, by 70%
of the population of Pakistans North West Frontier Province, and by
almost all the residents of Pakistans Federally Administered Tribal
Areas along the Afghan border.1 Pashto, closely identified with ethnic
Pashtuns, has always (co-)existed within wider linguistic spheres influ-
enced by Persian and important South Asian languages.2 This paper
discusses modern (c. 1850-2000) choices made by state and social actors
in Afghanistan, in colonial India, and in post-colonial Pakistan as gov-
ernments and communities negotiated official and informal language
policies about language status and use and the rights of speakers. In
Schiffmans discussion, the term language policy here refers, briefly,
to the policy of a society in the area of linguistic communication-
that is, the set of positions, principles and decisions reflecting that
communitys relationships to its verbal repertoire and communica-
tion potential.3 Over time, changing historical conditions raised and
lowered the value of Pashto language acquisition and use in specific
social and political domains.
Useful academic and critical studies of regional languages emerged
from nineteenth century colonial era scholarship that assembled

1
There are only unofficial estimates for the current (c. 2004) population of Afghan-
istan, with the Pashtun ethnic population estimated at 38-44% of 28.7 million Afghans
by the U.S. State Department. Many non-Pashtun Afghans also speak Pashto. Esti-
mates for Pakistan in the NWFP and FATA (about 16-17 million people) are from
Tariq Rahman, Language, Education, and Culture, (Karachi: Oxford University Press,
1999), p. 284. Swat State was a small princely state located just north of the NWFP
and east of Afghanistan.
2
In Afghanistan, Dari (Afghan Persian) is the second major language, among
many other languages.
3
Harold F. Schiffman, Linguistic Culture and Language Policy, Routledge, 1996,
p. 3.
264 robert nichols

dictionaries and grammars, and translated selected historical and cul-


tural texts. Ravertys lifetime of work on Pashto language and literature
situated the centuries-old production of Pashto language texts within a
wider Persian and South Asian cultural influence and context.4 Raverty
also recognized the political dimensions of state patronage or neglect
of regional languages. Early twentieth century western academics used
colonial networks to make quick surveys of regional languages, includ-
ing Pashto. In 1929 Georg Morgenstierne made a second linguistic
mission to the Borderland of North-Western India where he con-
tinued to collect linguistic information from the region I had visited
in 1924, consciously building on the foundation laid by the Linguis-
tic Survey of India and other previous sources (Morgenstierne, 1932:
Preface). Morgenstierne recognized the need for more concentrated
study of quickly surveyed languages and dialects, hoping it will be
possible to produce some kind of linguistic atlas of this region before
it is too late.
With the end of the colonial period in 1947, new Pakistani national
agendas shaped language policies and formalized decisions about the
status and domains of key languages. The government also provided
university research bases for scholars, including chairs in linguistics
and the Pashto Academy at the University of Peshawar. This paper
concentrates on a limited discussion of contemporary regional lan-
guage policy-making and use, and fully acknowledges various debts
of perspective and analysis to the comprehensive historical and post-
colonial linguistics research of Tariq Rahman (1996, 1998, 2002).
In Schiffmans terms, through the nineteenth and twentieth centu-
ries in the region under study state policies about language support
and use became increasingly overt, promotive, and restricted,
typically in selective patronage of languages thought to facilitate polit-
ical integration.5 In early twentieth century Afghanistan, this meant
an increased official recognition of Pashto. In early twentieth century
Swat State this involved the formal employment of Pashto as the lan-
guage of administration. Conversely, in the NWFP of British India
and in postcolonial Pakistan this often meant a marginalization of
Pashto, now analyzed as an ethnic and cultural threat to the political

4
See Bibliography for Raverty references.
5
See full discussion and definitions in Schiffman, 1996, especially Chapter 1,
Introduction and Chapter 2, Typologies of multilingualism and typologies of lan-
guage policy.
pashto language policy and practice 265

consolidation of the state, a process that emphasized Urdu as a state or


national language. In linguistic terms, in the NWFP, Pashto would
suffer in an inferior, extended diglossic language situation as colonial
and postcolonial authorities patronized other highly valued languages
(Urdu, English) in formal domains of administration and education.6
As suggested above, in historical terms Pashto language poli-
cies may be discussed spatially (Afghanistan, Pakistans NWFP after
1901, and Swat State, 19261969)7 and temporally (Afghanistan in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British colonial period in the
NWFP 18491947, and the NWFP after Pakistans independence in
1947). After some historical review and context, this essay focuses on
current language policy and practice in the contemporary NWFP.
Persian was widely used as the language of the elite rulers and admin-
istration in much of Central Asia and South Asia during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. Under Akbar, the Mughal emperor in India
(ruled 15561605), Persian served as the language of literature and
record from Kabul across north India to Bengal. Yet in the Peshawar
region Raverty noted that by the end of the sixteenth century competi-
tive religious polemics were being composed in the Pashto language,
including Bayazid Ansaris Khair ul Bayan and Akhund Darwezas
Makhzan.8 In 1860 Raverty also observed that in Afghanistan if Per-
sian was the official language of correspondence, still in the dwelling
of the Amir, Dost Muhammad Khan, at the present day, Pushto is
always spoken (Raverty 1860: footnote p. xiii).
This diglossic relationship between the written Persian of official
administration and the spoken Pashto of the royal household (and
local religious polemics) reflected, at the very least, differences of
function and prestige. Centuries of the use of Persian as a administra-
tive and high cultural textual language in Central Asia, Afghanistan,
and parts of northern India suggested that the language of state at
the Kabul court was patronized in a promotive, overt policy sense for
administrative use, as well as in a high status role as a language of
court poets and elite literature. The Persian relationship to Pashto in

6
See discussion of the Fishman extended diglossia development of the earlier
concept of diglossia in Fishman, 1967 and references in Schiffman, 1996, pp. 13,
15, 28.
7
Swat State was fully incorporated into Pakistan in 1969. See F. Barth and Miangul
Jahanzeb (1988).
8
Peshawar city was and is the leading urban area of the NWFP. See the Introduc-
tory Remarks, Raverty (1860: x).
266 robert nichols

Afghanistan, diglossic yet co-existing in terms of relative tolerance and


unrestricted usage, eventually would evolve towards more balanced
political patronage. In north India British imperial conquest would
change both the language of administration and any notions of official
linguistic tolerance or equity.
The British conquered the districts that would come to be known as
the North-West Frontier Province districts in 1849 when the greater
Punjab kingdom of the Sikhs was occupied. In these Pashtun ethnic
majority districts colonial policy replaced Persian with Urdu in the
courts and revenue offices. This was partially for administrative effi-
ciency, as trained judicial, revenue, and other native staff could be
easily transferred into the newly acquired districts. But the Urdu deci-
sion also was deliberately taken as one method to better integrate the
districts into a British colonial sphere at the expense of any Afghan
sympathies (Rahman 1998: 136-7).
After the colonial occupation in 1849, educational institutions were
surveyed. In reports from the 18541856 period the British totaled 198
Indigenous schools with 1,128 students in districts of the Pesha-
war Division (population 296,364) of the Punjab (Leitner 1882: 165).
The British recorded a variety of types of local schools. One survey
listed the maktab or place of writing, as a Persian school that
might teach a variety of subjects. The madrasa or place of learning,
was an Arabic school of heavily religious instruction. There were
also more intellectually advanced Koran schools. Hindu and Gur-
mukhi schools existed, with the latter offering basic skills for future
merchants and traders. Urdu, which we imported, did not boast of a
single school on our advent (Leitner 1882: 46).
After 1849, in both Afghanistan under ruling dynasties and in the
trans-Indus districts that became the NWFP, the politically powerful
now neglected the Pashto language to cultivate languages of com-
mand and high culture (Cohn 1996). Only a handful of British officers
were encouraged, or attempted, to study Pashto to directly command
Pashtun troops. One view summarizing regional language policy as a
state-building technique was written in 1882:
At present English education among Punjabis is little better than a
forced exotic, ready to wither under the influences of practical life. The
great and immediate object for attainment is the imparting of sound
elementary knowledge in the vernacular form. Let the mass of people
be taught the plain elements of our knowledge in their own language.
This is the first thing, and this, it is hoped, can be done in the present
pashto language policy and practice 267

age of translating. No pains will be spared to establish depots of ver-


nacular books for the Punjab. The chief language to be used is the Urdu
with the Persian character. The use of this tongue is rapidly spreading
among all ranks, and is becoming more than a lingua franca . . . (Leitner
1882: 167).9
By the early twentieth century, in addition to the British, Pashtun
nationalists also recognized that the advocacy of the Pashto language
was a potential territorial and cultural identity marker that could
threaten colonial hierarchies. In the 1920s, in contrast to Ravertys
1860 comment, the NWFP Pakhtun nationalist Abdul Gaffar Khan
wrote that he scolded the Afghan king Amanullah Khan for not know-
ing Pashto (Rahman 1998: 134). Uniquely, in the semi-autonomous
Swat State (19261969) north of the Peshawar valley, Pashto was made
the language of administration by the local Pashto-speaking dynasty to
facilitate popular interaction with the state.
After the decolonization of British India in 1947 increasing nation-
state consciousness in Afghanistan, especially in relation to indepen-
dent Pakistan, led to a new Afghan emphasis on Pashto. By the 1950s
Afghan polemics developed about former British colonial areas that
might compose part of a general Pashtunistan.10 In response and
contrast, in Pakistan advocates of Pashto language and Pakhtun cul-
ture were suspected, and persecuted, by Muslim League politicians who
valued a unified Pakistani national identity integrated through the use
of the Urdu language and Islamic ideology. Through the remainder
of the twentieth century, the use of Pashto in education continued as
a complex, politicized issue. After 1947 Pashto typically was offered as
an NWFP school subject of study, but rarely as an official medium of
instruction. The 1998 NWFP census noted that perhaps 73.9% of the
population spoke Pashto. Yet for national reasons the language of
instruction promoted in NWFP government schools was Urdu and, in
elite and private schools, English. Reflecting a complex socio-linguis-
tic dynamic, English medium government and private schools for the
most privileged families acknowledged the reality that international
language skills trumped national language competency.
Pashto literacy remained a low priority for provincial and national
education ministries. Only in 1984 was Pashto officially sanctioned

9
Italics found in the original.
10
For discussion of the Pashtunistan issue, see Dupree (1980: pp. 538-54) and
Roberts (2004).
268 robert nichols

as the medium of instruction for select NWFP schools for primary


grades 1-4 (Rahman 1998: 149). The evolution of recent national lan-
guage policies continued, including a December 2003 announcement
that English would be compulsory from class one.11 In Afghanistan,
meanwhile, Dari(Afghan Persian) and Pashto were named official lan-
guages in the 2003 Constitution, though regional languages were to be
acknowledged in home provinces. By 2004 many in the NWFP, espe-
cially those concerned with public or personal education, regarded
Pashto as a failing and fading language, a language of low status and
limited possibilities. Competition in schools from national and trans-
national languages continued to push formal study of Pashto reading,
writing, and literature into the background. Perhaps because of the
devaluation of Pashto in the domains of power, ordinary people felt it
could not be used by them (Rahman 1998: 150). The earlier diglossic
relationship between superior written languages (Persian, Urdu, and
English) and spoken (rarely written) Pashto had not been fundamen-
tally transformed after 1947. Instead, the use of Pashto as a textual
language remained undeveloped and neglected.
Ironically, Pashto use in educational institutions was indirectly
boosted as Pakistan policy in the 1980s determined to subsidize hun-
dreds of religious madrasas in the NWFP as one response to the 1979
Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the displacement of millions of
Afghan refugees to the NWFP (Malik 1996). This indirectly secured
the use of Pashto as a language of explanation and instruction, though
typically for students of comparatively low economic and social status
(Rahman 2002: 373). Less frequently, the informal use of Pashto for
explanation occurred even in elite, state institutions. In graduate-level
classes at the English medium University of Peshawar in the mid-
1990s professor-led discussions of assigned readings were observed
occasionally shifting to Pashto for a sentence or two as required for
clarification. At lower level, lower status educational institutions,
including many non-state supported English medium academies and
technological institutes, less language proficient instructors and stu-
dents might engage in even more frequent Pashto language classroom
interpolations.
By 2004 religious madrasas in the NWFP continued to teach mainly
Pashtun students, often using Arabic and Persian language texts with

11
For further discussion of the problem, see Mansoor (2004).
pashto language policy and practice 269

Pashto used for discussion.12 Many madrasas in the Peshawar val-


ley and Pakistan continued to be led by political activists, including
those who had educated many of the Afghan Taliban leadership. These
schools had also often educated, and now supported, candidates of
the six-party Islamist MMA alliance that dominated NWFP provincial
politics after the elections of October 2002.
This madrasa dynamic continued even as regular government
schools struggled to provide minimal instruction in a country of high
illiteracy rates for the poor. Perhaps 32.6% of 140 million lived below
the poverty line, with 47.1% literacy in 2000.13 And, in a country of
increasingly polarized education,14 tuition-charging private schools
and exclusive government schools and cadet colleges offered English
medium education to children of the wealthy and the civil and military
elite. These relatively few elite students, if envied by an Urdu proto-
elite (Rahman 1999: 89), could envision and often would achieve
international ambitions of higher education and employment.
The state of Pashto education in Pakistan in 2004 may be surveyed
through basic analysis of pedagogical materials used to teach students
in primary grades (1-5) and upper grades (6-10) leading to matric-
ulation.15 The following pages discuss the publication rates for each
class year, the authors employed to write each volume, and the lesson
content of the textbooks published for grades one through eight. The
details offered insight into the scale of Pashto teaching in NWFP lan-
guage classes. They also revealed something of the local and national
social and cultural politics that shaped Pashto instruction in recent
years. The diglossic, inferior status of Pashto was confirmed, even as a
language less valued was used to shape a domain of religious sensibil-
ity, especially through a large number of ideological lessons (Rahman
2002: 376). Since independence in Pakistan regulation of the language
and content of textbooks in the NWFP has continued as a subject
of political debate and polemic. On July 24, 2004, in the NWFP, the

12
Tariq Rahman notes in Pakistan in 2002, there were perhaps 10,000 madrasas
having 1.7 million students. Dawn, July 20, 2004, Pakistan Review section, p. XVII.
13
Mansoor (2004: 62). Zobeida Jalal, Federal Minister for Education, claimed the
literacy rate had risen to 55% in July 2004. News, July 30, 2004, p. 11.
14
Polarized education was the title of Rahmans July 20, 2004 Dawn newspaper
article.
15
Ten grades led to the Matric. Two more years earned an Intermediate, FA or
FSc degree. A four-year BA Graduation program might follow, leading to Masters
and PhD possibilities.
270 robert nichols

Provincial Education Commission . . . completed its report regarding


anti-Islam and anti-ideology of Pakistan material in all the textbooks
for class I to 12th.16
By 2004 the NWFP Textbook Board had published a uniform series
of paperback Pashto class textbooks for grades one through ten. Text-
book writing across Pakistan was closely supervised and approved.
When the book has been published, it is prescribed by the Provin-
cial Government as the sole textbook for the relevant class in all the
schools of the province (Aziz 1993: 1). In format, the Pashto books
were literary rather than concerned with grammar, math, or science
lessons. After initial script writing lessons, Pashto verse and essays filled
the ninety to 100-odd page textbooks with lessons that rarely exceeded
four or five pages. The books were critical for several reasons:
In every country the textbook is the primary implement of education at
the school and pre-university stages of instruction. In Pakistan it is the
only instrument of imparting education on all levels, because the teacher
and lecturer dont teach or lecture but repeat what it contains and the
student is encouraged or simply ordered to memorize its contents. Fur-
ther, for the young student the textbook is the most important book in
his little world; he is forced to buy it, he carries it to the classroom every
day, he has it open before him when the teacher is teaching, he is asked
to learn portions of it by rote, and he is graded by the quantity of its
contents that he can regurgitate (Aziz 1993: 1).
Evidence from the paperback books themselves suggested several con-
clusions. Pashto language instruction rapidly declined in number of
pupils as student cohorts rose through the educational system. There
was a shift in the intended audience for the books as over several years
a lower level element of gender balanced, modernist-technological
pedagogy in the early materials diminished. Finally, the social order
intended for reproduction through the lesson contents of the textbooks
was shaped, at minimum, by standard themes of Pakistan Studies
and Islamiyat curricula developed by national education authorities.
A critical question was the extent to which an increasingly conserva-
tive cultural agenda gained predominance in the sequence of the upper
level textbooks.

16
The News, July 26, 2004, p. 15.
pashto language policy and practice 271

The potential population base for Pashto language instruction


included perhaps 70-75% of the 17,555,000 residents of the NWFP,
99% of the 3,138,000 residents of the Federally Administered Tribal
Areas along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and millions more
in Baluchistan Province just south of the NWFP.17 Tariq Rahman
estimated that in 1999 there were 10,731 Pushto-medium primary
schools in Pakistan of the 169,089 government primary schools in
the country.18 Yet there was a persistently low national literacy rate
(51% in Sindh Province, 36% in Baluchistan Province) with much
lower rates for women (historically, single digit rates for women in
some FATA areas). School attendance rates were low as well. Primary
enrollment rates nominally ranged from 75% in the Punjab to 64% in
Baluchistan. Factors blamed for low attendance included poverty, lack
of state investment in education and teachers, cultural restrictions on
education for women, and reliance on child labor. Nationally, As a
result, at present 70 per cent children are enrolled in schools but about
50 per cent of these enrolled children drop out at the primary level.19
The lowest attendance was in the FATA regions of the NWFP.
Contributing to the shrinking of the student pool for Pashto instruc-
tion were common parental preferences that children in school gain
Urdu and English competency rather than Pashto literary skills. This
was to maximize future employment chances and social mobility. Top
government work remained heavily dependent on English language
correspondence and files. And Urdu continued as a minimum qualifi-
cation for desirable higher and lower level government service.20
The consequences for enrollments in Pashto language courses were
apparent as student class cohorts moved from lower primary-level
classes to upper-level classes leading to a tenth-year matriculation
certificate. Press run numbers of textbooks for each grade revealed

17
1998 census numbers, The News, July 22, 2004, p. 12.
18
Dawn, July 20, 2004, Pakistan Review, p. XVII.
19
Statistics and quotation are from the News, August 1, 2004, Special Report, p. 25.
The quotation is from Dr. Nasim Ashraf, National Commission on Human Develop-
ment, Pakistan.
20
The tension between NWFP administrative traditions of English use and pres-
sures from populist politicians and perhaps allied lower status government workers
with greater Urdu skills (Rahmans Urdu proto-elite) resulted in a memo that cir-
culated through NWFP offices in summer 2004. It announced that official correspon-
dence was now to be written in Urdu. The memo was written in English.
272 robert nichols

rapidly diminishing enrollments for Pashto classes.21 Efforts towards


Pashto instruction on a wide scale were effectively ended after the first
five years.
The first volume (lower first) of the current two volume first-year
Pashto textbook set Pakhto Ka-aidah (Pakhto System) was published
in an edition of 400,000 copies. This book introduced the script and
some basic vocabulary often linked with pictures of common personal,
family, and household subjects. The second volume (higher first) of
the current first year set, Pakhto Dars Kitab (Pakhto Class Book),
had a press run of 120,000 copies.
Projected enrollments in primary level Pashto classes remained rela-
tively high. The second-year textbook, Da Pakhto Nuway Kitab (New
Book of Pakhto) and the third-year (Dreyum Jamiat) book, Zma Da
Pakhto Nuway Kitab (My New Book of Pakhto) each had 240,000
copy printings. The fourth-year textbook, Zma Da Pakhto Kitab (My
Book of Pakhto) had a 120,000 copy press run. The fifth-year book,
again titled Zma Da Pakhto Kitab (My Book of Pakhto), had an edi-
tion of 160,000.22
But after these five years of primary education in Pashto a clear
shift occurred in the extent and direction of Pashto instruction. The
number of students declined rapidly. The sixth-year class (Spagam
Jamiat) textbook, Pakhto, was published in a edition of 25,000. The
seventh-year textbook, also titled Pakhto, had a run of 15,000 copies.
The eighth-year class book, again titled Pakhto, had a printing of just
5,000 copies.
This radical decline in apparent numbers of Pashto students was
accompanied by a shift in intended audience and lesson content. The
first five years of primary level textbooks were colorful, illustrated, and
exhibited occasional moments of gender balanced social context. Sci-
ence and a modern, urban context were introduced to student per-
spectives assumed to be of an often rural, village-based background.

21
Certainly multiple press runs of lower numbers might occur and upset any
simple correspondence of press runs and enrollments, but the dramatic differences
discussed seem to offer fair evidence.
22
These were the titles and press runs of the books available in Peshawars Chowk
Yadgar bookstores in summer 2004. Pakhto is the eastern/northeastern version
of the Pashto language (the sh letter/sound becomes kh, etc.). My transcriptions in
Pashto and English are not meant to be anything more than simple transcriptions
from the actual Pashto script from the volumes themselves.
pashto language policy and practice 273

Two women were among the authors listed as contributing to various


volumes of the first five years of textbooks.
Nine different authors, assembled in different combinations were
credited with writing the grade one through five books. Syed Ahmed
Mohmand and Niaz Muhammad Ijaz contributed to all six textbooks
used for the first five years of Pashto study. Muhammad Alam Khan
was listed as one of the authors of the first three years of books. Four
authors made contributions to only the first year, lower volume,
Pakhto System, including one woman, Nighat Yasmin. The other
three were Daud Khan Daud, Farmanullah Khan, and Syed Makmud
Khan. Joining the two mentioned authors of the second-year through
fifth-year textbooks were two additional authors, Aruf Ali Khan
Ghauri, and a second woman, Farzana Maroof.
The presence of Nighat Yasmin and Farzana Maroof as authors was
matched by schoolbook content that reflected female agency beyond
traditional gender roles. The early volumes certainly often replicated
patriarchal norms and practices, but they also included lessons with
women who participated in out of the home, skilled, urban roles and
employment.
In the very first Pashto book for first-year students one of the
images used to prompt pupils to recognize words using the letter waw
as a vowel marker for u was a picture of a burqa, the full body cov-
ering worn by many Pashtun women. In the second-year textbook,
the young girl Mariam introduced readers to her family. This is my
mother. She is the teacher in the school of the village. She also does
all the work of the home (p. 4). My grandmother helps mother in
the house (p. 5).
But through the rest of the book, new roles for women began to
appear. In a lesson discussing and illustrating different work skills
one woman was pictured and described as a dentist ( ghakhunah doc-
tor), while the text accompanying a picture of a woman at a sewing
machine said, Nur Bibi toils in a workshop (karkhana) (p. 39). In
the third-year textbook such economic integration continued to be
portrayed. In a section discussing people and professions (khalk au kar
kasb) readers learned that Mariams uncle and aunt lived in Peshawar
(Pekhawar). Her uncle was a pilot for PIA and her aunt is a doctor in
a hospital. Their son served (nokari) in a bank operating a computer.
Their daughter Aisha worked at a newspaper (akhbar ke kar kuwey)
preparing pages for printing (p. 5).
274 robert nichols

These rather modern moments occurred in primary-level textbooks


full of predictable material introducing children to the vocabulary and
context of their national, spiritual, and cultural world. Conformity to
national language policy and ideological guidelines for textbook con-
tent seemed apparent. Morality tales, religious verse, and trips around
Pakistan were mixed with national stories of the founder of Pakistan,
M.A. Jinnah. The second-year textbook included lessons on personal
hygiene and safety, but also on the early Muslim caliphs Hazrat Abu
Bakr and Hazrat Umar. There was a lesson on Pakistan in verse and
another lesson on M.A. Jinnah, Our Quaid and Pakistan.
The third-year textbook lessons included Our Messenger, Hazrat
Muhammad, The Ant and the Locust, I am also Pakistan, and a
lesson about a national hero, Rashid Minhas, an Air Force pilot in the
1971 war with India. On the back cover of this book, and on the back
cover of each of the yearly textbooks, were the stanzas of the Pakistan
national anthem (Quami Torana).
The fifth-year volume, Zma Da Pakhto Kitab (My Book of
Pakhto) was the culmination of primary-level Pashto instruction. At
165 pages, this was the thickest of the texts studied. It was full of col-
ored illustrations and lessons on issues ranging from archaeological
sites in Pakistan to environmental awareness. Religious verse and a
discussion of Mecca were followed by lessons on the history of writing
and on machinery and modern technology.
The national and religious projects continued in the fifth-year book.
Lessons were included on the Shalimar Gardens, again on Rashid Min-
has, pilot in the 1971 war, and on the life of M.A. Jinnah. The Pakhto
poet Rahman Baba was studied, as were Hazrat Usman, early caliph
and friend of the prophet, and Hazrat Imam Hassan. There were also
lessons discussing jihad and international Islamic unity.
Yet the fifth-year textbook also contained a contemporary feel in dif-
ferent lesson choices and stories being told. One lesson, based around
the sport of cricket and the cricket World Cup, included a picture of
children sitting in front of a television watching a match. One story
was set in China. Another essay, with photographs, was about the
North Pole (shamali qutb). There was a seven-page narrative about a
scientist, Madame Curie Marie (pp. 140-7).
A perceptible shift occurred after the textbooks of the first five
grade levels. The class six through class eight Pashto language text-
books, all titled Pakhto, revealed not just the apparent decline in
pashto language policy and practice 275

student enrollments, but a new set of authors with a narrower cultural


agenda. Different decisions had been made regulating the content of
the upper-level Pashto language textbooks. As Urdu, in comparison
to English, functioned in alternate and often lower status language
domains of religious and traditional discourses, so Pashto was being
appropriated to serve an accelerated religious agenda by the NWFP
textbook board.
Seven authors contributed to the Pashto textbooks for grades six
through eight, none of them women. Maulana Abdul Qadir wrote
for each year. Three additional authors contributed to the sixth-year
textbook. Another team of three authors all contributed to the sev-
enth-year and eighth-year textbooks. All seven authors of the books
for years six through eight had names or titles of a religious sensibil-
ity, Syed, Maulana, or Qazi. The authors of the eighth-class (Da Atam
Jamiat) textbook were Maulana Abdul Qadir, Syed Anwar ul Haq,
Qazi Ahmad Shahid, and M. (Maulana) Abdul Sabooh Qasmi.
An overview of lesson contents in these volumes reflected a shift
away from any degree of a modernist, gender balanced approach to a
more didactic set of nationalist, Islamic norms and values. The books
now were in the ninety-page range, with only a few black and white
illustrations. The fifth-year textbook had about thirty-five lessons,
including five labels as stories (qissa) and five as verse (nazm). The
sixth-year textbook had about 48 shorter lessons, including 12 com-
posed in verse. The opening prayer (dua) of the sixth-year book was
poetry from Allama Iqbal translated into Pashto. The second lesson
was on Hazrat Umar, the third on Our Pakistan, and the fourth on
All Ghazis (wara ghaziat). The fifth lesson was verse on Gratitude
(shukr) and the sixth was on Hazrat Imam Malik.
The mix of content of the previous lessons continued, but perhaps in
shifting proportions. There were lessons on The Glory of the Nations
Flag and verses To Ones Mother. There were lessons on Razia
Sultana, the only medieval woman ruler of Delhi, and on Florence
Nightingale. There were histories on the eighteenth century Pakh-
tun rulers in north India Bhagat Khan Rohilla and Hafiz Rahmat
Khan. There was a narrative of Major Khadim Hussain Shahid, a
hero from the 1965 war with India. Science, knowledge, and technol-
ogy were represented with lessons on Al Biruni, Boali Sina (Avi-
cenna), Edison and transportation. Geography lessons described
Waziristan, a Tour of Peshawar, and the Khyber Pass.
276 robert nichols

The sixth-year textbook offered moral guidance with lessons on


Truth and Falsehood, Being Awakened, the allegory of the Cricket
and Ant, and Justice and Equity. But it was often distinctly Islamic
moral guidance contained within narratives of True Sacrifice, The
Nations Shahid, The Countrys Shahid, the Ghaza of Rajasthan,
and Pir Baba.
The forty lessons of the seventh-year textbook confirmed the focus
on content from conservative Pakistan Studies and Islamiyat Studies
curricula. Including the opening prayer, six of the first seven lessons
were Islamic narratives, verse, or guidance. (The fifth lesson was on
Socrates.) Nationalism followed with two lessons on August 14, the
day of independence in 1947. Later lessons on Pakistan, Our Brave
Soldiers, and the National Flag of Pakistan were complimented
with war narratives of Wing Commander Muhammad Mahmud
Alim, Destruction of Dwarka (in India) and Attack on Pakistan
(by India).
An Islamic-nationalist sensibility combined in later lessons on
Muhammad bin Qasim, the eighth century Muslim conqueror of
Sindh, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Allama Iqbal, and Mustapha Kemal
of Turkey. Two lessons, Rubaiyani and Fatwa, were writings from
the seventeenth century Pakhtun warrior-poet Khushal Khan Khat-
tak. Sections on Marconi, Camera, Sui Gas, and Sugar Factory
were some of the few related to technological or economic themes.
Swat, Tirah, Jirga, and the Mahabat Khan Mosque in Pesha-
war were essays on NWFP themes. Though there was prose on Taxila
and the Lahore Fort, the tone of the book was set by early lessons on
Islamic Brotherhood, The Captured Mujahid, and Brave Muja-
hid followed by later essays such as Sacrificed for Islam. There were
moral warnings such as Dont be arrogant, but no biographies or
illustrations of women in any role.
The eighth-year textbook had fifty-four lessons or readings in 115
pages. The index is reproduced below. Explanatory details are in
parentheses.23

23
My colleague Khudadad first translated this index. Changes and the final list are
my responsibility.
pashto language policy and practice 277

Contents Page
1 Prayer (dua, by Rahman Baba) 5
2 You will reap what you sow 6
3 Caring for parents 8
4 Guidance 11
5 Birth of the Prophet (nazm) verse 13
6 How Pakistan came into being 14
7 The Badshahi mosque (of Lahore) 17
8 Maulana Muhammad Ali Gohar 19
9 Time and Money verse 22
10 Hakeem Al Razi (Dr. Abu Bakr ibn Zikria Razi) 24
11 Buddhism (On a temple in Swat) 26
12 Chitral 28
13 Oh Muslim! verse 30
14 Pakistans Wealth (Forests) 31
15 Medicine and Surgery in Islamic Andalus 33
16 A true Mujahid (Abdullah ibn Zubair, Prophets companion) 35
17 Dont be big. . . . verse 38
18 Loving the country made 40
19 Syed Ahmad Shahid Barelvi 43
20 Ghazis Song verse 46
21 Dysentery 48
22 Gabir ibn Hayan (father of chemistry) 50
23 Electricity Plants (kar khani) 52
24 The war for independence of Kashmir 55
25 A clever judge 58
26 A kind King of China 62
27 The song of ants (sandarah) verse 64
28 Jihad 66
29 Salahuddin Ayubi 69
30 Mohenjodaro 71
31 Khyber Gate verse 73
32 Our Baluchi brothers 75
33 Dr. Fleming (penicillin) 77
34 Real Life verse 79
35 Pakistans Wealth (industrial) 80
36 The Atom 82
37 Working oneself is a tradition (of the Prophet) 84
38 Manly Boy 86
39 Who is stupid? verse 88
40 Cleanliness of streets and footpaths 89
41 The Force of Faith 91
42 Our Sindhi Brothers 94
43 Conduct (adab) verse 96
44 Parachinar (FATA region) 97
45 Datta Ganj Bakhsh (religious saint) 99
278 robert nichols

(cont.)
Contents Page
46 Ghazis Song (tarana) verse 101
47 The natural resources of Pakistan 103
48 The Conqueror of Iran (Saad ibn Abi Waqas) 105
49 Flowers in the Earth verse 107
50 Rocket 108
51 I am a Ghazi verse 110
52 Climber of a volcanic mount, Part One 113
53 Climber of a volcanic mount, Part Two 115
54 Pakistan verse

As might be expected, the class-eight textbook had pages with smaller


type and denser script, often twenty to twenty-five lines of prose or
poetry to a page. As in earlier books, lessons ended with questions
(suwalunah) and exercises (mashk). The book had no pictures. It had
no lessons devoted to a womans biography or verses to mothers.
Surprisingly, even in a country with long spans of political rule by a
variety of civilian and military leaders, there was no lesson in the first
eight years of Pashto textbooks about a single Pakistani political leader
besides M.A. Jinnah.
Aside from the political ally China, modern nation-states were little
mentioned. Discussions of science and technology seemed a generation
or more behind contemporary subjects and ideas of global economies
and the latest high technology were missing. There was no biography
of the only Pakistani to win a Nobel Prize. That scientist, physicist
Abdus Salam, had spent his career working outside of Pakistan. He
was a Qadiani, a member of the Ahmadiyya community that had
been declared by the state to be non-Muslim, and apparently, to be
unworthy of study.
The politics of writing Pashto language textbooks in a national-
ist environment promoting integration through Islam and Urdu had
unique effects. There was no lesson on any twentieth century Pakhtun,
especially Abdul Ghaffar Khan, the anti-British, pro-Pakhtun national-
ist. There was no lesson on the Pashtun state-builders in nineteenth
and twentieth century Afghanistan. There was little or no sampling of
original Pashto language religious or historical material.
This preliminary survey of Pashto course books invites the atten-
tion of scholars with time to analyze the content of lessons beyond the
pashto language policy and practice 279

apparent identification with typical curriculum materials familiar from


Pakistan Studies and Islamiyat Studies programs. Clearly, those stu-
dents in the NWFP able to attend school were in a difficult situation.
They typically grew up speaking Pashto or another regional tongue.
They were schooled heavily in Urdu and were pressured in every way
to learn English. Simply becoming well educated in any single lan-
guage appeared a major challenge. And, if, in fact, the contents of les-
sons surveyed over the eight years of Pashto textbooks were typical of
post-1947 classroom pedagogical material, then this essay might close
with a statement from a scholar who did a thorough survey of history
texts written in the same constrained teaching environment:
But even more grievous is the effect these textbooks have on the mind
of the student and, over the years, on the character of the citizen. It may
well sound as an exaggeration to the uninitiated, but as a teacher and a
historian I am convinced that most of the ills from which the country
has suffered in the past and is still suffering have their root cause in the
textbooks in use. The failure of democracy, the long spells of military
dictatorship, corruption, moral laxity, deterioration in character, decline
in moral values, sense of irresponsibility, terrorism, sectarian strife, inef-
ficiency, cynicism, indifference to what the future holds for us-all this is
the bitter harvest from the seeds we use in the cultivation of the minds
of the young (Aziz 1993: 242).
In the end, national language policy, especially in the field of educa-
tion in the NWFP, had constructed a type of three tiered language
hierarchy. Pashto lagged far behind Urdu and English in prestige or
development in almost every domain of political or economic power,
even as Urdu took second place to English among the very elite. More
recently though, as national, more secular politics came into com-
petition with new, often regional religious politics, Islamist activists
embraced Pashto as a medium of instruction in madrasas operating
outside the direct supervision of nation-state regulation.
If the post-1947 use in the NWFP of Urdu and English to the det-
riment of Pashto served to illustrate the tensions inherent in socie-
ties in which diglossia existed with limited bilingualism, post-1970s
NWFP urbanization, increased education, and accelerating religious
politics offered increased evidence of new social spaces encouraging
NWFP residents to diversify their linguistic repertoire (Fishman,
1971: 75) to take advantage of opportunities in education, govern-
ment, high culture, and religion. In 2004 the Pakistan nation-state,
especially in the NWFP, struggled with the social and political
280 robert nichols

consequences of widespread diglossia existing with increasingly wide-


spread bilingualism.24
Even wider international foreign policy initiatives might become
entangled with regional language policies in efforts to juggle concerns
about education with concerns about culturally and politically sensi-
tive content. As a last example of Pashto pedagogy, for Afghanistan,
in 2002 ad/1381 ah, the University of Omaha in Nebraska produced
Pashto textbooks financed by USAID funds. The short sections of
the ninth-class (naham ttolegi) textbook, Pakhto, began with a lesson
in verse offering Praise (hamd), followed by lessons, among oth-
ers, on Hazrat Abu Bakr, Love of Country (Da Watan Mayanah),
Hazrat Umar, Hazrat Osman, and Hazrat Ali. These were in the first
twenty-five pages of a 112-page paperback volume. There were moral
lessons in story and poetry. Other lessons included those on Mirza
Khan Ansari, The Afghan Condition, On Religious Honor, and
Respect. There were two lessons titled Madame Nazo (merman
nazo) and The Good Woman (khe merman).

References

Aziz, K.K. (1993). The Murder of History, A critique of history textbooks used in Paki-
stan. Lahore: Vanguard.
Barth, F. & Jahanzeb, Miangul. (1988). The Last Wali of Swat: An Autobiography. New
York: Columbia University Press.
Cohn, Bernard. (1996). The Command of Languages and the Language of Com-
mand, in Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, pp. 16-56.
Dupree, Louis. (1980). Afghanistan. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fishman, Joshua. (1967). Bilingualism With and Without Diglossia: Diglossia With
and Without Bilingualism, in Journal of Social Issues, vol. 23, no. 2, pp. 29-38.
. (1971). Societal bilingualism: stable and transitional, in Sociolinguistics: A Brief
Introduction, Rowley, Mass.: Newbury House, second printing, pp. 73-89.
Leitner, G.W. (1882). History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since Annexation
and in 1882. Calcutta: Superintendent of Government Press.
Mansoor, Sabiha. (2004). The Medium of Instruction Dilemma: Implications for Lan-
guage Planning in Higher Education, in S. Mansoor, S. Meraj, and A. Tahir (eds).
Language Policy, Planning, and Practice. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Malik, Jamal. (1996). Colonization of Islam. Lahore: Vanguard Books.
Morgenstierne, Georg. (1932). Report on a Linguistic Mission to North-Western India.
Norway: Instituttet For Sammenlignende Kulturforskning. Reprint Karachi: Indus
Publication, n.d.

24
See Fishman (1971: 75) for discussion of Speech Communities Characterized By
Both Diglossia and Bilingualism.
pashto language policy and practice 281

Rahman, Tariq. (1998). Language and Politics in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University
Press.
. (1999). Language, Education, and Culture. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
. (2002). Language, Ideology and Power: Language-learning among the Muslims of
Pakistan and North India. Karachi: Oxford University Press.
Raverty, H.G. (1860). A Dictionary of the Pukkhto or Pukshto Language. Peshawar:
Saeed Book Bank, 1982 reprint.
. (1860). A Dictionary of the Pukkhto or Pukshto Language. Peshawar: Saeed Book
Bank, 1982 reprint.
. (1855). A Grammar of the Pukhto, Pushto or Language of the Afghans. New Delhi:
Asian Educational Services, 1987 reprint.
. (1860). The Gulshan-i-roh: being selections, prose and poetical, in the Pushto or
Afghan language. London: Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts.
. (1878). Notes on Afghanistan and Baluchistan. Lahore: Sang-e-Meel Publications,
reprint 2001.
Roberts, Jeffrey. (2004). The Origins of Conflict in Afghanistan. London: Praeger.
Schiffman, Harold F. (1996). Linguistic Culture and Language Policy. London: Routledge.
CHAPTER NINE

A VERNACULAR FOR A NEW GENERATION?


HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES ABOUT URDU AND PUNJABI,
AND THE FORMATION OF LANGUAGE POLICY
IN COLONIAL NORTHWEST INDIA

Jeffrey M. Diamond

Many articles in this volume have considered contemporary language


policy in the regions around Afghanistan. This article provides an his-
torical perspective to these policies, examining the formation of early
British colonial attitudes and policies concerning languages in the
northwest Indian regions bordering Afghanistan during the middle of
the nineteenth century. In order to comprehensively analyze decisions
concerning language, this paper argues that language policy in colonial
northwest India was not a clearly defined or systematic process; rather,
the development of language policy was connected to debates and atti-
tudes about languages formulated during the early colonial experience,
and influenced by missionary encounters, administrative personalities,
and partnerships with members of the Indian literati.
During the nineteenth century, the British expanded their rule
throughout much of north India. By 1849, they were able to cap-
ture the prized region of Punjab from Sikh rule. This regionwhich
extended approximately from Delhi to the North West Frontier bor-
dering Afghanistanencompassed an area that includes present day
east and west Punjab as well as the North West Frontier Province in
Pakistan. Such a large and diverse area brought enormous wealth but
many administrative challenges as well. One of the most fundamental
questions concerned language policy.
As the British acquired territory in north India, they actively devel-
oped policies concerning the use of Indian languages for administra-
tion. Historically, Persian was the language of administration for the
Mughal rulers and their successor states by the eighteenth century.1

1
For a review about the use of Persian during Mughal rule, see, Muzaffar Alam.
The Pursuit of Persian: Language in Mughal Politics, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 32,
no. 2, May 1998, pp. 317-49.
a vernacular for a new generation? 283

However, after establishing rule in India, Act XXIX of 1837 authorized


the British Governor-General of India to replace Persian as the language
of administration with English and Indian vernacular languages. Thus,
colonial attitudes toward Persian changed, as Persian was no longer
required for administration when the British annexed the Punjab. In
addition, British officials in the Punjab sought to employ an admin-
istration and an administrative language that did not represent the
structures of pre-colonial ruleand Persian was strongly linked to pre-
colonial administration. Although English was used for official British
correspondence, English could not be utilized for day to day purposes
as few if any Indians understood English at the time. Indeed, English
was not adequate for interacting with the local population through the
courts and other forms of administration, and it was not used in other
parts of India either for such purposes. As a result, colonial officials
sought to replace Persian with an Indian vernacular language for
local administrative purposes when the British conquered the greater
Punjab region.
Before we proceed further, we should ask, what do we mean by lan-
guage policy and how can we evaluate it in northwest India? Language
policy in colonial northwest India mainly involved the decisions about
the status, use, and domains of languages in the region.2 As language
policy was formulated by a colonial state, decisions were made from
abovewhat can be termed a centrist policy, at least officially.3 How-
ever, in the middle of the nineteenth century, there was no precise
definition of what colonial officials understood to be official language
policy and they did not readily use such terms. Official policy mainly
referred to the use of language for administrative (and subsequently
educational) purposes. For early colonial officials, this policy was part
of a wider concern about how they could most successfully administer
a region that they recently conquered. Although officials were influ-
enced by interactions with their subaltern assistants and their Indian
subjects, the voices of these people were limited. Therefore, this was

2
This definition does not include language planning. This paper uses the term ver-
nacularoften part of British discoursein reference to several Indian languages. The
use of the term vernacular does not imply the language is less significant.
3
The formation of official policy is the focus of this paper. Although difficult to
ascertain, in practice, one could argue the de facto language policy in colonial Punjab
was more amenable to local languages as colonial institutions had to adapt as well
(discussed below). For further discussion about centrist and de facto language policy,
see the Introduction to this volume as well as Harold F. Schiffman Linguistic Culture
and Language Policy. London: Routledge, 1996.
284 jeffrey m. diamond

not a democratic debate between different Indian groups about lan-


guage policy. It was a policy decided from above, although it had enor-
mous impact on later social and cultural developments in the region.
Indeed, the promotion and patronage of Urdu among the educated
elite helped Urdu to become a foundation for various social debates in
the later nineteenth century north India, as there was a belief that the
development of Urdu into a modern language would also facilitate
the development of India generally.4
In order to provide a larger analysis of these issues, this paper exam-
ines the question of language policy through three methods.5 First, we
evaluate the diverse language practices and linguistic culture in the
region of greater Punjab as the British encountered it around 1849.
Then, we examine cultural and linguistic studies conducted by mis-
sionary and colonial officials in order to evaluate how these studies
began to inform colonial attitudes, beliefs, and debates about appro-
priate languages for administration. We conclude with the colonial
debates about official language policy in northwest India through the
decisions to utilize Urdu as the judicial vernacular language in the
region.

9.1. Language and Society in Late Pre-Colonial


and Early Colonial Punjab

It is difficult to reconstruct the full linguistic culturethe behaviors,


assumptions, attitudes, ideas, and religious and historical circum-
stances of language usagein this article as the sources are limited.
Nonetheless, it is still important to detail the various sets of language
usage at the time in order to evaluate the circumstances involved in
the formation of language policy in northwest India.6 Therefore, this
section offers a brief review of language usage in pre-colonial and early

4
For an examination about the development of Urdu in relation to social and reli-
gious reform in later nineteenth century Punjab, see Jeffrey M. Diamond. Negotiating
Muslim Identity: Education, Print and Intellectuals in Nineteenth Century Colonial
North India. Cambria, (forthcoming).
5
Bernard Spolsky argues that language policy consists of three components
language practices, beliefs, and efforts to modify these practices. This article will exam-
ine language policy in northwest India through a similar method. Bernard Spolsky.
Language Policy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 5.
6
For a definition of linguistic culture, see, Schiffman 1996, p. 5.
a vernacular for a new generation? 285

colonial Punjab to contextualize linguistic studies and the subsequent


colonial debates regarding language and administration.
Due to the location near Afghanistan, at the crossroads between
Central Asia and South Asia, there historically has been a linguistically
diverse society in the Punjab region. This diversity facilitated a complex
fluid boundary between several languages. Many Punjabis were not lim-
ited to one language, as there were multiple languages used for differ-
ent circumstances, including the languages of government bureaucracies
mainly associated with the courts, the language of trade and property
records, as well as languages for educational purposes, and the languages
associated with religious functions. The most common usage of language
was within the household and the bazaar. These various uses of lan-
guages provided a fluid boundary between those that were spoken, writ-
ten, read, and understood in the region. However, it would be difficult
to argue that these languages were understood in pre-colonial Punjab
to be under one language umbrella. One could describe this multi-
ple language use as a diglossiaa diglossia that incorporated various
languages for different usages and not simply various forms of one
language.
Thus, languages in pre-colonial Punjab did not fit into explicit territo-
rial boundaries; instead, they illustrated the numerous influences on the
region. Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, different forms of Punjabi, Kashmiri,
Baluchi, Pushtu, and even dialects of the Khari Boli and Braj Bhasha
languages (in far east Punjab) all had unique uses in greater Punjab.7
The importance of these languages varied depending upon the context
of their use. There was a tradition of classical and vernacular language
textual production that was part of the wider developments through-
out North India. The Sanskrit root of vernacular languages in India has
been greatly discussed, but we should also note that this literary tradition
was significantly influenced by Perso-Islamic culture throughout north
India.
Although there were several written languages in Punjab, Persian was
the most significant textual language in the region. It was the administra-
tive language of Punjab immediately prior to 1849; continuing the prac-
tice during Mughal rule, the Sikh rulers of pre-colonial Punjab utilized

7
See Griersons study of Punjabi for a brief discussion on the other languages and
their influences in the region. George A. Grierson. Linguistic Survey of India. Vol. IX,
Indo-Aryan Family Central Group. Specimens of Western Hindi and Panjabi. Calcutta:
Superintendent of Government Printing, 1916, especially pp. 607-19.
286 jeffrey m. diamond

Persian for written documents, communication, and treaties. For exam-


ple, records of trade, the Lahore Darbar (court), and general administra-
tion all were in Persian.8 The British authorities also negotiated with Sikh
leaders such as Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Persian.9 However, Persian was
not limited to the Sikh court at Lahore; local administration in the Pun-
jab also was conducted in Persian. For example, Persian was the main
language used to record trade, general administration and legal docu-
ments in the Batala region during Sikh rule.10 All religious communities
relied upon the qazi (judge) to decide and validate cases that dealt with
property and trade, and these records were in Persian. These documents
were legally valid throughout the Punjab.
Persian also was the main language of erudition, the language of the
learned literate elite in pre-colonial Punjabi society. The curriculum
of the principal educational institutions, maktabs (Persian schools),
included famous Persian texts such as the Gulistan and Bustan.11 Maktab
students came from all religious communities whose members worked
as traders or were local administrators. Hindu and Sikh Kayasths and
Khatris were the main group of non-Muslims who learned Persian as
they held administrative positions and were important merchants and
traders.12 Therefore, Khatris, Kayasths, and Muslims who worked as
munshis under Sikh rule in pre-colonial Punjab, utilized Persian for
their duties.
Thus, the Punjab was a literacy aware society, where commercial
classes and religious leaders could utilize written languages to some

8
The catalogues of these records provide some insight into the workings of the
Sikh administration. See, for instance, Nazir Ahmad Chaudhry. Punjab Government
Record Office Publications. A Guide to the Punjab Secretariat Record Office, Lahore.
Lahore: Punjab Government, n.d., pp. 8-13.
9
For a listing of the Persian records of the Sikh court, see, Nazir Ahmad Chaudhry.
Punjab Government Record Office Publications. Calendar of Persian Correspondence:
Collection of Treaties, Sanads, Letters, Etc., Passed Between the East India Company,
Sikhs, Afghans, and other Notables. vol. 1. Lahore: Superintendent, Government Print-
ing, 1972.
10
The administration of justice is an important source for these records. For an
overview of the administration during Sikh rule with associated Persian documents,
see, J.S. Grewal. In the By-Lanes of History: Some Persian Documents from a Punjab
Town. Simla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1975, pp. 25-32.
11
These texts were popularly used in schools throughout the Punjab. For a study
of maktab education, see Diamond, (forthcoming).
12
Kayasth scribes gained prominence during the late eighteenth century. See, Aziz
Ahmad. Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. Delhi: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1999 (reprint of 1966 edition) pp. 234-6.
a vernacular for a new generation? 287

degree.13 Indeed, textual languages also served religious purposes, espe-


cially the classical languages of Arabic and Sanskrit. Muslim men and
women were taught to read the Quran (in Arabic) and to commit the
text to memory in schools or in the household. Certain Hindu castes
learned to read ancient Hindu epics along with portions of the puranas.14
Yet, few people understood or used Sanskrit or Arabic beyond recita-
tion, with the exception of religious leaders who maintained control over
this knowledge.15 Still, Arabic terms and phrases were incorporated into
Persian, Urdu, and Punjabi, and it was common for Muslims to intro-
duce aiyas (verses) of the Quran into everyday speech.16
Although literacy, the ability to read and write to some degree, was
quite low among Punjabi speakers, Punjabi was the most widely known
and spoken language in early colonial Punjab. In all of the districts of
Punjab except in the extreme east, nearly all of the inhabitants in 1881
used Punjabi.17 Punjabi was spoken in the home and marketplace as
part of an oral tradition. Punjabi also was the most common language
employed for religious purposes. Punjabi oral culture did not super-
cede important texts in Arabic or Sanskrit. However, peoples refer-
ence to religion commonly was through Punjabi. For Muslims, much
of the spiritual Sufi practices were conducted in the Punjabi language.18

13
For a discussion on the literacy aware society of north India, see C.A. Bayly.
Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India,
17801870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 38-40.
14
The Mahabharata and Ramayana were two important epics that also had ver-
nacular language translations by the nineteenth century. This allowed these texts to be
read and accessed by a more diverse group than the few familiar with Sanskrit.
15
For instance, few Muslims understood Arabic beyond the recitation of texts such
as the Quran. See, Muhammad Qasim Zaman. Commentaries, Print and Patronage:
Hadith and the Madrasas in Modern South Asia. Bulletin of the School of Oriental
and African Studies, vol. 62, no. 1, 1999, pp. 60-3. A similar argument has been made
about Brahmins and higher caste Hindus, who developed an exclusive system for
maintaining their superior status. See Poromesh Acharya. Indigenous Education
and Brahminical Hegemony in Bengal. in Nigel Crook (ed.), The Transmission of
Knowledge in South Asia: Essays on Education, Religion, History, and Politics. Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 1996, especially p. 116.
16
Any traveler can recognize that this folk religious practice has retained currency
to this day. Other Islamic phrases include the ubiquitous Inshallah (God willing).
17
This includes various dialects classified by the British colonial officials. In the 1881
census, approximately 95% of people in the Punjab proper spoke a dialect of Punjabi. For
detailed information by district, see the Gazetteer series, such as Gazetteer of the Lahore
District, 18834. Lahore: Punjab Government, 1884.
18
There has been much writing on Sufism in Punjab and North India that details the
important role Sufism has played in transferring Muslim religious ideals through oral
culture. One interesting article that relates Sufi practice to religious and political culture
288 jeffrey m. diamond

Although influenced by the Persian language and culture, Sufi tradition


adapted to the context of North India readily.19
The three major written forms of Punjabi were in the lande, gurmukhi
and nastaliq (modified Perso-Arabic) scripts. Lande was a script based
on nagri that was used by merchants in central and western Punjab.
It varied somewhat in each district, and was used by groups such as
the Kayasths mostly for personal records of trade (as Persian was the
language of important legal documents).20 Gurmukhi, a script based on
Sanskrit and similar to the Hindi devanagri script, served as the script
for the Sikh religious texts, the Adi Granth. Additional Sikh writings
in gurmukhi included publications about the Adi Granth, along with
other devotional literature.21 Thus, as we shall see, colonial officials,
who began to review these texts, saw Punjabi (at least in the written
form) as the language important to the Sikhs and often used the terms
Punjabi and gurmuhki interchangeably. Yet we should also note that
the Punjabi textual literary heritage prior to colonial rule included all
religious communities. Indeed, Punjabi Muslim poets were responsible
for the significant development of Punjabi verse by utilizing Persian
literary traditions, often writing in the Perso-Arabic nastaliq script.22
This Muslim Punjabi literary tradition included the story of Yusuf and
Zulaikha as well as Waris Shahs Hir Ranjha.23

is Richard M. Eaton. The Political and Religious Authority of the Shrine of Baba Farid,
in Metcalf, Barbara, ed., Moral Conduct and Authority: The Place of Adab in South Asian
Islam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984, pp. 333-56.
19
Persian Sufi mysticism influenced Sufi practices throughout North India. The
Persian influence is discussed in Aziz, Studies in Islamic Culture, p. 233.
20
G.W. Leitner also argued that the various forms of commercial writing were
all related to Lande, and were modifications of Nagri. For his comments and exam-
ples of lande, see G.W. Leitner. History of Indigenous Education in the Punjab Since
Annexation and in 1882. Lahore: Republican Books, 1991 (reprint of 1882 original),
p. iii, Appendix VII. Gurmukhi is said to be an adapted from lande and devanagri. See
Grierson, Linguistic Survey, p. 624.
21
The Adi Granth and related literature forms the core of Sikh literature in gur-
mukhi at the India Office Library. See, C. Shackle. Catalogue of the Panjabi and Sindhi
Manuscripts in the India Office Library. London: Indian Office Library and Records,
1977, Introduction and pp. 1-20.
22
The Persian Masnavi influenced Punjabi narrative poetry. Christopher Shackle,
Some Observations on the Evolution of Modern Standard Punjabi, in Joseph
OConnell, Milton Israel, and Willard Oxtoby (eds.), Sikh History and Religion in the
Twentieth Century. Toronto: South Asian Studies, Univ. of Toronto, 1988, pp. 105-7.
23
Christopher Shackle, Between Scripture and Romance: The Yusuf-Zulaikha Story
in Panjabi. South Asia Research, vol. 15, no. 2, Autumn 1995, pp. 164-6.
a vernacular for a new generation? 289

As there was no standard Punjabi in pre-colonial Punjab, there were


several dialects and variances in style, composition, and terminology
that influenced each text. For instance, Guru Nanaks poetry in the
Adi Granth was in his native Sheikhupuri Punjabi, although there were
additional linguistic influences as well.24 Indeed, the texts of the Adi
Granth illustrate the heterogeneous nature of Punjabi in pre-colonial
Punjab. The lack of a standard may have lead to different spelling and
techniques of style as well.25 These diverse regional dialects of Pun-
jabi could be understood, but were not necessarily spoken through-
out the region. Moreover, many of the texts by Muslims, Sikhs, and
Hindus relied upon a heterogeneous literary tradition that included
Persian and Urdu influences, illustrating the fluid boundaries between
languages.
With this fluid arena of language usage, it is important to differenti-
ate between an intelligible language and a spoken language.26 Several
languages in colonial Punjab were not spoken in the region; however,
they were intelligibleunderstoodas they shared recognized terms,
phrases, and often a similar grammar. For instance, people living in the
peripheral areas of greater Punjab also spoke languages such as Sin-
dhi, Pushtu, Baluchi, and Kashmiri. Thus, it was common for people
to know (understand, and perhaps speak or even write) several lan-
guages, particularly among those living near borders or those belonging
to literate classes.27 This also facilitated the development of mixed lan-
guages, incorporating the terms and grammar of several languages. For

24
Shackle, 1988, pp. 105-6. Grierson even argued that a very small portion of
the Adi Granth was in Punjabi, as it was a mixture of different languages. Grierson,
Linguistic Survey, p. 618.
25
For instance, one nineteenth century manuscript listed in Takkars Descriptive
Catalogue of Panjabi Manuscripts contains words that Takkar believes were mis-spelt
or written in an unconventional way. Amrit Lal Takkar, Descriptive Catalogue of Pan-
jabi Manuscripts in the Vrindaban Research Institute. Vrindaban: Vrindaban Research
Institute, 1996, p. 29.
26
This concept is explored by a discussion about Bhudev Mukhopadhyays view of
Hindustani as the most common-intelligible language for people in all areas of India,
not the most common-spoken, in Sudipta Kaviraj. The Two Histories of Literary Cul-
ture in Bengal in Sheldon Pollock (ed.), Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions
from South Asia. Berkeley: University of California, Press, 2003, pp. 510-2.
27
An important Muslim Punjabi poet from the southern Punjab princely state of
Bahawalpur in the later nineteenth century knew Urdu, Siraiki, Sindhi, Braj along with
Arabic and Persian; he also wrote in various scripts. See Christopher Shackle, Urdu as
a sideline: the poetry of Khwaja Ghulam Farid, in Christopher Shackle (ed.), Urdu and
Muslim South Asia: Studies in Honour of Ralph Russell. London: SOAS, 1989, pp. 78-9.
290 jeffrey m. diamond

example, Urdu was known as a rekhta (scattered or mixed) language in


the earlier nineteenth century, incorporating various elements of Arabic,
Persian, Punjabi and other related languages.28 Punjabi also exhibited the
characteristics of a mixed language during this time. Therefore, many
authors had a certain level of multilingual knowledge that allowed them
to speak or even write one or more languages; and this knowledge ren-
dered several other important languages intelligible as well. Thus, the
fluid boundary between languages and the intelligible nature of other
languages influenced language usage.
Urdu, also known as Hindustani at that time, was the main language
of administration used by the British in colonial North India.29 It was
intelligible by many people who spoke Punjabi and those familiar
with Persian in early colonial Punjab. Urdu, Punjabi, and other North
Indian languages shared similar grammatical structures and terms on a
elementary level. Indeed, Urdu contained many words used in Persian
and Punjabi that a listener or reader could understand in the structure
of his or her own main language(s), typically Punjabi or administrative
Persian. However, Urdu does not appear to have had any special con-
centration of speakers in early colonial Punjab. The Hindustani speaking
areas of Delhi and eastern Haryana were not attached to the Punjab until
after 1857, well into colonial rule. The fluid boundaries between Urdu
and Punjabi and the intelligible nature of Urdu became more appar-
ent in the later nineteenth century, as Urdu became the administrative
vernacular for Punjab.
While there may appear to be a divide between the oral and liter-
ate, there was a co-existence between the oral and textual word in
this time period for Punjab. There have been similar evaluations about
other Muslim societies with a co-existence between the oral and writ-
ten traditions. Jack Goody has illustrated how religious literature in
West Africa existed alongside the many oral, unwritten traditions.30

28
This idea is developed in Javed Majeeds analysis of the expansion of British rule
in North India and the early nineteenth century Urdu writer, Sayyid Inhsa Allah Khan
from Delhi. Javed Majeed, The Jargon of Indostan: An Exploration of Jargon in Urdu
and East India Company English in Peter Burke and Roy Porter (eds.), Languages and
Jargons: Contributions to a Social History of Language. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press,
1995, pp. 191-6.
29
For a general discussion about the usage of Urdu for administration, see, Chris-
topher Shackle and Rupert Snell. Hindi and Urdu since 1800: A Common Reader.
London: SOAS, 1990, pp. 1-8.
30
Jack Goody. The Interface Between the Written and the Oral. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1987, pp. 125-38.
a vernacular for a new generation? 291

A similar argument can be made for the Muslim Middle East, where
a long Arab intellectual tradition existed as part of an overwhelmingly
oral society.31 Indeed, Muslim religious knowledge has been widely
accessible in oral societies, and the Quran has had a long history of
oral usage and significance.32
Therefore, early colonial Punjab offered a diverse linguistic frontier,
where several oral and literate languages operated by 1849. This diverse
usage must have presented a daunting task for colonial officials. In
order to order and evaluate these languages, an entire series of studies
was commissioned that helped to formulate colonial knowledge about
languages and cultures the region. These studies became central to the
later beliefs and attitudes that influenced the development of language
policy in the region.

9.2. Constructing Early Colonial Attitudes:


Encountering the Punjab

The linguistic culture of the region raises an important question about


why colonial officials, as they debated official language policy, did not
adequately consider local languages, such as Punjabi. In order to eval-
uate this query and the nature of the language debates, we have to
examine how early colonial officials formulated attitudes about lan-
guage usage. For this purpose, this article concentrates on the construc-
tion of colonial attitudes and beliefs about Punjabi, the acknowledged
most widely spoken language in the region, especially in the Punjab
proper (although not necessarily in the outlying regions). If Punjabi
was adopted for the region or at least the Punjab proper, in theory,
other regional languages, such as Pushto in the North West Frontier,
could be used as well. However, if Punjabi was deemed unsuitable,
there would be even less support for other regional languages, such as
Pushto, during early colonial rule.

31
For example, see, Albert Hourani. A History of the Arab Peoples. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1991.
32
Orality is important to Muslims as the Quran was revealed to Muhammad orally.
It was written down only after the death of Muhammad. However, the Quran is still
learned orally and it is common for many Muslims to memorize the entire Quran in
order to orally recite aiyas (verses) for prayer and folk religious purposes.
292 jeffrey m. diamond

The British sought to construct knowledge about the diverse language


frontier in the Punjab before 1849, and they formulated an early inter-
est in Punjabi. After annexing the Punjab in 1849, the British actively
developed studies and settlement reports of the region. In addition
to their concern over language, colonial officials desired to construct
knowledge about the different religious groups, and cultural practices
in the Punjab as well.
Early British interactions, during the formative years of their expand-
ing interests in the region, were in Sikh ruled eastern and central Pun-
jab. Thus, the earliest studies about the Punjab mainly concerned the
political history of Sikh rule.33 One of the first British publications was
John Malcolms Sketch of the Sikhs, written in 1812. Malcolm was an
important colonial official who represented British interests in various
regions of India and Persia. His early encounter with the Punjab while
in the British military lead him to collect materials that would throw
light upon the history, manners, and religion of the Sikhs.34 The Sketch
was an attempt to describe the rulers of a territory. Malcolm also sought
to provide information about the Sikh Gurus, starting with Guru Nanak,
and offered commentaries on the texts of the Adi Granth. Additional
publications that followed Malcolms work included Henry Prinseps
Origin of the Sikh Power. Published in 1834, this text concentrated on
Sikh rule in the region.35
After the Punjabs full annexation in 1849, a Board of Adminis-
tration was established to oversee the affairs of the Punjab. Colonial
officials began to produce detailed studies, and early settlement reports
were one of the first efforts to study scientifically the people and cul-
tures of the territory. There were several stages of these reports. Early

33
This discussion provides a background for the linguistic studies that are exam-
ined in the ensuing section; thus, it is meant to be an illustrative (and not exhaustive)
account of early colonial studies and perspectives of the Punjab.
34
John Malcolm. Sketch of the Sikhs; A Singular Nation, Who Inhabit the Provinces
of the Penjab, Situated Between the Rivers Jumna and Indus. London: John Murray,
1812, pp. 1-2. Malcolm was born to a large family in Scotland in 1769. He left for
India in 1782, and spent considerable time in Persia. The Sketch of the Sikhs was
one of several historical writings that also included the Sketch of the Political His-
tory of India, 17841806, written in 1810. For details of Malcolms life, see, Rodney
Pasley, Send Malcolm! The Life of Major-General Sir John Malcolm, 17691933.
London: Bacsa, 1982.
35
Henry T. Prinsep. The Origin of the Sikh Power in the Punjab and Political Life of
Maharaja Ranjit Singh with an Account of the Religion, Laws and Customs of the Sikhs.
Patiala: Languages Department, Punjab, 1970 (reprint of 1834 edition).
a vernacular for a new generation? 293

reports were concise, providing some initial observations and details


of various districts.36 The studies were created for revenue and admin-
istrative purposes to understand and to manage the large agricultural
production in Punjab.
Several of these studies attempted to construct knowledge about
the social and literary cultures of the greater Punjab, mainly through
researching select locations in the region. These works were written
in English and Urdu by British officials and their subaltern Indian
assistants respectively. For example, a series of tarikhs (histories) were
produced from the 1850s to 1870s for each district in Urdu. One such
example is the Tarikh-e-Zilla Dera Ismail Khan (History of the Dera
Ismail Khan District), written by the Extra Assistant Commissioner of
Dera Ismail Khan, Munshi Charanjit Lal.37 The various tarikhs helped
to inform the District Gazetteers that were produced throughout the
Punjab in the later nineteenth century. Written and English and dis-
tributed throughout India, these Gazetteers provided details of each
district, from its geography to the language, education, and customs
of the people.38
As these studies developed, British attitudes toward Punjabi were
connected to their notions of literacy. The significance and practica-
bility of a language was based upon views of the oral (or illiterate)
and written (or literate) word.39 Colonial officials believed that Punjabi
predominantly was an oral language, and this belief appeared to be con-
firmed by scientific studies such as the Census. For example, the Census
of 1868 continued to reinforce the view that most people in the Punjab
were not literate when it stated that only about 380,000 people (mostly
men) could read and write in the territory.40 This was roughly 2 percent
of the population according to the census data. The belief that Punjabi
was the language of the illiterate was furthered with the development of

36
For example, see, R.H. Davies, R.E. Egerton, R. Temple, and J.H. Morris. Report
of the Revised Settlement of the Lahore District in the Lahore Division. Lahore: Punjab
Government, 1860.
37
Munshi Charanjit Lal. Tarikh-e Zillah Dera Ismail Khan. Lahore: Central Jail
Press, 1878.
38
For example, see, Gazetteer of the Lahore District, 18834.
39
I use the term literate only to indicate a language that has significant use in both
oral and written forms.
40
The language(s) these people could write was not clear, but it may refer to the
literate elite who utilized Urdu, Persian, and other textual languages. Report on the
Census of the Punjab, Taken on 10th January 1868. Lahore: Indian Public Opinion
Press, 1870, p. 35.
294 jeffrey m. diamond

colonial ethnographic studies. For example, although District Gazetteers


confirmed that the primary language of many districts was Punjabi, they
also indicated the oral nature of Punjabi. For example, the Gazetteer of
the Rawalpindi District stated that, there were several dialects of Panjabi
spoken.41 This Gazetteer illustrates how colonial officials often referred
to Punjabi as spoken, enhancing its position as an oral language.
The focus on the oral nature of Punjabi influenced British attitudes
toward the language. By focusing on oral culture, the attempts to exam-
ine Punjabi literature were more limited. This is perhaps one reason
why Grierson later argued that Punjabi had a very scanty literature.42
Instead, there were more concerted attempts to document oral tra-
ditions. For example, folklore became important in textualizing the
literary heritage of the region.

9.3. Missionary Encounters with Punjabi in the Early


to Middle Nineteenth Century

The previous studies helped to illustrate, for the British, that Punjabi
was mainly an oral language. In addition, further attitudes and beliefs
about Punjabi were developed by the expanding missionary linguis-
tic studies of the region. These philological efforts indicate a concern
about Punjabi, as Punjabi was the most widely known language
even according to colonial studies. Yet, while such studies could have
helped to improve colonial perceptions of Punjabi, the result of these
efforts was the opposite; they helped to foster further negative atti-
tudes toward Punjabi on the part of the colonial administration.
The linguistic studies about the Punjab were part of larger programs
undertaken by colonial administrations and missionaries in India that
had a profound effect upon all Indian languages, including Urdu and
Punjabi. Many Indian languages lacked a standard grammar or diction-
ary during early colonial encounters, yet they were thought to have a

41
Gazetteer of the Rawalpindi District, 18831884. Lahore: Civil and Military
Gazette, 1884, p. 55.
42
Grierson argued this in 1916, well into colonial rule. Grierson, Linguistic Survey,
p. 618.
a vernacular for a new generation? 295

standard form.43 Colonial administrators and missionaries collected,


classified, standardized, and enumerated the languages of India; indig-
enous languages were altered from having vaguely defined character-
istics, as previously described in the Punjab, to being neatly packaged,
counted, and outlined.44 These processes often took several decades
while colonial rule was established in a region, as grammars, dictionaries
and other printed materials ultimately facilitated the standardization of
languages.45
The reforms of many North Indian languages had already begun prior
to the annexation of the Punjabi in 1849. However, while Punjabi even-
tually did experience similar processes of standardization, classification
and enumeration, these processes had not begun to a significant extent
by 1849.46 Therefore, it is vital to analyze the attempts to study Punjabi
in late pre-colonial and early colonial Punjab in order to understand
how the resulting works influenced subsequent colonial attitudes toward
the language and the eventual preference for Urdu over Punjabi as an
administrative vernacular in the region.
The linguistic efforts to delineate, understand, and standardize Pun-
jabi began in earnest with the first missionary contact in the region
prior to the British annexation in 1849. Missionaries required intricate
knowledge of local languages to enhance their proselytizing operations.
Therefore, they were at the forefront for studying and analyzing Pun-
jabi, as they wrote descriptions and guides about Punjabi from the early
nineteenth century.
The earliest studies were conducted in the Bengal Presidency, where
Protestant missionary activity was established before 1813. One signifi-
cant group was the Baptist Mission founded by the Rev. William Carey

43
David Washbrook, To Each a Language of His Own: Language, Culture, and
Society in Colonial India, in Penelope J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History, and Class.
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991, pp. 180-1.
44
Sudipto Kaviraj, Writing, Speaking, Being: Language and the Historical Formation
of Identities in India, in Dagmar Hellmann-Rajanayagam and Dietmar Rothermund
(eds.), Nationalstaat und Sprachkonflikte in Sd- und Sdostasien. Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner Verlag, 1992, pp. 25-68.
45
It is important to note that grammars and dictionaries were part of the processes
of standardization. The complex reforms also involved the spread of printed works
that incorporated such standards, and the use of Punjabi by missionaries.
46
This does not imply that Punjabi was a less important or less advanced lan-
guage, but rather that colonial and missionary attempts to standardize the language
had not significantly begun by 1849.
296 jeffrey m. diamond

at Serampore in 1800.47 Careys Mission significantly contributed to the


study of North Indian languages, especially Bengali. Carey learned vari-
ous languages, developing Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Punjabi, and San-
skrit grammars as well as Bengali, Marathi, and Sanskrit dictionaries. He
also helped to translate the Bible into various Indian languages. Due to
these efforts, Carey became a Professor of Sanskrit, Bengali, and Mah-
ratta at the College of Fort William in 1801.
Carey had already published grammars of several Indian languages
(including Bengali) when he wrote A Grammar of the Punjabee Lan-
guage in 1812 for his Mission. This was one of the earliest Punjabi gram-
mars written for missionaries or officials of the colonial government.
Careys grammar was a limited one,
intended to furnish short and appropriate rules for the acquisition of this
language, without attempting any remarks upon the nature of the gram-
mar in general.48
The grammar provided an introductory discussion about Punjabi; it
detailed the gurmukhi character, and then reviewed basic grammatical
structures, including nouns, verbs and tenses. Although he did not men-
tion his Indian assistants, Carey collaborated with Indian colleagues for
his other linguistic efforts.49
Careys Grammar was intended for English speakers. Consequently,
Careys work was one of the earliest to influence colonial and missionary
perceptions of Punjabi. Indeed, Carey became one of the first Europeans
to associate Punjabi with the Sikhs when he stated that Punjabi was,
spoken by the Shikhs, that singular people, who inhabit the Punjab.
He also believed that Punjabi was written in a peculiar character called
Gooroo-Mookhee, but he acknowledged that the language was of mixed

47
Carey located the station in Serampore, A Danish territory near Calcutta, because
of the objections of the East India Company to his missionary activities. He was born
in 1761, and developed a fondness for learning languages, and became an impor-
tant missionary and linguist in India. For information about William Carey and his
missionary activities, see M. Siddiq Khan, William Carey and the Serampore Books
(18001834). Copenhagen: Monksgaard, 1961, pp. 204-36; George Smith, The Life of
William Carey, D.D.: Shoemaker and Missionary. London: John Murray, 1885.
48
William Carey. A Grammar of the Punjabee Language. Serampur: Mission Press,
1812, Preface. Grierson argued that Careys work was the first to describe the Panjabi
language. Grierson, Linguistic Survey, p. 618.
49
For example, Carey inspired pandits and munshis at Fort William College
to write Bengali texts. See, Kanti Prasanna SenGupta. The Christian Missionaries in
Bengal, 17931833. Calcutta: Firma K.L. Mukhopadhyay, 1971, pp. 124-7.
a vernacular for a new generation? 297

origin . . . derived from the Sungskrit . . . and . . . from the Arabic, Persian,
Pushtu, and other languages spoken in the vicinity of the Punjab.50
Early missionary activities also included the publication of bibli-
cal literature in Punjabi. Missionaries believed that a translation of the
Bible would facilitate the evolution of an indigenous literature. Indeed,
Robert Cust, the Judicial Commissioner in the Punjab during the 1860s,
argued that the Bible is the nucleus of an indigenous literature; due
to its translation into an Indian language, the grammatical structure
of the language became fixed, and a certain amount of permanence is
guaranteed to its existence.51 Cust may have exaggerated the role of
missionaries, nonetheless, the Serampore Mission published a transla-
tion of the New Testament into Punjabi, utilizing the gurmukhi script,
in 1811.52 This appears to be the first copy of any portion of the Bible to
be published in Punjabi.53 Careys Grammar (in progress during 1811)
may have facilitated this translation. By 1820, Carey claimed that his
translation of the Bible caused a considerable stir in the minds of the
people in the Punjab at that time.54
The publications of William Carey and his Serampore Mission proved
highly influential in the development of Indian languages such as Ben-
gali. However, his publications has a less direct impact upon the devel-
opment of Punjabi. It is not clear why Careys work on Punjabi was
not as effective, but his writings may not have been widely available to
missionaries and colonial officials who began further studies on Punjabi
in the 1830s and 1840s.55 Still, Careys efforts at Serampore facilitated
the foundation for later missionary efforts. His efforts illustrated that
grammars, dictionaries and bibles assisted with missionary activities and

50
Carey, A Grammar, Preface.
51
Robert Needham Cust. Language, as Illustrated by Bible-Translation, in
R.N. Cust, Notes on Missionary Subjects. Part I. London: Elliot Stock, 1888, p. 64. Cust
was sympathetic toward missionaries, and he is discussed in further detail below.
52
Paramesvar de sabh bacan visekhkarkai jo manhkhadi rakia ate kajde sadhle lai
prakasia soi dharam pothi. Serampur: Mission Press, 1811.
53
It has been argued that later missionaries did not find Careys work useful as they
translated the Bible several further times. John S.M. Hooper, (revised by W.J. Culshaw).
Bible Translation in India, Pakistan, and Ceylon, 2nd ed. London: Oxford University
Press, 1963, p. 135. Yet, this also may have been because each mission sought to pro-
vide its own translation and interpretation of various parts of the Bible.
54
Carey is quoted in Smith, The Life of William Carey, p. 263.
55
Careys works on Punjabi were not widely diffused in North India. This may
be due to the Great Fire of 1812 at the Serampore Mission that destroyed much of
Careys writings, minimizing their eventual dispersion in India. For information about
the fire, see Khan, William Carey, p. 236.
298 jeffrey m. diamond

would help to develop certain standards for Indian languages such as


Punjabi.
The Serampore Mission was one of the earliest missionary societies
to develop knowledge about Punjabi, but it was another twenty years
before there was a direct missionary impact in the Punjab. In 1833, the
American Presbyterian Missionaries established a mission station at
Ludhiana, in eastern Punjab.56 As they expanded their activities, they
founded important institutions for their proselytizing efforts, such as
churches and schools. They also quickly established a printing press to
publish materials in English, Persian, Urdu, and of course Punjabi. Due
to the press and their linguistic studies of Punjabi, including the publi-
cation of grammars and dictionaries, the Ludhiana Mission was highly
influential in developing a set of standards for Punjabi.
As the Ludhiana Mission was active in the Punjab around the time of
annexation, British officials also relied upon the Mission to help develop
knowledge about Punjabi. During the military battles between the Sikh
rulers of the Punjab and the British in 1846, the Mission published Idi-
omatic Sentences, in English and Panjabi.57 This book mainly consisted of
phrases concerning military affairs, as well as judicial and medical situ-
ations. The book developed a rather simplistic notion of language usage
based upon colonial concerns. For example, military phrases in Punjabi
included, Are the native officers for the most part very respectful?58
The authors found their task difficult because there found no extant
grammar or dictionary to assist with the publication. Careys grammar
was either not considered useful or was not available for the Ludhi-
ana missionaries. Therefore, the Ludhiana Mission began research on
a grammar and dictionary of Punjabi for English speakers after they
published a geographical description of the Punjab for the assistance of
missionaries and colonial officials in 1850.59

56
For details of the American Presbyterian Mission at Ludhiana, see John C. Lowrie.
A Manual of Missions; Sketches of the Foreign Missions of the Presbyterian Church: With
Maps Showing the Stations and Statistics of Protestant Missions Among Unevangelized
Nations. NY: Anson D.F. Randolph, 1854; John C.B. Webster, The Christian Commu-
nity and Change in North India: A History of the Punjab and North India Missions
of the Presbyterian Church in the USA, 18341914, PhD dissertation, University of
Pennsylvania, 1971.
57
Idiomatic Sentences, in English and Panjabi. Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mis-
sion Press, 1846. This work is attributed to Rev. Levi Janvier and Rev. John Newton.
58
Idiomatic Sentences, pp. 12-3.
59
Reverend Levi Janvier provides this background in the Dictionary published
in 1854 (examined below). Committee of the Lodiana Mission. A Dictionary of the
Panjabi Language. Lodiana: Mission Press, 1854, Preface.
a vernacular for a new generation? 299

The standardization of grammar was an important part in the pro-


cess of structuring a language that could be taught to missionaries and
colonial officials. In 1851, Reverend John Newton published the first
Punjabi grammar in English by the Ludhiana Mission. This grammar
was explicitly directed to the needs of missionaries and colonial offi-
cials during first years of British rule in the Punjab. Indeed Newton
stated that, nothing but the urgent request of friends has caused the
publication of this work, referring to the recent annexation of the
Punjab and influx of British officials who were mainly familiar with
Urdu.60 Therefore, the relationship of Punjabi to Urdu was an impor-
tant focus of Newtons grammar as well.
My object simply was to note . . . those things in which this language dif-
fered from the Urdu . . . The original plan . . . was to publish merely the
alphabet, the declension of the nouns and pronouns, and the conjuga-
tions of the verbs, these being the things in respect to which persons
already conversant with Urdu, need the most to be informed.61
On one hand, Newton implied that Punjabi and Urdu were closely
related, an idea that many colonial officials shared. Yet on the other
hand, Newton also began to recognize the differences as he had to
contend with two difficulties while he wrote the text. First, following
his predecessors, he used gurmukhi (and romanized Punjabi, some-
times known as romanized gurmukhi) as the written script for Punjabi.
To use gurmukhi, he had to provide a gurmukhi alphabet for officials
mainly familiar with the Perso-Arabic nastaliq script commonly used
for Urdu. Secondly, Newton realized there were grammatical differ-
ences between the languages when he stated that there was no purely
native Grammar of Punjabi. He either did not know about the early
rudimentary grammars by Carey and others, or found them of little
use.62 Thus, Newton found it necessary to develop a system of gram-
matical terms and phrases based upon European (and American)
categories. For example, the book was divided into several sections,
including discussions about the gurmukhi script and the etymology
of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, as well as verbs and conjunctions. In

60
John Newton. A Grammar of the Panjabi Language; With Appendices. Lodhiana:
American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1851, Preface.
61
Newton, A Grammar, Preface.
62
This also includes the comparative grammar by Robert Leech in 1838 (discussed
below) that mainly provided details about vocabulary. Thus, Newton would not have
found it helpful.
300 jeffrey m. diamond

addition, there were rules about syntax. Newtons Grammar influenced


future works about Punjabi by beginning the process of standardiza-
tion of the language by promoting explicit grammatical structures.
Following Newtons Grammar, the American Presbyterian Mission
published a Punjabi Dictionary in 1854. The main contributors to the
Dictionary were John Newton, along with Reverend Levi Janvier and
Reverend Joseph Porter. These missionaries realized that their dictio-
nary was necessary for mission work as well as for colonial settle-
ment activities in the Punjab. The dictionary also used gurmukhi and
its romanized form as the script for Punjabi, following earlier writ-
ings about Punjabi.
The American Presbyterian Missions publications in pre-colonial
and early colonial Punjab became an influential standard for the study
of Punjabi. The Mission publications relied upon a set of rules, gram-
mar, and style that were used in the eastern Punjabi dialect spoken in
Ludhiana.63 The grammatical structures and unique terminology were
not necessarily shared in other parts of the Punjab. Indeed, there were
many dialects of Punjabi in the different districts of the Punjab. These
included Siraiki spoken in Multan and the South West Punjab, Majhi
spoken in Amritsar and Lahore (considered a standard or pure Punjabi
by Grierson in his Linguistic Survey of 1916), and European Standard
Punjabi or Ludhiana Punjabi.64
The missionary publications on Punjabi provided important knowl-
edge for missionaries and early colonial officials. Indeed, missionar-
ies arguably had a better understanding and appreciation of Punjabi
than colonial officials. Thus, their publications influenced colonial
attitudes about Punjabi. The Ludhiana Missions studies and publica-
tions also served as important vehicles for standardizing Punjabi. Their
Punjabi standard was used in mission publications (in English), such
as their grammar, dictionary, as well as missionary publications in
gurmukhi (including translations of the Bible).65 A second edition of

63
This standard continued to be used through the nineteenth century. Conse-
quently, the Gazetteer of the Ludhiana District stated the The language of the dis-
trict is Panjabi in a very pure form. See, Gazetteer of the Ludhiana District, 18889.
Calcutta: Calcutta Central Press Co., 1890, p. 59.
64
The division of these dialects is based upon Griersons analysis on Punjabi from
1916 that still serves as a model for the classification of Punjabi dialects. Grierson,
Linguistic Survey, pp. 607-46.
65
In the 1850s, a large function of the Ludhiana Mission press was to publish
religious materials for different missionary organizations in the region. This mainly
a vernacular for a new generation? 301

Newtons Grammar was published in 1866, closely following the text


that he wrote in 1851.66 Newtons grammar also influenced later writ-
ings about Punjabi, including the section on Punjabi in John Beames
classic three-volume work on the Grammar of North India languages
in 1872.67 Consequently, Grierson saw their work as a fountain of
instruction in Panjabi for Englishmen.68 Yet, these processes to stan-
dardize Punjabi began in earnest after the establishment of colonial
rule in the Punjab, much later than the initial development of Urdu.
Thus, Punjabi had a distinct disadvantage by the 1850s, when language
policy became a vital concern to colonial officials.

9.4. The Effects of Colonial Attitudes toward Punjabi


and the Choice of Urdu as an Administrative Vernacular
in Early Colonial Punjab

The various linguistic studies of Punjabi and the related empirical


research about the Punjab had a vital influence on the development
of colonial knowledge about the region. In addition, colonial officials
also formulated their own perceptions of Punjabi following annexa-
tion. Therefore, this section examines how empirical and linguistic
studies as well as colonial perceptions about Punjabi undermined the
significance of the language, influencing the decision to utilize Urdu
as an administrative vernacular.
There were several underlying reasons for the choice of Urdu as the
administrative vernacular in northwest India. First, colonial percep-
tions of Punjabi illustrate why it was not chosen as an administrative
language. By the middle of the nineteenth century, colonial officials
acquired knowledge about Punjabi from previous studies (including the
missionary efforts previously outlined) as well as their experiences for-
mulating administration in the region. Officials encountered many lan-
guages that were familiar to them from their administrative experiences

included translated portions of the Old and New Testaments in Punjabi. For exam-
ple, see, The Eighteenth Annual Report of the Lodiana Mission, For the Year Ending
September 30th, 1852. Lodiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1852.
66
John Newton. Grammar of the Panjabi Language; With Appendices. Second Edi-
tion. Lodhiana: American Presbyterian Mission Press, 1866.
67
John Beames. A Comparative Grammar of the Modern Aryan Languages of
India: To Wit, Hindi, Panjabi, Sindhi, Gujarati, Marathi, Oriya, and Bangali. London:
Trubner and Co., 1872.
68
Grierson, Linguistic Survey, p. 609.
302 jeffrey m. diamond

in the North-Western Provinces (examined in the ensuing section). Yet,


the Punjab region also included new languages and a more diverse use of
languages. Consequently, these studies and experiences raised several
concerns about the language.
One of the central questions regarding colonial attitudes about Pun-
jabi was how to classify the language. Colonial conceptions of languages
rested upon a notion of a unique literate-textual canon or tradition and
distinct forms of grammar. However, the previous section illustrated
that there was no formalized grammatical structure or textual canon
for Punjabi in the middle of the nineteenth century, and many dialects
were spoken throughout the region. The Ludhiana Missions linguistic
efforts began around the time of annexation. Therefore, Punjabi did not
neatly fit into colonial understanding of language. Moreover, the Pun-
jabi literary tradition incorporated various elements of other traditions.
As a result, the diverse nature of Punjabi limited its applicability for
administration.69
Moreover, as Punjabi was not yet standardized, the shared gram-
mar and vocabulary of Urdu and Punjabi led to belief that Punjabi was
not a distinct language, but a dialect of Urdu. In fact, early colonial
studies of the Punjabi language asserted that Punjabi was a dialect of
Urdu. This is illustrated by a grammar of several languages (including
Punjabi) written by Lt. Robert Leech in 1838. The section on Punjabi
grammar was elementary and mainly limited to vocabulary. This was
due to the fact that Leech asserted that Punjabi, as spoken in large
towns, is a dialect of the Urdu or Hindustani, and differs from it chiefly
in having those vowels short that the latter has long.70 Leech illustrated
his belief that pronunciation was the main difference between Punjabi
and Urdu by discussing the pronunciation of the number eighteen,
athara, in Urdu and the nasalized athara(n) in Punjabi. Although
problematic, the implications of Leechs conclusions were that officials
who knew Urdu could easily learn Punjabi, as it was simply a dialect

69
Similarly, the numerous dialects of Bengali also hampered its initial use for
administration in the early nineteenth century. For a discussion about early British
attitudes toward Bengali, see, Christopher R. King. One Language, Two Scripts: The
Hindi Movement in Nineteenth Century North India. Bombay: Oxford University Press,
1994, pp. 54-7.
70
R. Leech. Epitome of the Grammars of the Brahuiky, Baluchky, and Panjabi Lan-
guages with Vocabulary of the Baraky, Pashi, Laghmani, Cashgari, Teerhai and Deer
Dialects. (Reprinted from the 1838 Asiatic Society Journal). Calcutta: R.C. Lepage and
Co., 1849, p. 33.
a vernacular for a new generation? 303

of Urdu. Leechs work was published in book form during the annexa-
tion of the Punjab in 1849, as the need for grammars increased. It
was one of the first significant colonial studies to explicitly argue that
Punjabi was a dialect of Urdu. The more substantial missionary efforts
that began at this time (such as Careys Grammar) did not radically
change the view that Punjabi was a dialect, as they were written for
people who already knew Urdu.
The view that Punjabi was a dialect of Urdu remained for several
years following annexation, and it influenced colonial policy concern-
ing education. In 1862, a question was posed to Captain A.R. Fuller,
the Director of Public Instruction in the Punjab, about the viability of
Punjabi in the courts. He readily dismissed the advocacy of Punjabi as
a court vernacular by denigrating the significance of Punjabi. Fuller
believed that, Punjabee is merely a dialect of Urdoo, and, As a written
language it makes its appearance only in the Goormookhee Character, a
bastard form of the Nagree, almost as bad as the Kuyasthe of the N.W.
Provinces.71 Fullers attitudes illustrate the low opinions about Punjabi
in administrative circles. As the head of the colonial governments edu-
cational establishment of the time, his opinion was highly regarded.
For colonial officials, a second concern about Punjabi was the
apparent oral nature of the language. This understanding was fostered
by early administrative developments in various districts (discussed
below) and many empirical studies of the region (including the census
data) that illustrated the main spoken language of the region to be
Punjabi. Moreover, officials did not view favorably the perceived lack
of a strong written tradition. Thus, as colonial perceptions regarding
oral language were somewhat negative, the oral nature of Punjabi was
not viewed positively. Literacy brought with it notions of civilization
and progress, while illiteracy (orality) implied almost an uncivilized
society and social setup. For example, an administrator at one early
school in the Simla settlement in 1849 went so far as to describe his
illiterate students as wholly uncivilized.72

71
Fuller to Sec. Government of Punjab, 22 July 1862, No. 32, in, Nazir Ahmad
Chaudhry. Punjab Government Record Office Publications. Development of Urdu as Offi-
cial Language in the Punjab (18491947). Lahore: Evergreen Press, 1977, p. 37.
72
Additional opinions included beliefs that students are entirely ignorant, again
referring to the students inability to read and write to a measurable standard. OIOC
(Oriental and India Office Collections), Home/Misc/760, p. 408.
304 jeffrey m. diamond

Thirdly, the belief that Punjabi did not have a strong textual tradi-
tion was further undermined by the widely held view that the limited
written works of Punjabi were connected to gurmukhi and Sikh texts.
This association began with early literary studies of texts in Punjabi
that mainly discussed the Sikh Adi Granth. For instance, John Mal-
colm offered an early attempt to understand these texts in his Sketch of
the Sikhs. As a study of the book of the Sikhs Malcolm wrote about
the Gurumukh character of Punjabi.73 Thus, he was one of the first
British authors to link gurmukhi with Punjabi. Missionary writings,
beginning with the early efforts of William Carey and the Serampore
Missionaries (in 18111812), also furthered the belief that written Pun-
jabi was associated mainly with gurmukhi texts. The American Presby-
terian Mission later believed that gurmukhi was the standard script for
Punjabi as well. Thus, they believed that Punjabi (at least in the written
form) was the language important to the Sikhs, and they adapted their
press to allow them to print Punjabi language materials in the gurmukhi
script. They printed the Bible in gurmukhi, and the Dictionary, Grammar,
and other texts in a romanized version of gurmukhi that they adapted
from John Shakespears work on Hindustani from the earlier nineteenth
century.74 The Ludhiana publications influenced colonial perceptions
of Punjabi (especially the widely circulated Dictionary and Grammar).
Thus, early colonial administrators understood Punjabi (at least in the
written form) to be the language sacred and important to the Sikhs,
and often used the terms Punjabi and gurmukhi interchangeably.75
The connection between Punjabi, gurmukhi, and the Sikhs helps
us to further understand colonial attitudes about Punjabi. As we shall
see, colonial officials sought to replace the administrative structures
affiliated with Sikh rule and shift authority to local officials and the

73
Malcolm, Sketch of the Sikhs, pp. 1-2. John Malcolm is discussed in the above
section about empirical studies of the Punjab.
74
A Dictionary of the Panjabi Language, Preface. John Newton was an influential
Orientalist around the turn of the nineteenth century who wrote an Urdu grammar
and dictionary.
75
For example, the 18511852 Punjab Administration Report stated that gurmukhi
was sacred and important to Sikhs, implying gurmukhi was a religious language of the
Sikhs. General Report on the Administration of the Punjab Territories, Comprising the
Punjab Proper and the Cis and Trans-Sutlej States, for the Years 185152 and 185253,
in Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Foreign Department). Calcutta:
Calcutta Gazette Office, 1854, p. 184; For further documents equating gurmukhi with the
Sikhs, see, OIOC, Home/Misc/760, p. 366.
a vernacular for a new generation? 305

new bureaucracy. Moreover, empirical studies such as the census and


District Gazetteers, confirmed that the Sikhs were a minority commu-
nity in the Punjab, and that there was a significant Muslim population in
the region. Thus, a language associated mainly with Sikh religious texts
(in its written form) could not be supported in such an environment.
This shift away from indigenous symbols of authority and rule also had
wider implications for the development of other aspects of rule (includ-
ing education).76
Lastly, the significance of Punjabi to the region also was diminished by
the colonial belief that the language was becoming less influential with
the establishment of British colonial rule. For instance, the 18511852
Punjab Administration Report stated that gurmukhi was decreasing in
usage and importance; Goormookhee, though of sacred origin, and in
the days of Seikh supremacy both a courtly and priestly tongue, is now
rapidly falling into desuetude.77 Since gurmukhi was understood to be
the main written form of Punjabi, its apparent decline meant that writ-
ten forms of Punjabi were decreasing in significance. The importance of
Punjabi as a literate language was already devalued and the belief that
its written form was in decline added credence to this attitude. This was
reinforced by the further belief that Punjabee as a spoken language, is
also losing its currency, and degenerating into a mere provincial and rus-
tic dialect.78 Consequently, these attitudes were important in advancing
the role of Urdu as an administrative and educational vernacular in the
Punjab.
Therefore, the empirical and linguistic studies and colonial attitudes
about Punjabi helped to construct the beliefs that Punjabi was a dialect
of Urdu, primarily an oral language, and was connected to gurmukhi
and Sikhs (and thus its significance was in decline with the end of Sikh
rule). These negative views of Punjabi influenced the choice of Urdu as
an administrative vernacular.
In opposition to the beliefs that Punjabi was not suitable for admin-
istration, the decision to utilize Urdu was practical, and related to the
wider development of administration in north India. As many of the

76
For a study about the reform of indigenous educational structures, see, Diamond,
(forthcoming).
77
General Report on the Administration of the Punjab . . . for the Years 185152 and
185253, in Selections from the Records, p. 184.
78
General Report on the Administration of the Punjab . . . for the Years 185151 and
185253, p. 184.
306 jeffrey m. diamond

early colonial officials in the Punjab came from the neighboring North-
Western Provinces (NWP), the British colonial encounter with Punjab
after 1849 was constructed from their administrative knowledge and
bureaucratic experiences developed in the NWP. Many officials were
trained under the tutelage of the NWP Lieutenant Governor, James
Thomason, including John Lawrence.79 Thus, Thomasons administra-
tion effected the formation of colonial bureaucracy in the Punjab, and
ultimately influenced language policy as well.
The officials who governed early colonial Punjab were part of the
paternalistic administrative structures known as Punjab School of
administration. The brothers Henry and John Lawrence are both con-
sidered the founders of this School, but John Lawrence was especially
influential in its development.80 Henry Lawrence held sweeping powers
as the British Resident at Lahore prior to 1849. Although Henry did
not support the annexation of the Punjab, he served as President of the
Board of Administration from 18491853. John Lawrence was a mem-
ber of the Board as well. Both brothers debated the future direction of
British rule in the region, where John argued for a more intervention-
ist role and the development of formal bureaucratic structures to shift
power away from symbols of Sikh rule and the native aristocracy.81
John developed considerable experience creating administrative struc-
tures when he worked in Delhi and in eastern Punjab prior to 1849.
He utilized these experiences to formulate new revenue, judicial, police
and affiliated administrative systems for the Punjab, and he con-
vinced the Governor General, Lord Dalhousie, to support these efforts.

79
Peter Penner, The Patronage Bureaucracy in North India: The Robert M. Bird and
James Thomason School, 18201870. Delhi: Chanakya Publications, 1986, p. 273.
80
John Lawrence was born in 1811. He studied at Haileybury College from 1827
1829, and then left for Delhi where he worked under Charles Metcalfe. By 1846, he
was appointed Commissioner of Jullunder in the annexed Trans Sutlej States of east-
ern Punjab. During this time, John often officiated as Resident in place of Henry,
including serving as Resident from August 1847 to March 1848. His biographies pro-
vide details of his life. These include, Sir Richard Temple. Lord Lawrence. London:
Macmillam and Co., 1889. Lawrence later became Chief Commissioner of Punjab
from 18531859, and the Viceroy of India from 18641869.
81
This discussion is meant to provide an overview of administrative changes in
order to situate the analysis about language and colonial rule. For a background of the
Punjab School and the debates between John and Henry Lawrence, see, Sir Richard
Temple, Men and Events of My Time in India. London: John Murray, 1882, pp.
51-101. Also see, Harold Lee, John and Henry Lawrence and the Origins of Pater-
nalist Rule in the Punjab, 18461858, International Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 2,
no. 1, 1995, pp. 65-88.
a vernacular for a new generation? 307

Consequently, John Lawrence became the Chief Commissioner of the


Punjab after the Board was dissolved in 1853.
John Lawrence established an administration that was reliant upon
independent and colorful personalities. Henry and John Lawrence both
personally knew and often chose many of the early officials who served
in the region. For example, Robert Montgomery, the member of the
Board of Administration responsible for judicial affairs, was a personal
friend of John Lawrence. Montgomery later became the first Lieuten-
ant Governor of the Punjab in 1859.82 Moreover, John knew many of
his high-ranking officials from his time at Haileybury College. Indeed,
many officials were educated at the College, an important institution that
trained civil servants for the East India Company up to 18561867.83 Hai-
leybury students learned Indian languages, including Persian and Urdu,
as well as history and political economy. Thus, Haileybury provided a
common connection and experience for several high-ranking officials,
and this experience influenced their understandings about language. In
addition, John Lawrence often served with them in James Thomasons
NWP administration.
As many colonial officials central to language debates in the Punjab
previously served in the NWP, ideas about language and culture gar-
nered from their colonial experiences in wider North India were subse-
quently brought to the Punjab. Indeed, the debates about the appropriate
administrative vernacular in NWP prior to 1849 influenced many offi-
cials in the Punjab. These NWP debates began even prior to Act XXIX
of 1837, an act that authorized the Governor-General to replace Persian
with Indian vernacular languages, as NWP officials sought to utilize
Urdu as the official vernacular of the NWP. The Lieutenant-Governor of
the NWP, Sir Charles Metcalfe, thought that the language of the courts
should be the language of the people.84 The convenience of the peo-
ple was paramount. In deciding a vernacular, a form of the Khari Boli

82
Robert Montgomery was raised near the Lawrence home, and was a contem-
porary of John at Foyle College. The close relationship between John Lawrence and
Robert Montgomery is discussed in, John Lawrence (Audrey Woodiwiss, ed.). Law-
rence of Lucknow: A Story of Love. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1990, p. 197.
83
For example, officials educated at Haileybury included Donald Mcleod. Mcleod
served as a Financial Commissioner in 1850s Punjab, and was appointed Lieuten-
ant Governor of the Punjab in 1865. See Frederick Charles Danvers, Sir M. Monier-
Williams, et al. Memorials of Old Haileybury College. London: Archibald Constable
and Co., 1894, p. 385.
84
A general overview of these debates can be found in, King, One Language, Two
Scripts; Shackle and Snell, Hindi and Urdu Since 1800, p. 8.
308 jeffrey m. diamond

dialect around Delhi became the convenient standard for Urdu. For rea-
sons of efficiency and retaining a reliable standard, Urdu in a modified
Persian script was chosen for the NWP.
NWP administrators believed that Urdu was the natural successor to
Persian. It was a vulgar version of Persian that could readily replace
Persian, as reformers were still developing formalized Urdu structures,
grammars, terms, and expressions at that time.85 Consequently, the
shared features between Urdu and Persian throughout North India,
including the Persian script and the large vocabulary of highly Persian-
ized Urdu, was advantageous for people who knew Persian. Many judges
favored Urdu in the Persian nastaliq script, although there were prob-
lems with colonial officials retaining Persian vocabulary but merely using
Hindustani verb structures. Nonetheless, Urdu (Hindustani) became a
successor to Persian as an administrative vernacular language that was
intelligible to most people in the NWP.
These administrative developments had a direct relation to the choice
of an administrative vernacular in the Punjab. Most officials who arrived
in early colonial Punjab knew Urdu (and often Persian) because they
had typically been educated at Haileybury College and because Urdu
had already replaced Persian as the official administrative vernacular
language in the NWP. Thus, their knowledge of languages and previ-
ous administrative experiences in the NWP influenced their approach
to language policy and their support of Urdu.
The final decision to utilize Urdu as an administrative vernacular was
connected to the establishment of the judiciary, and the courts become
an early test for its usage. Soon after the British annexed the region,
the Board of Administration sought to have a uniformity in the lan-
guage used, as documents submitted to them were written in Persian,
some in Urdu, and some in a mixed dialect composed of both.86 They
believed there was an obvious advantage for the adoption of one
uniform language for all Courts and official documents in the districts
under the Board.87
At this point, colonial perceptions about Punjabi influenced the nature
of the debate. As there was little support for Punjabi or belief it was

85
Majeed, The Jargon of Indostan, p. 184.
86
Circular No. 193, 1 June 1849, in Selected Circular Orders of the Board of
Administration for the Affairs of the Punjab in General and Political Departments.
Lahore: Punjab Printing Co., 1871, pp. 8-9.
87
Circular No. 193, 1 June 1849, in Selected Circular Orders, p. 9.
a vernacular for a new generation? 309

an appropriate language, it was not considered in the colonial records


for some time. Therefore, the Secretary to the Board of Administration,
Punjab sent out a memorandum to all commissioners in the Punjab to
inquire whether Urdu or Persian was best suited for administration in
various parts of this new territory. In a report about these correspon-
dences, the secretary of the Board stated that the Boards main concern
focused on the vernacular language officials would use for the public
business in the courts of the newly acquired territory.88 As the courts
provided an important avenue for the colonial government to interact
with Punjabis, this question held significance for all people of greater
Punjab as it was the primary method for the determination of language
policy. The Board of Administration believed many people readily com-
prehended Urdu, while Persian to them is a foreign tongue, although
they acknowledged Persian was more familiar to some.89 Such state-
ments indicate that there was some apprehension about the spoken
languages used in the Punjab, but an acknowledgement that Urdu was
comprehensible (intelligible) throughout the region.
The decision to utilize Urdu in the courts was not simply a directive
from the highest levels of government. Indeed, this decision was linked
to the importance of local officials who were given enormous power and
influence under the administration of the Lawrence brothers, what came
to be known as the Punjab School of administration. Consequently, local
officials were vital to the debates regarding an administrative vernacu-
lar, as there were differences of opinions between various divisional and
district commissioners in the Punjab. The early opinions of commis-
sioners that granted a slight advantage to Persian over Urdu in some
parts of the Punjab were eventually reversed. In the divisions of Lahore,
Jhelum, and parts of the Multan division, Urdu was immediately adopted
as being less foreign than Persian according to the commissioners in
these divisions.90 Many of the divisions of the Punjab, including Pesha-
war and most of Multan, initially retained Persian. Nonetheless by 1851,
the Board decided that Urdu should become the official language of the
courts for most districts of the Punjab as many officials already decided
to use Urdu in their districts; the main exceptions were border districts

88
This was also for the ease of administration in the newly established colonial judi-
ciary system in Punjab. G.J. Christian Esq. Sec. Board of Administration for Punjab to
H.M. Elliot, Sec. GOI, 17 August, 1849, OIOC, Home/Misc/760, pp. 115-8.
89
Circular No. 193, 1 June 1849, in Selected Circular Orders, p. 9.
90
OIOC, Home/Misc/ 760, pp. 115-8.
310 jeffrey m. diamond

of Peshawar and Multan, as local officials strongly advocated the reten-


tion of Persian.91
The Board of Administration eventually decided to introduce Urdu
into those districts still using Persian. John Lawrence especially argued
that Urdu was best suited for the Punjab. Indeed in 1851, he stated
clearly stated that:
It should be considered that the Urdu is not the language of these Districts
neither is Persian. But Urdu is well understood by the majority of our offi-
cers, whereas Persian is not . . . Urdu is the Lingua Franca of India and it
is presumably . . . becoming that of all the Districts in the Punjab.92
The convenience of colonial administration was paramount, as Lawrence
argued the language that British officials could comprehend also was a
factor in the decision of an administrative vernacular.93 Moreover, he did
not hesitate to utilize Urdu in the region as he sought to reform local
administration. Indeed, Lawrence believed that the introduction of Urdu
into the courts would facilitate its usage in the Punjab. As the supposed
lingua franca of North India, colonial officials presumed Punjabis
would wish to use Urdu as well. Therefore, with the official sanction of
Urdu, numerous letters encouraged the remaining districts to use Urdu
as the language of the courts in the Punjab.94
Punjabi was not considered seriously until the early 1860s, when
debates appeared in official discourse. At that time, the Judicial Com-
missioner of the Punjab, R.N. Cust, stated that Punjabi was better suited
for the majority of the courts in the Punjab. Cust was an important
member of the Punjab administration who developed an early inter-
est in languages at Haileybury College. His diverse interests included
extensive missionary pursuits and writing numerous articles and books

91
Sec. Board of Administration to DC Peshawar and Hazara, 20 September 1849,
no. 21, Chaudhry, Development of Urdu as Official Language in the Punjab, pp. 27-8.
92
Note by John Lawrence, No. 21, Chaudhry, Development of Urdu as Official
Language in the Punjab, pp. 27-8.
93
John Lawrence argued that officials who arrived from the NWP typically were
not familiar with Punjabi, and several did not know Persian. Thus, Urdu was the
most convenient vernacular language for officials. Note by John Lawrence, no. 21,
Chaudhry, Development of Urdu as Official Language in the Punjab, pp. 27-8.
94
For example, see the correspondence between the Secretary to the Chief Com-
missioner, Punjab and the Commissioner of the Leia Division. No. 24, 7 June 1854;
No. 25, 10 June 1854; No. 26, 8 June 1854; No. 28, 13 June 1854, in, Chaudhry, Devel-
opment of Urdu as Official Language in the Punjab, pp. 30-4.
a vernacular for a new generation? 311

about Indian languages and linguistics.95 These pursuits led him to advo-
cate the use of Punjabi. His opinion also may have been influenced by
the reality that the courts had to negotiate the usage of Urdu with Pun-
jabi.96 However, he often held views that were not shared by other British
officials.
Custs remarks began a debate about the use of Punjabi as a court
vernacular, evoking strong responses to his proposal. It also was an
early contradiction of the prevailing attitudes toward Punjabi. However,
many officials did not agree with Custs conclusions, as their beliefs were
influenced by colonial and missionary empirical and linguistic studies
about Punjabi. For instance, the Commissioner of the Lahore Division,
Thomas Douglas Forsytha Haileybury graduate who earned honors
for his studies of Persian, Hindustani, Sanskrit, and Hindiwas skep-
tical about the use of Punjabi for written records due to the lack of a
defined textual tradition and grammar.97 Forsyth spent considerable time
in various posts throughout the Punjab, and he was well placed within
the administrative and linguistic debates at the time. Therefore, he was
concerned that there should be one standard administrative vernacu-
lar language for the Punjab, which included the Urdu speaking areas
of Delhi and Haryana after 1857. He illustrated his concerns by stating
that if a munshi from Delhi came to a Lahore Court, he would find,
his flowing Oordoo turned into Punjabi. Captain N.W. Elphinstone,

95
Robert Needham Cust was educated at Haileybury College from 18401842, win-
ning prizes in Hindustani, Arabic, classics, and history. Danvers, Memorials of Old
Haileybury College, p. 420. Cust later became a prolific writer of essays on linguistics
in India and in Africa as well. For example, see, Robert Needham Cust, Linguistic
and Oriental Essays. 2nd series, written from the year 1847 to 1887. London: Trubner,
1887.
96
Although it is difficult to find first hand accounts of courtrooms at that time,
we know that many Punjabi who began to use the courts did not speak Urdu (based
upon the linguistic culture of the region). Thus, the courts had to negotiate the usage
of language, with both Punjabi and Urdu being used in the oral proceedings (and the
written records being in Urdu and English). This negotiation still takes place today in
many parts of Pakistani Punjab, where Urdu and Punjabi are used side by side for a
variety of functions, and Urdu still serves as the primary written language.
97
Thomas Forsyth, Commissioner, Lahore Division, to Sec. GOP, 16 June 1863,
no. 33, Chaudhry, Development of Urdu as Official Language in the Punjab, pp. 39-40.
Forsyth attended Haileybury College from 18451847, where he earned prizes in Per-
sian, Sanskrit, Hindustani, and Hindi. In India, he became acquainted with Henry
Lawrence, and by the early 1860s, he was the Commissioner of Lahore Division. For
information about Forsyth, see Douglas Forsyth (Ethel Forsyth, ed.), Autobiography
and Reminiscences of Sir Douglas Forsyth. London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1887;
Danvers, Memorials of Old Haileybury College, p. 434.
312 jeffrey m. diamond

the Deputy Commissioner of Jullundhur also believed that Custs plan


would render the proceedings and record of our Division, quite unin-
telligible to the courts of the next one, where Urdu or a local Punjabi
dialect might be favored.98 Elphinstone further argued that Urdu was
the Vernacular of the Educated classes of the new generation, and
therefore there was no need to utilize Punjabi in the courts. With many
officials repudiating Custs proposal, Urdu was maintained as the court
vernacular in Punjab.
The use of Urdu in the Punjab allowed the British to maintain a con-
venient administrative vernacular throughout North India in the middle
of the nineteenth century.99 This common language facilitated adminis-
trative work, making the translation of documents and the movement
of colonial officials exceptionally easy across North India. Many colo-
nial officials received language instruction in Haileybury College, where
Urdu was taught to civil servants intending to work in North India. Their
experience in administration also meant that they usually already knew
Urdu to some extent. Officials did not necessarily have a background in
Punjabi. Moreover, many Bengalis and other Indian assistants who came
to the Punjab were familiar with Urdu from work in other regions of
North India. Maintaining Urdu as the administrative vernacular proved
beneficial to the establishment of administration.
The formation of language policy took place during the first years of
colonial rule in the Punjab. A more bureaucratic administrative system
developed after John Lawrences tenure as Chief Commissioner con-
cluded in 1859. However, Lawrences influence had far reaching implica-
tions for the development of a paternalistic administration in the region.
Many officials continued to serve in important posts through the 1860s
and 1870s (including many Lieutenant Governors up to Charles Aitchi-
son), and their earlier experiences informed governmental decisions.100
The choice of Urdu had a lasting effect on education and governance
in the Punjab.

98
Elphinstone, DC Jullundhur, to Sec. GOP, 8 July 1862, No. 37, Chaudhry, Devel-
opment of Urdu as Official Language in the Punjab, pp. 46-7.
99
Shackle and Snell, Hindi and Urdu since 1800, p. 8.
100
Lawrences influence on successive officials and the administrative structures
that developed after his tenure as Chief Minister is discussed in P.H.M. van den
Dungen. The Punjab Tradition: Influence and Authority in Nineteenth Century India.
London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972, especially pp. 56-66.
a vernacular for a new generation? 313

9.5. Conclusion

The objectification of Indian languages such as Urdu through colonial


analysis and the subsequent patronage of institutions and specialists
facilitated the use of Urdu as an administrative vernacular.101 However,
Punjabi was not extensively formalized until missionary studies and
the subsequent growth of Sikh revival movements such as the Singh
Sabha in the late nineteenth century.102 Thus, Punjabi did not have an
established standard by the time of the British annexation of the wider
Punjab region in 1849. It was a heterogeneous language with various
influences. The arrival of missionaries facilitated the processes of stan-
dardization, including a formal grammar and writing style. However,
regional variations remained, and Punjabi was not fully standardized by
the time colonial officials chose an administrative vernacular language
for the region.
Colonial attitudes and beliefs about Punjabi were vital to these
debates. Punjabi was not considered to be a suitable language for
administration. For many officials, Punjabi also was viewed as a dia-
lect of Urdu in early colonial Punjab. Later, many officials viewed
Punjabi as a language with many regional dialects. Its oral form was
denigrated as a low and vulgar language, and there were claims that
the usage of Punjabi was decreasing. In addition, missionaries and Brit-
ish officials linked the written form of Punjabi to gurmukhi and Sikh
religious texts.
Although the Punjab was a large region, the diverse linguistic cul-
ture of the region was less paramount to the formation of colonial lan-
guage policy. Instead of celebrating many languages, colonial officials
sought to standardize administration by utilizing Urdu as a language
that supposedly transgressed territory. Indeed, colonial language policy
did not only ignore the varieties of languages and their different uses,
but also ignored the spoken repertoires of languagesincluding the

101
The development of Indian languages such as Urdu involved the patronage
of institutions and specialists to support and transmit this knowledge. See, Bernard
Cohn, The Command of Language and the Language of Command, in Bernard
Cohn, Colonialism and its Forms of Knowledge: The British in India. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1997, pp. 45-7. Diamond, (fortcoming).
102
Christopher Shackle argues that Modern Standard Punjabi did not exist before
the twentieth century, after the formation of Sikh reformist organizations that actively
promoted the Punjabi language. See, Shackle, Some Observations, p. 105.
314 jeffrey m. diamond

supposedly vulgar Punjabi spoken throughout the region. Moreover,


the administrative experiences of officials from other parts of North
India also led officials to favor Urdu. Persian was the administrative
language in Sikh ruled Punjab prior to 1849, as it was in Mughal North
India. As Urdu replaced Persian throughout other regions of North
India prior to 1849, Urdu quickly became the administrative vernacu-
lar in Punjab as well.
This language policy had wide ranging effects on Punjabi society,
as the language chosen for the courts became the administrative ver-
nacular for this new colonial territory. As early as 1851, administrators
believed that Urdu, as the prescribed language of the courts and of
the public departments is becoming familiar to the upper and middle
classes.103 Thus, Urdu quickly became the preferred language of various
government and government-aided educational institutions as well. As
education was a path to service in the colonial government (among the
newly forming elite of colonial society), government policies that gave
preference to a language or script (as official status) greatly influenced
those who attended government institutions. Thus, Urdu became the
written language of an educated indigenous elite who worked with the
colonial government and Punjabi remained the language of the wider
population that did not have access to colonial education.
Although early colonial perceptions helped to influence language
policy, we can observe the limitations of the policy to this day. Punjabi
has remained a vital part of the language terrain. Punjabi, laced with
Persian and Urdu words and proverbs, was spoken by the educated
elite throughout colonial rule.104 In Indian Punjab today, Punjabi has
become standardized and is officially recognized and patronized by
government. Even in Pakistan Punjab, where Punjabi has received
little official sanction or support, Punjabi has continued to remain an
important spoken language.105 However, the preeminence of Urdu at
the expense of Punjabi in the regions that form Pakistan Punjab has led

103
General Report on the Administration of the Punjab . . . for the Years 185152 and
185253, p. 184.
104
Prakash Tandon, in his famous memoir Punjabi Century, states that his grand
uncle, born in 1850, spoke in clear Punjabi laced with chaste Urdu and Persian and
an occasional English word, punctuated with much conscious wisdom and many
Punjabi, Persian, and Urdu proverbs. Prakash Tandon. Punjabi Century: 18571947.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973, pp. 17-23.
105
For a general discussion of this issue, see, Tariq Rahman. Language and Politics
in Pakistan. Karachi: Oxford University Press, pp. 199-209.
a vernacular for a new generation? 315

to larger problems for the postcolonial state and society. Elite attitudes
and beliefs about regional languages (and the people who primarily
utilize them) remain rather negative although these regional languages
have retained their influence among the majority of the population.
This article has examined the historical roots of such debates.

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CHAPTER TEN

BALOCHI: TOWARDS A BIOGRAPHY OF THE LANGUAGE

Brian Spooner

10.1. Introduction

The Baloch, speaking a language classified by linguists as Northwest


Iranian, are generally thought to have arrived from the northwest in
what is now southeastern Iran and western Pakistan in waves between
1000 and 1500 ad. Some of them settled and Balochized the existing
settled communities. Some remained nomadic. The nomads are still
considered by many Baloch to be the true Baloch, who preserve the
old ways best. Other tribal groups have immigrated into the area since,
and similarly adopted Balochi language and identity. Balochi1 is known
in the literature of area studies and linguistics as a series of dialects,
for the most part mutually intelligible, differing mainly in vocabulary
and the degree of influence from neighboring languages, mainly Per-
sian (cf. Elfenbein 1989a, 1989b). It is spoken by three to five mil-
lion2 people in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, Oman and the Persian
Gulf states, Turkmenistan, East Africa, and diaspora communities in
other parts of the world. But some communities on the peripheries
of this distribution, isolated from other Balochi-speaking communi-
ties in Punjab, Sindh, India and elsewhere, have ceased to be Balochi-
speaking. The most important contributors to modern studies of the
Baloch have been Joseph Elfenbein and Carina Jahani. Jahani (1989:
86-90) summarises the official status of Balochi in each country, and
is a valuable source for the situation with regard to standardization
and literacy up to 1989. She has also made available much significant
new work as well as other useful bibliography in the Studia Iranica

1
Often written Baluchi, when it is Romanized from Persian which does not dis-
tinguish written /o/ from /u/. In this article I have used Baloch for the people, and
Balochi for the language, except where there is a reason to Romanize from a Persian
context.
2
Some claim many more, and national censuses are indeterminate, except for
Turkmenistan where the 1989 Soviet census lists 29,000 Baloch (Axenov 2006: 19).
320 brian spooner

Upsaliensia series at Uppsala (such as Ahangar 2007, Axenov 2000 and


2006, Baranzehi 2003, Bashir 2007). Details of other important work
are also included in the bibliography at the end of this chapter (Bashir
1991, Barker 1969, Collett 1983, Farrell 1989, 1990, 1995, Korn 2009,
Nawata 1981, Rzehak 2003). The foundational studies of Balochi, by
M. Longworth Dames, William Geiger, George Gilbertson, and G.A.
Grierson are also listed.
Although a Baloch state was established at Kalat (located now in
Pakistan) in 1638 (cf. Spooner 1984, 1989), under a dynastic Khan,
this political centralization did not survive through the colonial period
and did not lead to standardization of the language. The medium of
administration in this state, which became known as the Khanate
of Kalat, was Persian, as was customary down to the 19th century
throughout south and central Asia and beyond (see Spooner, this vol-
ume). Kalat was taken over by Ahmad Shah Durrani, and incorpo-
rated into the new Afghan Empire in the late 1740s, but broke away
and became independent again in the mid-1750s, remaining so until
the arrival of the British in 1839. Efforts to establish a standard writ-
ten Balochi began with the ethnic awareness that emerged during the
period of British suzerainty (18391947). After Kalat and its depen-
dencies acceded to Pakistan in 1948 Balochi was recognised as one of
the national languages of Pakistan, and publication in Balochi (sup-
ported by government funding) favored some dialects over others, but
still did not lead to general acceptance of a standard. Sokolova (1953)
provides a useful review of publication in Balochi down to that time.
Similar state recognition was granted to Balochi in Afghanistan after
the communist Putsch in 1978, with similar lack of significant effect.
There has been no comparable state recognition of Balochi in Iran or
in any of the other countries with Balochi-speaking minorities, except
to a limited extent in Turkmenistan, and more recently in Afghanistan
(see below, and Moshkalo 2000).
Meanwhile, although literacy rates in the region have risen signifi-
cantly over the past generation, the rise in Balochi literacy has been
slow, and generally negligible. Literacy for most Balochi-speakers is
not in Balochi, but in Urdu in Pakistan and in Persian in Afghani-
stan and Iran. Even now very few Baloch read Balochi, in any of the
countries, even though the alphabet in which it is printed is essen-
tially identical with Persian and Urdu. Despite efforts to make Balo-
chi a medium of written and print communication, Baloch who read
Urdu or Persian comfortably and could easily make out Balochi on a
balochi: towards a biography of the language 321

printed page, claim to find it illegible, though there is no difficulty for a


non-native speaker. This is a situation which needs to be explained
both in terms of the way people read and of the historical status of the
three languages. Although the script is alphabetic, in general people
read by unconscious recognition of the shapes of common combina-
tions of letters, rather than by phonetic construction of words from
individual letters. This is especially true of languages written in the
Arabic script, because writing works in terms of established pen-
strokes including particular serial combinations of letters, rather than
by the simple connection of whatever letters are required to form any
particular word. Most of the established pen-strokes in Urdu are dif-
ferent from those in Persian. Those needed for writing in Balochi
are different again, and therefore unfamiliar to readers already accus-
tomed to either Persian or Urdu and difficult to read. In general also
there is still an historical expectation that writing should be in Persian
or Urdu, rather than Balochi. But without a growth in literacy rates
or increase in use in electronic (non-oral) media Balochi is unlikely to
achieve standardization, or to increase in national significance. Cur-
rently, however, its use is central to local political as well as cultural
identity within Baloch-majority areas. This is due to its historical use
as the medium of public life among the Baloch, and as the medium
of interaction between subcommunities who have come to consider
themselves Baloch even if they retain the use of another language. We
may therefore expect that if socio-political identity continues to rise
among the Baloch, as it has over the past generation or so, its use in
electronic media will increase and a standard form of the language will
emerge. In Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan, the Baloch live in areas
that are poor in resources, and have historically received little atten-
tion from the national government. Under current processes of glo-
balization this situation may change, with consequences for the Baloch
and their language that are not yet predictable.
The history of the Baloch and their language over the past four cen-
turies makes Balochi an interesting case for modern language policy
studiesone in which linguists, anthropologists, historians and politi-
cal scientists all have a stake. Besides providing a detailed description
of a variety of processes of language change, the value of such a study
lies in the light it would shed on a transnational identity in a global-
izing world. My aim in this chapter is to justify this statement. I will
start by reviewing the history of the Baloch: how they arrived in their
current locations and the significance of the configuration of their
modern communities. Along the way I will point to consequences for
322 brian spooner

the evolving status of Balochi. I will conclude with a summary of what


can be said of current policy regarding Balochi in the countries we will
have visited.3

10.2. Balochi in the Light of Baloch History

True to the 14th-century Arab historian ibn Khalduns model of his-


torical relationships between tribal nomadic and settled agricultural
populations, besides the Kalat Khanate the Baloch made other efforts
to take over settled communities. None of them is well known histori-
cally. The most significant case is that of the Baloch Talpur Mirs, who
ruled Sindh before it was annexed by the British in 1843. Another
is Las Bela which was established under a Baloch with the local title
Jam in 1742. In both these cases the local population was Sindhi, but
even though Sindhi had become a written language at least as early as
the 16th century, the literacy ratio was very low and Balochi was the
language of the ruling family. A similar case in southeastern Iran will
be reviewed below.
The earliest extant text (i.e. direct evidence) of Balochi is a ms in
the British Museum, published by Elfenbein (1983), who dates it to
around 1820. It is important to note that this is a period when sev-
eral languages in the region are for the first time beginning to com-
pete with Persian as written languages. In the part of Balochistan that
came under British suzerainty the amount of textual material gradu-
ally increases in the course of the colonial period, during which time
first Kalat (on the plateau) and later Las Bela (on the coast) and Kalats
western dependencies (Kharan, and eastern Makran, centered on Tur-
bat) were recognised by the British as Princely States. A century later,
seven months after the Partition of British India in August 1947, lack-
ing the support that would have been necessary for independence, the
whole of Balochistan that had been included in British India acceded
to Pakistan. Balochi was now the language of one of four provinces of
West Pakistan. Next, all four Baloch Princely States (Kalat, Kharan,
Las Bela, Makran) were joined together in the Balochistan States
Union of West Pakistan in 1952 (with the Khan of Kalat as the Khan-e
Azam, or Great Khan). This arrangement lasted until 1955, when

3
This account is based on my own research with the Baloch in Afghanistan, Iran
and Pakistan between 1958 and 1985, enriched by data from the works cited below.
balochi: towards a biography of the language 323

the Union was formally absorbed into the unitary province of West
Pakistan, together with the area known as British Balochistan along
the Afghan border (which had been directly ruled from Calcutta,
and later New Delhi). The current Pakistani Province of Balochistan,
including all these earlier divisions, was established after East Pakistan
broke away to become Bangladesh in 1971. Since that time various
movements have arisen among the Baloch (whose leaders never fully
acquiesced in the accession to Pakistan) to seek independence from
Pakistan, or minimally to renegotiate the relationship with the central
government in Karachi, and later in Islamabad.4 Tariq Rahman (1996)
classifies Balochi as one of 65 languages in Pakistan. It is one of the
six official languages, but not one that can be used for any form of
nationally recognised or useful qualification. He records that 3.57%
of the population speak it, and that it is a strong identity symbol but of
no value for either economic or political advancement. The Province
of Balochistan, however, covers over 43% of Pakistans territory, and
Balochi is the primary language associated with it.
Hostility to the Federal Government in Islamabad has grown, most
particularly among the Marri and Bugti tribes in the northeast of the
Province. The discovery of a cache of arms in the Iraqi embassy in
Islamabad in 1973, supposedly destined for delivery to the Marri Baloch
in the northeast of Balochistan Province, led to an escalation of the
Governments efforts to suppress Baloch opposition, which in turn
increased their sense of political identity. In 1974 the Marri went into
full rebellion, and some migrated into southern Afghanistan, where
they remained for over a decade (despite the Russian occupation). The
problem has not been resolved. Nominally the Baloch in modern Paki-
stan have a significant degree of political autonomy in that the prov-
ince elects and forms its own provincial government. However, the
Baloch have been unable to benefit from this situation, partly because
of the divisions among the communities that formed the Princely
States of the British period, and partly because of the number of Pash-
tuns who are included in the part of the Province that was British
Balochistan (that is, under direct British administration) along the
border of Afghanistan.

4
Islamabad was constructed as the new national capital in the 1960s and began
functioning as such in the early 1970s. Its location was chosen to provide better access
to the seat of government from all parts of the country. In fact, however, it reduced
accessibility from Balochistan.
324 brian spooner

The relationship between the Baloch and the Pashtuns is complex,


since neither community is politically centralized. They are closely
related culturally as well as historically. Balochi and Pashto are both
Iranian languages, but only distantly related and with no degree of
mutual intelligibility. However, since the incorporation of the Baloch
into the Afghan Empire in the mid-18th century, if not before, there
has been a transitional zone in northern Balochistan and along either
side of the border with Afghanistan, which is inhabited by communi-
ties of both identities. There is evidence that some Pashtun commu-
nities have assimilated to Baloch identity over the past two hundred
years. An interesting explanation of this process has been offered by
Barth (1964). The whole of Balochistan was included in the terri-
tory claimed by the movement to declare a new country, to be called
Pashtunistan, which was promoted by the Afghan government in the
middle of the last century, in reaction to the inclusion of a large pro-
portion of all Pashtuns in the new state of Pakistan when the British
withdrew in 1947.
The political history of the Baloch in Iran has been different, but
interrelated. The difference is partly the result of distance from Kalat,
beyond the reach of the Khan, but more importantly due to differ-
ences between the larger government interests extending into the area
from Kabul, New Delhi and Tehran. Political movements against the
authority of the central government in Tehran have been similar to
those of the Pakistani Baloch against the Government of Pakistan. But
early in the 19th century a new element appeared. A branch of the
Barakzai line of the Durrani ruling clan of Pashtuns in Afghanistan
appeared among the Baloch in Saravan, in what is now the Iranian
province of Sistan and Baluchistan. Since this was not long after the
internecine fighting between the two main branches of the Durrani
clan in Herat in 18171819, it is possible that the migration resulted
from that clash, but no textual or other evidence has survived to sub-
stantiate the connection. Gradually these Pashtun Barakzai managed
to replace the local leaders in Saravan, Bampur and western Makran.
They also assimilated to a Baloch identity. These leadership positions
were comparable to those of Kharan and Makran that became Princely
States under the British, but the Iranian conception of the state did not
recognise any degree of local autonomy. In Iranian Balochistan there
are several other agricultural settlements with non-Balochi names that
appear to have continuous histories from before the arrival into the
area both of Islam and of the Baloch, many of which had local rulers
who claimed non-Baloch origins, comparable to the Barakzai.
balochi: towards a biography of the language 325

Barakzai power and regional authority grew in the early decades of


the 20th century when, following the efforts of Muhammad Shah to
extend his authority into Balochistan in the 1830s, his successors in
the Qajar dynasty in Tehran had little interest in such distant parts
of the country. However, when Reza Shah Pahlavi deposed the Qajars
and launched his new nationalistic modernizing regime in 1925, he
spent the first years restoring the authority of the national govern-
ment throughout Iranian territory as it had been defined in border
negotiations with the British and the Russians starting in 1871. As
with previous rulers the Baloch were last on his list. Finally, in 1928
he sent an army against them under General Amir Amanullah Jah-
anbani, which had little difficulty in defeating the alliance of tribes
that the incumbent, Dust Muhammad Khan Barakzai, namesake of the
Afghan 19th century ruler (18261863), had assembled (see Jahanbani
1957, 1959).
The two efforts to build a Baloch state to include all or most of
the Balochthe Ahmadzais in Kalat and the Barakzais in Bampur
both failed to survive through the 20th century. But these indigenous
efforts distinguished the Baloch situation from that of the Kurds or
Azari-speakers, who have not established their own central author-
ity, except ephemerally with Soviet assistance after WWII. However,
although the Baloch were not reliable fighters for their own leaders,
they were always ready to fight for others. In particular they formed
the army of the Muscadine Empire in the Persian Gulf and the western
Indian Ocean in the 19th century, remained in Zanzibar till the revo-
lution in 1963 (initially filling the position of Viceroy), and traded in
East Africa (cf. Lodhi 2000, Nicolini 2008), moving as far west as the
Congo (where some were observed by an ethnographer as late as the
1950s). Several Baloch tribes settled in Oman earlier and became Ara-
bic-speaking (cf. Foxton 1985). Others developed trading relationships
with the other Gulf states, which continue down to the present. There
were abundant opportunities for Baloch to trade and find employment
under the British, and some joined the merchant marine and gained
experience of other parts of the world. Meanwhile, in eastern Iran the
Alam family, descended (like the Durrani Shahs of Afghanistan) from
one of Nader Shahs5 generals, and established since that time in the
Quenat in what became eastern Iran, had extended its influence south

5
Nader Shah (17361747), who replaced the Iranian Safavid dynasty (15011722),
was assassinated in Mashhad in 1747.
326 brian spooner

into Sistan and Baluchistan, and used the Baloch as retainers. It is


possible that Baloch from the Sarhadd (lit. borderland, the northern
part of Iranian Baluchistan) had raided north before this time, but in
the 19th century their relationship with the Alams encouraged them
further. In the 1950s there was still a community of Baloch north of
the central deserts west of Esfarain in northwestern Khorasan (Iran).
Some moved further north and settled in what is now Turkmenistan.
The extent of this dispersal raises the question: how could the Baloch
maintain a single cultural, linguistic and political identity over such a
vast geographical extent, before the era of modern communications,
with nothing to hold them togetherno central place or authority,
and no written language or means of communication among far-flung
communities speaking different dialects. The answer to this question
appears to lie in the cultural significance they attributed to pastoral
nomadism and a mobile rather than a settled agricultural life. The
degree to which language played a role in this process was introduced
by Barth (1964). Here I will summarise Barths argument and elabo-
rate on it from my own experience.

10.3. Balochi as a Criterion of Baloch Identity

The Baloch have been held together, and perhaps even able to expand,
because their sense of common identity lay in acceptance of institu-
tional forms of behavior among strangers, forms in which language
was a central component, and the necessary standard forms were
shared across dialects. To be accepted as a Baloch one had to do little
more than do as the Baloch did. It was a hierarchical society with an
oral culture. Anyone could be accepted so long as they assimilated
to the behavioral norms that signified acceptance of a position in the
political hierarchy of communities. The most important general insti-
tutions which are a part of everyday Baloch life concern meetings and
exchange of information (cf. Barth 1964: 13-4).
Although Baloch etiquette and formality is minimal compared to
(for instance) Persian, except when he is with intimates the Baloch
is properly always dignified, formal and laconic (sangin). When a
man enters anothers house he says the traditional Islamic greeting
salaam alaikum (peace be on you) and equals and inferiors rise. The
newcomer gives hands with his host and any other men present with
whom he has or would like to have some personal relationship. The
balochi: towards a biography of the language 327

host is not necessarily the owner of the house. The honorary role of
host is played by the most senior man present who is least traveller
(musafer), i.e. a more senior man after the first day or so of his stay
is treated as though he were the owner and host. The newcomer then
sits in the place indicated by the host, and the host turns to him, and
does the wash-atk (Bal. wash-atk akant), thus:

Host Newcomer
wash tke you are welcome wash tke you are welcome
ju e are you well ju e are you well
mehrabni kan do kindness hodi mehrabn int God is kind
tau mehrabni kan you do kindness
habar kan talk, tell the news

In a formal situation the newcomer will then give a short resum of


the news he has, e.g., where he has come from (also, of course, in
the unusual circumstance where this is not already known, who he
is), what he has seen on his way and any recent developments in the
region he has come from, in a nomadic region who is camped where,
assuming of course that he has no reason for wanting to keep his hosts
ignorant of these things. He will then, the formalities over, ask the
health individually of the others present, including the families of any
whom he may know, with the phrases ju e? dadd e? sharr dadde? He
will not be pressed to give the reason for his coming until (if he stays)
the third day.
Where two or more meet away from a settlement or camp the pro-
cedure differs only in that whoever is senior does the wash-atk. (I never
observed any disagreement over who was senior.) If any are mounted,
they dismount some ten yards or more before meeting. Then they walk
towards each other, give hands, say salaam alaikum, and sit in a circle.
If the men concerned have met before the same day, or if each knows
that the other is local the procedure is abbreviated, but not omitted.
The general Balochi word for news is hal (from the Arabic hal condi-
tion, situation, actuality). It is constantly being sought and exchanged.
The two main occasions for the exchange of hal and the wash atk are
the diwan (court, from Sasanian usage, 224-651 ad), an institution-
alized gathering intimately connected with the position of any senior
personage.
Although life among the Baloch has changed over the past half cen-
tury as their interaction with a larger national society has increased,
328 brian spooner

these practices are still recognised and have not lost their cultural
value. One may assume that this function of the language belongs to a
particular historical phase of the developing relationship between the
Baloch and their neighbors. Although there is no historical evidence, it
is easy to understand how such a function would have evolved under
regimes of Baloch rulers who could not use literacy for local admin-
istration. Although this use of the language continues, Balochi is now
a written language and has been evolving slowly in this new dimen-
sion of remote interaction over the past fifty years. But still very few
Baloch read Balochi, and fewer write it, and those who do are mostly
in Pakistan. The foundations of Balochi literacy were laid by foreign-
ers in the 19th century, mostly by missionaries. The interests of the
Baloch were also served significantly by the production of the multi-
volume Baluchistan District Gazetteer Series, published in 19061907,
which included a great deal of information on the language as well as
the sense of identity and the cultural life associated with it, making
them one of the best documented non-literate peoples anywhere. The
earliest periodical publication appears to have been Bolan, a literary
weekly published in Quetta before Independence, perhaps as early as
the 1930s (see Elfenbein 1989a, and Jahani 1989: 135). We lack data
on printruns and readership. Publication in Balochi was subsidized by
the Federal Government when the Balochistan States Union acceded
to Pakistan in 1948. But it appears to have peaked in the 1960s.
Other initiatives designed to raise the status of Balochi to a national
level (all in Pakistan) include regular radio broadcasts (Baloch 1985),
the establishment of a Balochi Academy in 1957 in Quetta (the pro-
vincial capital), and a Balochi Studies section at Balochistan University
in Quetta in 1997, which teaches and sponsors research on the Balo-
chi language and literature. Broadcasts in Balochi were introduced by
Radio Pakistan in 1949. The program was daily, forty five minutes,
and was broadcast from Karachi. Starting in 1956 the programs were
broadcast from Quetta, the provincial capital. The Balochi Academy
was established in Quetta, with financial support from the Federal
Government. Its most important literary activities have been publi-
cation of books, mainly in Balochi, and the organization of literary
meetings. There have also been some attempts at starting primary edu-
cation in Balochi. As the result of an initiative of the government of
Benazir Bhutto, Balochi, Brahui and Pashto were introduced as the
medium of instruction in government schools in 1990. However, only
two years later, in 1992, education in mother tongue languages was
balochi: towards a biography of the language 329

made optional and parents switched back to Urdu (Rahman 1996:


169, see also 1999 and 2002). Private initiatives have also been taken
to teach Balochi, especially in the main Baloch residential area of
Karachi, Lyari. A number of periodicals have also been published in
Balochi for various periods. Some of the Baloch in the diaspora are
also concerned with the preservation and promotion of Balochi, pub-
lishing magazines and arranging literacy classes, cultural evenings, and
other activities. There are now numerous weekly and monthly maga-
zines published in Balochi. But although these initiatives have raised
the value of particular dialect forms, mainly Makrani, they have not
raised the value of Balochi as a national language or led in any signifi-
cant way towards standardization.
Some more detail from the current literature on the early history of
the language and people may be useful here. As stated at the begin-
ning, Balochi is classified as Northwest Iranian and is closely related
to (but by no means mutually comprehensible with) Kurdish as well
as Persian. For this reason in Iran it was often referred to in the past
as a dialect of Persian. But this was more a political statement about
the relationship of the non-literate Baloch to the Persianate urban elite
than a linguistic statement about the relationship between the two lan-
guages. The name Baloch appears in sources that originate before the
Islamic period. It is associated with people who appear to have moved
as pastoral nomads from areas south of the Caspian Sea south and
southeastwards towards their current territories in southeastern Iran,
southwestern Afghanistan and western Pakistan. Linguists consider
the original home of the Baloch to have been somewhere just east or
southeast of the central Caspian region, the meeting point of Middle
Persian and Parthian (Elfenbein 1989a). The Russian orientalist, Vladi-
mir Minorsky, suggested that the place names on the edge of the central
deserts of the Iranian Plateau may be the equivalent of visiting cards
left by them on their waywhich suggests that they were also involved
in agriculture (cf. Frye 1961). In Balochi epic poetry, collected by
M. Longworth Dames (1907), the Baloch themselves claim to have come
from Syria. They were passing through the Kerman area in the time of
Masud (ruling from Ghazni in what is now southeastern Afghanistan)
in the 11th century, and arrived in the Indus valley finally in the 15th
or perhaps even as late as the 16th century. They brought the Baloch
identity and language with them and must have Balochized the exist-
ing population, i.e. assimilated them to a Balochi identity. Many of the
current place names of the region, names of agricultural settlements,
330 brian spooner

predate their arrival. The fact that we have no evidence of them as


a unitary political community before the middle of the 17th century
raises questions about the current dialect variation, apart from the
two significant language subcommunities in their midstthe Jadgal
in Dashtiari (southeast corner of Iran) and the Brahui (cf. Elfenbein
1989c, Emeneau 1962a and 1962b) who are concentrated mainly south
of Kalat. In the recent past the Baloch have routinely distinguished
between nomads whom they referred to as baloch (with the implica-
tion of par excellence, the real Baloch) and agriculturalists, for whom
they used the term shahri (Spooner 1987). Many of the shahri enjoyed
a helot type of status under the control of leading tribal families, most
of whom may have originated outside the region and outside the
Balochi-speaking community, though they are now fully identified as
Baloch. This category includes the Jadgal (whose speech appears to be
a dialect of Sindhi). There were also serfs, imported from East Africa.
Many of the Brahui speakers, however, have been close to the govern-
ment in Kalat, which had a continuous existence from 1638 to 1954.
Perhaps more interesting still, there is evidence to suggest that some
tribal communities have shifted from Brahui to Balochi or vice versa
more than once in the recent past (Morgenstierne 1932: 8-9, quoted
in Barth 1964: 13, wrote that the tribal system of the Baloches and
Brahuis, which in contrast to that of the Pathans favours the assimi-
lation of racially foreign elements into the tribe, has no doubt led to
frequent changes of language within many Baloch and Brahui clans.
Cf. Morgenstierne 1948 and Sabir 2003).
Since in the modern world ethnic identity is usually understood in
ethnolinguistic terms, the emergence of nationalist sensibilities raises
the question whether or not Brahui-speakers should be distinguished
in some way from Balochi speakers. The question has not arisen for
Jadgali speakers in Dashtiari (Iran) because they have historically
held low-class helot-type status under the Baloch Sardarzai Khans in
Bahu Kalat. But the Brahui-speakers in Sarawan, south of Kalat, now
in Pakistan, had no such historical disadvantage. The Government of
Pakistan established two separate academies in Quetta for the promo-
tion of Balochi and Brahui languages and cultures. It was perhaps in
the governments interest to see Brahui develop as a distinct identity,
which would weaken Baloch solidarity and political identity. Quetta
radio became the major producer of programs in Balochi, heard in
Iran and Afghanistan. (Radio Zahedan and Radio Kabul had less than
balochi: towards a biography of the language 331

ten hours a week each.) Baloch writers published magazines and books
in Balochi, English, and Urdu. Beginning in the 1960s an increasing
number of Baloch writers have published on the history and culture
of the Baloch.
After the establishment of the Khalqi government in Afghanistan in
1978 Balochi was declared one of seven national languages of Afghani-
stan, along with not only Dari and Pashto but also Uzbeki, Turkmani,
Nuristani, Pashai (DPA Revolutionary Councils Decree Number 4
on May 15, 1978; see Nawid, this volume). Balochi continued with
this status through the various changes of government during the
Soviet occupation and the civil war that followed, although Dari and
Pashto were given preference in practice under Najibullah, from 1986
onwards, and the Baloch were not equipped to take much advantage of
the opportunity to promote their ethno-linguistic identity. Beginning
in 1996, under the regime of the Taliban, although no official language
policy was announced, Pashto became de facto the official language of
the government. The next constitution, promulgated by the coalition
forces in 2004, like previous constitutions, did not designate any lan-
guage as official. However, Article 16 states, From amongst Pashto,
Dari, Uzbeki, Turkmani, Balochi, Pachaie, Nuristani, Pamiri and other
current languages in the country, Pashto and Dari shall be the official
languages of the state. In areas where the majority of the people speak
in any one of Uzbeki, Turkmani, Pachaie, Nuristani, Balochi or Pamiri
languages, any of the aforementioned languages, in addition to Pashto
and Dari, shall be the third official language, the usage of which shall
be regulated by law. The state shall design and apply effective programs
to foster and develop all languages of Afghanistan. Usage of all current
languages in the country shall be permissible in press publications and
mass media. Past academic and national administrative terminology
and usage in the country shall be preserved.
While Irans 1906 Constitution did not specifically acknowledge
Balochi, Chapter 1 Article 15 did articulate that local languages were
allowed to be used, including use in the media. This article also
allowed the instruction of ethnic literature alongside Persian courses.
However, despite the previously detailed spurts of production follow-
ing the Revolution, solely Radio Zahidans daily radio broadcasts were
sustained (Jahani 1989: 86). The central government in Iran did dur-
ing the 1960s broadcast Balochi news and music for several hours a
day from a transmitter in Zahedan (Elfenbein 1966: 1). It is perhaps
332 brian spooner

notable that Balochi was taught to a small group of Iranian refugees


living in Sweden in the late 1980s (Jahani 1989: 90). Information on
Balochi usage in Iran in the 1960s is available in Spooner 1964.
In Pakistan Baloch nationalism continues to be a political factor
at the national level (cf. Hewitt 1996, Khan 2005, Titus 1997). It has
been suggested that the idea of Baloch nationalism began with Dost
Muhammad Khans resistance to Reza Shah in Iran in 1928 (Harri-
son 1981: 3). But it is doubtful whether the combination of general
ethnic awareness, interest in political unity, and potential for strong
leadership, which are necessary for a successful nationalist movement,
existed in a significant proportion of the Baloch anywhere before the
1960s at the earliest. Since then it has motivated an increasing number
of young Baloch in Pakistan, Iran, and the Persian Gulf. In February,
1981, a coalition of Baloch emigr groups was formed in London
under the name of World Baloch Organization, the purpose of which
is to raise money for the Baloch cause.
The future of Balochi is now uncertain because of the increasing
rate of social change, especially in Iran and Pakistan. As tribal identi-
ties continue to lose significance, the language is likely to give way to
Persian and Urdu, unless the movement for a stronger ethnic identity
finds a leader. In 1984 I was in a situation in rural Balochistan in
which six languages were being spoken in a single discussion: Balochi,
Brahui, English, Pashto, Persian, and Urdu. So far as I could tell I
was the only participant who thought this significant. Bi- or multi-
lingualism is common in Balochistan and surrounding regions. Prob-
ably no one in the group spoke all six languages comfortably. But they
were accepted as local languages, and every participant was comfort-
able in at least several. All participants had different social statuses,
not easy to define in every case, but recognizably different. A genera-
tion earlier, perhaps less, the differences in social status would have
determined the choice of language: everyone in the group would
have understood implicitly who was senior and that person would
have managed the discussion in the language of his choice. In general
that is the way Baloch society worked. By the mid 1980s, however,
statuses had already lost some of their edge. People were becoming
more socially mobile, and this was being reflected in the way people
from different backgrounds did business with each other. The Baloch
in Sindh and South Punjab can speak four languages: Balochi, Sin-
dhi, Panjabi and Saraiki. There are a large number of Baloch living in
CASPIAN
SEA

A L BU Mazar Sharif
RZ
Balkh

ER
AT

H
JS
SW

N
PA
Herat Kabul
Ghur
HAZARAJAT Peshawar
Qaenat
Ghazni
AFGHANISTAN
Isfahan

IRAN Qandahar

r
ve
Ri
d
an
Helm
Quetta

ZA
GR
OS Shiraz BOLAN
PASS
Kharan

PE PAKISTAN
R Bampur
Saravan
GU SIA
LF N
M A K R A N
N
Turbat
Bahu Kalat
DASHTIARI
LAS BE
Approximate area of majority LA
W E
Baloch population
balochi: towards a biography of the language

0 500 1000 km
333

Map 1. South-Central and Central Asia where Balochi is spoken


334 brian spooner

Karachi who are fluent in Urdu and Sindhi. The number of situations
where it is important to speak Balochi is diminishing.

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Websites
http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=bcc
http://titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/personal/agnes/lv/balochi-sources.pdf
compiled by Agnes Korn July 2008 a.korn@em.uni-frankfurt.de
SECTION IV

PEDAGOGICAL RESOURCES AND CONCLUSION


CHAPTER ELEVEN

RESOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF LANGUAGE POLICIES


AND LANGUAGES OF AFGHANISTAN AND ITS NEIGHBORS

Cynthia Groff

11.1. Introduction

This chapter surveys print and electronic resources available in English


for those who wish to teach and study the language policies and lan-
guages of Afghanistan and its neighboring countries. Resources include
background and general information on the region and languages of
the region. Language policies of the region and of specific countries
are examined in various sources. Language learning resources are
highlighted through reference to the various websites where print and
electronic resources are listed and can often be downloaded. Also dis-
cussed are methods by which scholars can locate resources and make
them more accessible. The bibliography allows scholars to locate the
sources by area of interest.
The diversity of the peoples in and around Afghanistan is reflected
in the diversity of languages found there. The languages of this region
have received relatively little attention in western academia, particu-
larly compared with the attention given to European languages. This
is not to say, however, that language policy and language learning
resources for the region do not exist. During these current times of
transition, interest in language policies and languages of the region has
increased. Independence movements, the breakup of the former Soviet
Union, and the spotlight placed on the region since 9/11 contribute
to this interest. Still, these languages are taught and studied at rela-
tively few institutions with limited options for pedagogic materials and
limited resources for revision of pedagogical methods and materials.
This chapter explores resources available in English for the study and
teaching of, first, the language policies and, second, the languages of
the region in and around Afghanistan. Not claiming to be a complete
review, the chapter concludes with some thoughts on how to expand
access to such resources including description of the methods used in
compiling this review and recommendations for further searches.
340 cynthia groff

A list of print and electronic resources that provided a foundation


for this review was collected by Maggie Ronkin for the December
2003 Workshop on Languages in and around Afghanistan organized
by the South Asia Language Resource Center. Without her extensive
work compiling the resource pages, this review would not be possible.
The languages covered in and around Afghanistan include but are not
be limited to Balochi, Dari, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Pashto, Persian, Saraiki,
Sindhi, Tatar, Turkik, Tajik, Urdu, Uyghur, and Uzbek.
Background and general resources described in the first section
provide insight into the region and language groups of the region.
Language policy resources are described in the next section by region
or country as they appear in the bibliography. Languages learning
resources are highlighted through reference to the various websites
where electronic resources have been made available and where lists
of print resources have been compiled.

11.2. Background and General Resources

Numerous sources of information on the region and languages of


Central and Northwest Asia could be cited. The various university
programs and centers focusing on this region may serve as a starting
point. These include the Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus at
Harvard University (2008), the Ellison Center for Russian, East Euro-
pean and Central Asian Studies Center at the University of Wash-
ington (REECAS, 1998), and the Center for Russia, East Europe and
Central Asia at University of Wisconsin-Madison (CREECA, 2010).
In addition, the Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Cen-
ter (IAUNRC, 2010) provides links to numerous general resources on
countries and regions of Central Asia. Central Eurasian Studies World
Wide (CESWW, 2008) provides resources for the study of Central Eur-
asia including a directory of experts and relevant dissertations, as well
as study programs and syllabi. The Digital South Asia Library (2010)
provides access to further resources on the region, as do the language
centers listed under language learning resources below.
Another source of information on countries of the region comes
from the Library of Congresss (2005) Federal Research Division
Country Studies, which provides access to the online version of books
and allows for search by topic and by any combination of countries.
Resources helpful in finding general information on the languages of
resources for the study of language policies 341

the region can be obtained from atlases or glossaries of language and


culture such as Payne (1987), Fussman (1972), Grierson (1919, 1906)
Ibbetson, and Maclagan Rose (1919).
Among general language resources of the region are Csat, Isaaksson
and Jahani (2005), focusing on the similarities and differences between
languages of the region, Kreyenbroek and Marzolph (2010) on litera-
ture of minority languages in Iran, and the Newsletter of Baluchistan
Studies edited by Rossi and Tosi (2003). A bibliography of resources
on the languages and cultures of Nuristan, a region in and around
eastern Afghanistan is provided online by Richard Strand (2010a). The
site also provides information about the region and extensive informa-
tion on the lexicons, sound systems, and grammars of languages of
the Hindu-Kush (Strand, 2008b). Other resources on Nuristani (and
Dardic) languages were listed in a post to Linguist List (Brush, 1998).
Such resources concerning the languages and region may serve as lan-
guage learning resources and provide background for the study of lan-
guage policies of the region.

11.3. Language Policy Resources

Resources about language policies in the region of Afghanistan include


works on language policy in Central Asia (Fierman, 1997; Henze,
1977; Lo Bianco, 2002; Schlyter, 2001), as well as scholarship focus-
ing on implementation issues (Fierman, 1995), reform movements
(Carlson, 1994), and language policy changes over time (Schlyter, 2001,
2003). The Proceedings of the Foundation for Endangered Language
held in Tajikistan (Elnazarov, Ostler, 2009) contain contributions on
several of the regions languages, past and present. Language policies
of the Peoples Republic of China also impact minority languages in
the region of Central Asia (Connor, 1984; Zhou, 2003). Relevant also
are South Asian perspectives on language planning (Mansoor, Meraj,
Tahir 2004).
Policies in Ex-Soviet states are considered (Landau, Kellner-
Heinkele, 2001) as well as the former language policy situation in the
Soviet Union (Connor, 1984; Kirkwood, 1989; Kreindler, 1982; Lewis,
1972), including an account of Russian policy towards Turkic lan-
guages (Bruchis, 1984; Wheeler, 1977b) and policies towards Muslim
peoples in the Soviet Union (Kreindler, 1995; Wheeler, 1977a.). Addi-
tional resources on language policies in the former Soviet Union can
342 cynthia groff

be found on Harold Schiffmans (2002) website, as well as Dickens


(1988).
On language policies of specific countries in the region, I highlight
a few resources, noting that languages, of course, are not confined
by state boundaries as in the situation of the Baloch (Adamik, 1977;
Jahani, 1989; Jahani, 2000; Jahani and Korn, 2003; Axenov, 2006; Jah-
ani, Korn and Titus, 2008; see also a resource list by Korn, 2008).
Some also compare the policies of countries, as in Perry (1999) on
Iran and Tajikistan. Sources relevant to language policy in Afghanistan
include Miran (1974, 1977a, 1977b), Dupree (1978), Pstrusiska
(1989), Naby (1980), Bhattacharya (1984), Rubin (1992), Edwards
(2002), and Crews and Tarzi (2008). Among resources on Iran are
those dealing with language reform (Perry, 1985) communication and
language status (Beeman, 1982, 1986). Iranian nationality in relation
to the Persian language (Meskoob, 1992), and Persian orthography
(Hashabeiky, 2005). Articles on the language policies of Kazakhstan
(Ajbasova, Imazhanova, Isaxan Kabdushev, 1997; Eschment, 1998)
also include those dealing with language revival (Dave, 1996a, 1996b,
1996c), language and identity (Fierman, 1998), and language attitudes
(Rivers, 2002). The political nature of language issues in Kyrgystan are
examined by Huskey (1995) and Pannier (1996).
Language policy in Pakistan has been analyzed and reported exten-
sively by Tariq Rahman (1996c, 1998, 1999, 2002). Historical articles
describe British language policies (1996b), and language acquisition
policies for Urdu teaching (2000b) and textbook change (2001f ), as
well as the decline of Persian in this context (1999). Current medium
of instruction issues are also considered (1997b) including English
teaching (2001a), Urdu teaching (2002), the Urdu-English debate
(1977), and power dynamics in language learning (2001b). Rahman
describes the role of Urdu in India (1999), as well as ethnicity and
language (1997a) and language of employment (2000a) in Pakistan.
Rahman also focuses on specific minority languages within Pakistan,
including the Siriaki language movement (1995a; see also Shackle,
1977), Sindhi language movement (1995c), Pashto language move-
ment and language learning (1995b; 2001d), Balochi/Brahvi language
movement and language learning (1996a; 2001c), as well as Punjabi
language movement and language learning (1996d, 2001e). Mansoor
(2005) looks at language planning in the higher education context in
Pakistan.
resources for the study of language policies 343

The situation in Turkmenistan, along with Azerbaijan, is discussed


by Pool (1976). Language planning as it relates to national identity
in Tajikstan is discussed by Beeman (1999); Perry (1996, 1997, 1999)
addresses Tajik Persian, and Clifton (1993) describes the situation of
minority languages in Tajiskstan. Corpus planning decisions regarding
Turkic alphabets are discussed in three articles (Devlet, 1992; Ercila-
sun, 1995; Simsir, 1995), although these and other non-English articles
are unfortunately outside of the scope of this review.
Resources concerning language policy in Uzbekistan include All-
worth (1954), Fierman (1991), Lenker (1991), (Friedman (1992),
Hozhiev (1996), Schlyter, (1997, 1998), and Smith, Law, Wilson, Bohr
Allworth (1998). William Fierman (1995a, 1995b) specifically focuses
on difficulties in language policy implementation in Uzbekistan. Addi-
tional language policy resources for Uzbek are presented by Khalilova
(1993) along with language learning resources.

11.4. Language Learning Resources

Links to language learning resources have been compiled on various


websites. While all texts being used for instruction of each of the Cen-
tral Asian languages are not listed here, lists of resources and of insti-
tutions where these languages are being taught will link teachers and
learners to this information.
The most extensive collection of language learning resources can be
found through the UCLA Language Materials Project (2004), along
with language profiles. Resources can be searched by language, by
material type and by student level. Table 1 lists the Central Asian lan-
guages for which resources are referenced at this site, including the
number of authentic materials and teaching materials currently listed.
I have included in italics the number of resources that were available
for these languages in 2005 for comparison. The total number of mate-
rials listed for these Central Asian languages increased by 50% within
the past five years.
In addition, resource information collected for over thirty years in
the Center for Applied Linguistics (CAL) database can be searched
from the UCLA site, complementary to the Language Materials Proj-
ect. The UCLA site also includes a link to the database of the Center
for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA, 2009a)
344 cynthia groff

Table 1. Resources listed for selected languages through the UCLA


Language Materials Project
Language Authentic Teaching Authentic Teaching
Materials Materials Materials Materials
(As of Summer 2010) (As of Spring 2005)
Balochi 1 20 1 13
Dari 18 30 8 19
Kazakh 60 41 56 31
Kurdish 19 42 7 33
Kyrgyz 18 23 16 19
Pashto 23 64 10 56
Persian 116 213 15 179
Punjabi 15 65 7 32
Tajik 18 30 13 13
Tatar 14 23 9 17
Turkmen 11 32 9 28
Uighur 8 33 4 20
Urdu 34 88 10 66
Uzbek 25 54 17 48

with a search-able database of institutions that provide instruction


in specific less commonly taught languages in the United States.
The CARLA site lists instructional materials, links, and locations of
instruction for various languages, including Urdu. For scholars of less
commonly taught languages there is a listserv as well as an ask the
experts section including email addresses of experts willing to answer
questions regarding specific languages (CARLA 2009b). Languages of
interest include Balochi, Dari, Druze, Kazakh, Kurdish, Pashto, Per-
sian, Poguli, Uighur, Urdu, and Uzbek. The National Council of Less
Commonly Taught Languages (NCOLCTL, 2010) is an additional
resource for language teachers.
The South Asia Language Resource Center (SALRC, n.d.), sponsor
of the workshop for which these materials were originally compiled,
is one of fifteen Title VI Language Resource Centers at universities
designated by the US Department of Education. These centers were
designed to improve the teaching and learning of foreign languages.
For example, the SALRC supports a project on Resources for Learning
Pashto (n.d.) which includes online access to classical, modern and
folk literature in Pashto as well as links related to Pashto language
instruction.
resources for the study of language policies 345

The Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region (CeLCAR,


2009) has developed textbooks for Introductory Pashto, Tajiki, Uzbek,
and Uyghur, some of which have been recently published (Azimova,
2010; Nasrullo, 2009). CeLCAR continues to develop materials for
teaching these languages as well as Kazakh, Kyrgyz and Mongolian,
including audio and video materials, multimedia dictionaries, and
script-writing tutorials for Dariand Pashto script. The website also pro-
vides links for other language resources and general resources pertain-
ing to Afghanistan and the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, PRC.
The National Middle Eastern Language Resource Center (NMELRC,
2005) provides links to online Persian language resources.
Language-learning materials for Balochi, Farsi, Kazakh, Tajiki,
Urdu, and Uzbek are available for sale by Multilingual Books (2009). A
website focusing on Balochi language (n.d.) provides a list of language
learning resources for Balochi. On-line Pashto conversation record-
ings can be found at an archived Indiana University site (2004). The
University of Minnesota Learning Resource Center (2002) also hosts
instructional recordings in Pashto and Punjabi, as well as recordings
of Urdu poetry. The lexicons, sound systems, and grammars of lan-
guages of the Hindu-Kush provided by Strand (2004b) may also serve
as a language learning resource. Unfortunately the OELAs (2004)
page on Languages and Cultures of Afghanistan, with Pashto and Dari
language materials and language and culture resources, is no longer
available and has been blocked in the online archive.
Organizations such as the American Association of Teachers of
Turkic (AATT, 2004) also provide information on language teaching
resources and Internet resources. For example the AATT site provides
a list of teaching resources, links to online Turkic learning and teach-
ing resources, including a link to the University of Arizona Critical
Language Series (2010) with CD-ROM course ware for beginning
Kazakh and Karmanji Kurdish. Similarly the American Association
of the Teachers of Persian (AATP, n.d.) provides useful links, includ-
ing lists of major Persian programs. The Online Persian Language
Learning Resource (n.d.) lists books and links to lessons, online and
downloadable dictionaries, media links, games, and information on
romanization of Persian script.
346 cynthia groff

11.5. Researching Resources

This collection of language policy and language learning resources not


only provides a sampling of available resources but also exemplifies
various means for accessing more such resources as they become avail-
able. How do we gather together the resources that are available? As a
starting point, the chapters published in this volume, along with their
authors and reference lists, certainly provide an important resource on
language policies in Central Asia. Library and Internet searches also
point to available resources. Perhaps most important is the informa-
tion available through colleagues studying and teaching the language
policies and languages of the region.
The importance of library and journal searches need hardly be men-
tioned. Besides university libraries, the Library of Congress Online
Catalog (2004) aids in searching for available resources. However, the
difficulty of finding all available resources through library catalogs and
search engines is exemplified by the fact that the University of Penn-
sylvanias library catalog contains no entries for the subject heading
language policy Afghanistan, only three book under the heading
language policy Asia, one for a book under language policy Iran,
and one under language planning Central Asia.
Many of the resources listed in this review are accessible through the
Internet, providing an important resource for further searches. Links
from relevant sites often lead to a chain of other related sites. Most of
the resources here were collected from websites and through connec-
tion with experts in the field. Fortunately individual scholars need not
be alone in this search. The bibliographies collected by colleagues serve
as an important resource. For this collection of resources, for example,
Birgit Schlyters (2001) bibliography for Language Policies in Present-
Day Central Asia proved useful. The resources posted by colleagues
on their websites as well as the CVs of experts in the field provide
valuable leads. Suggestions for resources were also provided through
personal communication and responses to listserv requests.
The list of experts provided by CARLA (2004b) offers access to col-
leagues in specific fields. A similar resource is available from the Asia
Society Experts Directory (2010). Additional information on many
scholars of history and culture of Central Asia is available in a publi-
cation of the Harvard Central Asia Forum (1995).
Most scholars reading this review will be experts in some area and
will have accessed resources not mentioned here. Thus, this article
resources for the study of language policies 347

and this volume are only a beginning. The Internet in particular pro-
vides scholars access to one another as never before, starting with
opportunities to join list-serves, offer our names on the various expert
lists, post relevant bibliographies online, or contribute to the UCLAs
Language Materials Project. Continued collaboration will help to fill
the gaps. For example, we may consider forming a Language Policy
Materials Project where language policy materials, particularly from
less commonly studied regions, may be compiled similar to the way
language-learning resources are compiled through UCLAs Language
Materials Project. Hopefully, we will continue to be a resource for one
another in our search for resources relevant to Central Asian language
policies and language learning.

References

A. Background and General Resources


Asia Society (2010). Asia Society Experts Directory. Retrieved August 17, 2010, from
http://asiasociety.org/media/experts/asia-society-experts-directory.
Brush, Melia. (1998, May 10). Nuristani references. Message posted to Linguist List,
archived at http://www.linguistlist.org/issues/9/9-688.html#1.
CESWW (2008). Central Eurasian Studies World Wide. Retrieved August 17, 2010,
from http://cesww.fas.harvard.edu/.
CREECA (2010). University of Wisconsin-Madison: Center for Russia, East Europe
and Central Asia. Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://www.wisc.edu/creeca/.
Csat, gnes va, Isaaksson, Bo and Jahani, Carina (eds.). (2005). Linguistic Conver-
gence and Areal Diffusion: Case Studies from Iranian, Semitic and Turkic, London
and New York: Routledge Curzon.
Digital South Asia Library (2010). Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://dsal
.uchicago.edu/.
Fussman, Gerard. (1972). Atlas Linguistique des Parlers Dardes et Kafirs. Paris: cole
Francaise dExtrme Orient.
Grierson, George Abraham. (1906). The Pisaca Languages of North-Western India.
London: The Royal Asiatic Society.
, (ed.) (1919). Linguistic Survey of India, vol. VIII, part II Specimens of the Dardic
or Pisacha Language. Calcutta: Superintendant Government Printing.
Harvard Central Asia Forum (1995). Guide to Scholars of the History and Culture
of Central Asia. Research Publications of the Harvard Central Asia Forum, vol. 1.
Harvard University.
Ibbetson, Denzil, Edward Maclagan, and H.A. Rose. (1919). A Glossary of the Tribes
and Castes of the Punjab and North-West Frontier Province, volume I. Lahore:
Superintendant of Government Printing.
IAUNRC (2010). Inner Asian and Uralic National Resource Center. Retrieved August
17, 2010, from http://www.indiana.edu/~iaunrc.
Kreyenbroek, Philip G., Marzolph, Ulrich. (2010). Oral Literature of Iranian Lan-
guages: Kurdish, Pashto, Balochi, Ossetic; Persian and Tajik: Companion Volume II
(A History of Persian Literature A, vol. 18). London: I.B. Tauris.
348 cynthia groff

Library of Congress. (2005). Federal Research Division Country Studies. Retrieved


January 29, 2005, from http://lcweb2.loc.gov/frd/cs/.
Library of Congress Online Catalog. (2010). Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://
catalog.loc.gov.
Payne, J.R. (1987). Iranian Languages, New York: Oxford University Press.
Program on Central Asia and the Caucasus at Harvard University. (2008). Retrieved
August 17, 2010, from http://centasia.fas.harvard.edu/index.html.
REECAS (2010). University of Washington: Ellison Center for Russian, East European
and Central Asian Studies. Retrieved August 17, 2010, from http://jsis.washington
.edu/ellison/.
Rossi, A.V., and Tosi, M. (eds.). (2003). Newsletter of Baluchistan Studies. University
of Naples.
Strand, Richard. (2010a). A Bibliography of the Languages and Cultures of Nuristn
and Environs. Retrieved January 29, 2005 from http://users.sedona.net/~strand
/bibliography.html.
. (2008b). Nuristan: Hidden land of the Hindu-Kush. Retrieved August 17, 2010
from http://users.sedona.net/~strand/.

B. Language Policy Resources by Region and Country


Regional
Adamik, Jozef. (1977). The Origins and Dialect Differentiation of Baloci: Chronological
Reconstruction of Developments in the nominal morphology. Doctoral dissertation,
Harvard University.
Axenov, Serge. (2006). Balochi Language of Turkmenistan: A Corpus-Based Grammati-
cal Description. Doctoral dissertation, Uppsala University. Coronet Books.
Bruchis, Michael. (1984). The Effect of the USSRs Language Policy on the National
Languages of Its Turkic Population, in Yaacov Roi (ed.), The USSR and the Muslim
World: Issues in Domestic and Foreign Policy. London: George Allen Unwin.
Carlson, Charles F. (1994). Language Reform Movements in Central Asia, in
Ingeborg Baldauf and Michael Friederich (eds.), Bamberger Zentralasien Studien:
Konferenzakten ESCAS IV, Bamberg 8.-12 Oktober1991 (pp. 135-51). Berlin: Klaus
Schwarz Verlag.
Connor, Walker. (1984). The national question in Marxist-Leninist theory and strategy.
Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.
Dickens, Mark. (1988). Soviet Language Policy in Central Asia. Retrieved September 7,
2010 from http://www.oxuscom.com/lang-policy.htm.
Elnazarov, Hakim and Ostler, Nicholas (eds.). (2009). Endangered Languages and His-
tory: Proceedings of the Conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages,
FEL xiii, 24-26 September 2009, Khorog, Tajikistan.
Fierman, W. (1997, August). Language, Identity and Conflict in Central Asia and the
Southern Caucasus. Perspectives on Central Asia, 2(5), 1-4.
, (ed.). (1995). Implementing Language Laws: Perestroika and its Legacy in Five
Republics, Nationalities Papers, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 505-659.
Henze, Paul B. (1977). Politics and alphabets in Inner Asia, in Fishman, J.A. (ed.).
Advances in the creation and revision of writing systems (Contributions to the Soci-
ology of Language, 8). The Hague: Mouton, pp. 371-420.
Jahani, Carina (ed.). (1989). Standardization and orthography in the Balochi language.
Uppsala, Sweden: Almqvist Wiksell.
, (ed.). (2000). Language in SocietyEight Sociolinguistic Essays on Balochi, Acta
Universitatis Upsaliensis, Uppsala.
and Agnes Korn, (eds.). (2003). The Baloch and Their Neighbors: Ethnic and Lin-
guistic Contact in Balochistan in Historical and Modern Times. Wiesbaden: Reichert
Verlag.
resources for the study of language policies 349

, Agnes Korn, and Paul Titus (eds.). (2008). The Baloch and Others: Linguistic,
Historical and Socio-Political Perspectives on Pluralism in Balochistan. Wiesbaden:
Reichert Verlag.
Kirkwood, Michael (ed.). (1989). Language Planning in the Soviet Union. London:
Macmillan Press Ltd.
Korn, Agnes. (2008). Sources for Balochi. Retrieved September 7, 2010 from http://
titus.fkidg1.uni-frankfurt.de/personal/agnes/lv/balochi-sources.pdf.
Kreindler, Isabelle. (1982). Lenin, Russian, and Soviet Language Policy, Interna-
tional Journal of the Sociology of Language, vol. 33, pp. 129-35.
. (1995). Soviet Muslims: Gains and Losses as a Result of Soviet Language Plan-
ning, in Yaacov Roi (ed.), Muslim Euroasia: Conflicting Legacies, pp. 187-203.
London: Frank Cass.
Landau, Jacob M. and Barbara Kellner-Heinkele. (2001). Politics of Language Use
in the Ex-Soviet Muslim States: Azarbayjan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Turkmenistan, and Tajikstan. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Lewis, E. Glyn. (1972). Multilingualism in the Soviet Union: Aspects of Language Policy
and its Implementation. Mouton: The Hague.
Lo Bianco, Joseph. (2002). Voices from Phnom Penh: Development and Language Local
Influences and Global Effects. Melbourne, VIC: Language Australia.
Mansoor, Sabiha; Shaheen Meraj, and Aliya Tahir. (1992). Language policy, planning
practice: A South Asian perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Multilingual Books (2009). Accessed September 2, 2010 from http://multilingual
books.com/eurotalk.html.
Schiffman, Harold. (2002). Language policy in the former Soviet Union. Retrieved
August 17, 2010, from http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/540/handouts/ussr/soviet
.html.
Schlyter, Birgit N. (2000). Korean Business and Culture in Former Soviet Central
Asia, Proceedings from the ESCAS VII Conference, Vienna, September 25-30, 2000.
. (2001). Language Policies in Present-Day Central Asia, International Journal
of Multicultural Societies, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 135-45.
. (2003). Sociolinguistic Changes in Transformed Central Asian Societies, Lan-
guages in a Globalising World (pp. 157-87). New York: Cambridge University
Press. (Previously published in French translation under the title of Lvolution
sociolinguistique dans les socits en mutation de lAsie centrale, in Jaques
Maurais Michael A. Morris (eds). Gostratgies des langues (Terminogramme
99-100), (pp. 183-212). Qubec: Les Publications du Qubec 2001.
. (2004). Changing Language Loyalties in Central Asia, in Tej K. Bhatia, William
C. Ritchie (eds.), Handbook of Bilingualism. New York: Blackwell Publishers.
Wheeler, Geoffrey. (1977a, January). Islam and the Soviet Union, Middle Eastern
Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, pp. 40-9.
. (1977b, May). The Turkic Languages of Soviet Muslim Asia: Russian Linguistic
Policy, Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, pp. 208-17.
Zhou, Minglang (2003). Multilingualism in China: The politics of Writing Reforms for
Minority Languages, 19492002. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

Afghanistan
Bhattacharya, Sauri P. (1984). Soviet Nationality Policy in Afghanistan, Asian
Affairs, vol. 15, no. 2, pp. 125-37.
Crews, Robert D., and Amin Tarzi (eds.). (2008). The Taliban and the Crisis of
Afghanistan. Hardcover ed. Boston: Harvard Univ. Pr., 2008.
Dupree, Louis. (1978). Language and Politics in Afghanistan: An Essay in Socio-
linguistics through Time, in Language and Civilization Change in South Asia,
Clarence Maloney (ed.), Leiden: E.J. Brill.
350 cynthia groff

Edwards, David B. (2002). Before Taliban: Genealogies of the Afghan Jihad. Berkeley:
University of California Press.
Miran, M. Alam. (1974). Some Linguistic Difficulties facing DariSpeakers Learning
Pashto. New York: Afghanistan Council of the Asia Society.
. (1977). The Functions of National Languages in Afghanistan. New York: Afghani-
stan Council, Asia Society.
. (1977). Sociolinguistic Factors in Afghanistan, Afghanistan Journal, vol. 4, no. 3,
pp. 122-7.
Naby, Eden. (1980). The Ethnic Factor in Soviet-Afghan Relations, Asian Survey,
vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 237-56.
Pstrusiska, Jadwiga. (1992). On the Sociolinguistic Epilogue of the War in Afghani-
stan (1989), In Contacts Between Cultures: Eastern Asia: Literature and Humani-
ties, Bernard Hung-Kay Luk (ed.), pp. 359-63. Lewinston: E. Mellen Press.
Rubin, Barnett R. (1992). Political Elites in Afghanistan: Rentier State Building,
Rentier State Wrecking, International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 24,
no. 1 (1992), pp. 77-99.

Iran
Beeman, W. (1982). Culture, Performance and Communication in Iran. Tokyo: Insti-
tute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa. (ILCAA).
. (1986). Language Status and Power in Iran. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press.
Hashabeiky, Forogh. (2005). Persian Orthography: Modification or Changeover? Doc-
toral dissertation. Stockholm, Sweden: Uppsala University.
Meskoob, Shahrokh. (1992). Iranian nationality and the Persian language. Washing-
ton, D.C.: Mage Publishers.
Perry, John R. (1985). Language Reform in Turkey and Iran, International Journal
of Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 17, pp. 295-311.
. (1999). Comparative Perspectives on Language Planning in Iran and Tajiki-
stan, in Yasir Suleiman (ed.). Language and Society in the Middle East and North
Africa: Studies in Variation and Identity, pp. 154-74. London: Curzon.

Kazakhstan
Ajbasova, M.K., R.K. Imazhanova, G.T. Isaxan and B.Z. Kabdushev (eds.). (1997).
Jazykovaja politika v Kazaxstane (1921-1990 gody), Cbornik dokumentov, Almaty:
Qazaq universiteti.
Dave, Bhavna. (1996a). Politics of Language Revival: National Identity and State Build-
ing in Kazakhstan. Unpublished doctoral dissertation, Syracuse University.
. (1996b, November). Kazaks Struggle to Revive Their Language of Folklore,
Transition, vol. 29, pp. 23-5.
. (1996c). National Revival in Kazakhstan: Language Shift and Identity Change,
Post-Soviet Affairs, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 51-72.
Eschment, Beate. (1998). Hat Kasazchstan ein Russisches Problem?: Revision eines
Katastrophenbildes, Bundesinstitut fr ostwissenschaftliche und internationale Stu-
dien. Sonderverffentlichung, February 1998.
Fierman, William. (1998). Language and Identity in Kazakhstan: Formulation in
Policy Documents 19871997, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 31(2),
pp. 171-86.
Rivers, William. (2002). Attitudes towards Incipient Mankurtism among Kazakhstani
College Students, Language Policy, vol. 1, no. 2.
resources for the study of language policies 351

Kyrgystan
Huskey, E. (1995).The Politics of Language in Kyrgyzstan, In Fierman, W. (ed.),
Implementing Language Laws: Perestroika and its Legacy in Five Republics (Special
Topic Issue). Nationalities Papers, vol. 23, no. 3, pp. 549-72.
Pannier, Bruce. (1996). A Linguistic Dilemma in Kyrgyzstan, Transition, vol. 29
(Nov.), pp. 28-9.

Pakistan and North India


Mansoor, Sabiha. (2005). Language Planning in Higher Education: A Case Study of
Pakistan. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rahman, Tariq. (1977). The Urdu-English Controversy in Pakistan, Modern Asian
Studies, vol. 31, no. 1, pp. 177-207.
. (1995a). The Siraiki Language Movement in Pakistan, Language Planning and
Language Problems, vol. 19, no. 1.
. (1995b). The Pashto Language Movement in Pakistan, Contemporary South
Asia [UK], vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 151-70.
. (1995c). Language and Politics in a Pakistan Province: The Sindhi Language
Movement, Asian Survey, vol. 35, no. 11, pp. 1005-16.
. (1996b). British Language Policies and Imperialism in India, Language Prob-
lems and Language Planning, vol. 20, no. 2, pp. 91-115.
. (1996a). The Balochi/Brahvi Language Movements in Pakistan, Journal of
South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, pp. 71-88.
. (1996d). The Punjabi Language Movement in Pakistan, International Journal
of the Sociology of Language, p. 122.
. (1996c). Language and Politics in Pakistan. Karachi, PK: Oxford University Press,
Paperback reprint, 1998 and 2000.
. (1997b). The Medium of Instruction Controversy in Pakistan [Canada and
UK], Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, vol. 18, no. 2, pp.
145-54.
. (1997a). Language and Ethnicity in Pakistan, Asian Survey, vol. 37, no. 9,
pp. 833-9.
. (1998). Linguistics in Pakistan: A Country Report, In Rajindra Singh (ed.),
The Yearbook of South Asian Languages and Linguistics (pp. 184-96). Delhi: Sage
Publications.
. (1999). The Politics of Urdu in India, Journal of South Asian and Middle
Eastern Studies, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 38-60.
. (1999). The Decline of Persian in British India, South Asia [Australia], vol. 22,
no. 1, pp. 63-77.
. (2000b). The Teaching of Urdu in British India, The Annual of Urdu Studies,
vol. 15, no. 1), pp. 31-56.
. (1999). Language, Education and Culture. Karachi, PK: Oxford University Press.
Paperback reprint, 2000.
. (2000a). The Language of Employment: The Case of Pakistan, Journal of South
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 62-87.
. (2001c). The Learning of Balochi and Brahvi in Pakistan, Journal of South
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 45-59.
. (2001f ). The Project of Respectability: Changes in Language Textbooks in
British India, South Asia [Australia], vol. 24, no. 2, pp. 29-51.
. (2001b). Language Learning and Power: A Theoretical Approach, International
Journal of the Sociology of Language, 152, 1-22.
. (2001d). The Learning of Pashto in North India and Pakistan: An Historical
Account, Journal of Asian History, vol. 35, no. 2, pp. 158-87.
. (2001a). English-Teaching Institutions in Pakistan, Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development, vol. 22, no. 3, pp. 242-61.
352 cynthia groff

. (2001e). The Learning of Punjabi by Punjabi Muslims: A Historical Account,


International Journal of Punjab Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 187-224.
. (2002). The Politics of the Teaching of Urdu in Pakistan, Annual of Urdu
Studies, vol. 17.
. (2002). Language, Ideology and Power: Language-Learning Among the Muslims of
Pakistan and North India. Karachi, PK: Oxford University Press.
Shackle, C. (1979). Saraiki: A Language Movement in Pakstan, Modern Asian Stud-
ies, vol. 11, no. 3, pp. 379-403.

Tajikistan and Turkmenistan


Beeman, W. (1999). The Struggle for Identity in Post-Soviet Tajikistan, MERIA
(Middle East Research 3(4). Article 7, pp. 369-93.
Clifton, John. (1993). Situation of Less-Widely Spoken Languages in Tajikistan,
Paper presented at the Workshop on the Languages of Afghanistan, South Asia
Language Resource Center, Philadelphia, PA.
Devlet, Nadir (Ed.). (1992). Milletlerarasi agdash Trk Alfabeleri Sempozyumu
[International Symposium on Modern Turkic Alphabets], Istanbul: Marmara ni-
versitesi Yayinlari no. 509. Trkiyat Arashtirmalari Yayinlari no. 1.
Ercilasun, Ahmet B. (1995). Ltin Alfabesi Konusunda Gelishmeler, Trk Dili,
vol. 523, no. 1), pp. 738-79.
Perry, John R. (1996) From Persian to Tajik to Persian: Culture, politics and law
reshape a Central Asian language, in Howard I. Aronson (ed.), NSL.8. Linguistic
Studies in the Non-Slavic Languages of the Commonwealth of Independent States and
the Baltic Republics, pp. 279-305. University of Chicago.
. (1997). Script and Scripture: The Three Alphabets of Tajik Persian, 19271997,
Journal of Central Asian Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, pp. 2-18.
. (1999). Comparative Perspectives on Language Planning in Iran and Tajiki-
stan, In Yasir Suleiman (ed.). Language and Society in the Middle East and North
Africa: Studies in Variation and Identity, pp. 154-74. London: Curzon.
Pool, Jonathan. (1976, May). Some Observations on Language Planning in Azer-
baijan and Turkmenistan, Language Planning Newsletter, vol. 2, no. 2. Hono-
lulu: East-West Cultural Learning Institute. Online version: http://scholarspace
.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/10125/17538/1/LanguagePlanningNewsletter_1976
_v2_n2[pdfa].pdf.
Simsir, Bill N. 1995. Trkmenistanda Ltin Alfabesine Gei Hazirliklari, Trk
Dili, vol. 518, pp. 115-38.

Uzbekistan
Allworth, Edward. 1964. Uzbek literary politics. The Hague: Mouton.
Friedman, Thomas L. 1992. Uzbek says yes to democracy, of course, The New York
Times, Feb. 17, 1992, A7.
Fierman, William. (1991). Language Planning and National Development: The Uzbek
Experience, (Contributions to the Sociology of Language, vol. 60). Berlin and New
York: Mouton.
. (1995a). Independence and the Declining Priority of Language Law Implemen-
tation in Uzbekistan, In Yaacov Roi (ed.), Muslim Eurasia: Conflicting Legacies
(pp. 205-30). London: Frank Cass.
. (1995b). Problems of Language Law Implementation in Uzbekistan, In
William Fierman (ed.), Nationalities Papers, vol. 23, no. 3: Implementing Language
Laws: Perestroika and its Legacy in Five Republics, pp. 573-95.
Hozhiev, A. (1996). Termin tanlash mezonlari [Criteria For the Choice of Terms],
Tashkent: Uzbekiston Respublikasi Fanlar Akademijasining Fan Nariti 1996.
Khalilova, Sabohat. (2003). Language Policy in Uzbekistan and Uzbek Language
Teaching Materials, paper presented at the Workshop on the Languages in and
round Afghanistan, South Asia Language Resource Center, Philadelphia, PA.
resources for the study of language policies 353

Lenker, Michael. (1991). The Politics of Language Policy: A Case Study of Uzbeki-
stan, in Alfred J. Rieber and Alvin Z. Rubinstein (eds.). Perestroika at the Cross-
roads, pp. 264-77. New York/London: M.E. Sharpe, Inc.
. (1997). Language Policy in Independent Uzbekistan, Stockholm FoCAS Work-
ing Paper 1, Forum for Central Asian Studies.
. 1998. New Language Laws in Uzbekistan, Language Problems and Language
Planning, vol. 22, no. 2 (1998), pp. 143-81.
Smith, Graham; Vivien Law, Andrew Wilson, Annette Bohr, and Edward Allworth,
(1998). Nation-building in the Post-Soviet Borderlands: The Politics of National Iden-
tities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Chapter 9, Language policy and
ethnic relations in Uzbekistan, pp. 197-223, notes pp. 278-83.

C. Language Learning Resources


AATP (n.d.). American Association of the Teachers of Persian. Retrieved August 9,
2010, from http://www.aatpersian.org/home.html.
. (2004). American Association of Teachers of Turkic. Retrieved August 19, 2010,
from http://www.princeton.edu/~ehgilson/aatt.html.
Azimova, Nigora. (2010). Uzbek: An Elementary Textbook. Washington, DC: George-
town University.
Balochi language (n.d.). In focus: Balochi language. Retrieved September 2, 2010 from
http://users.tpg.com.au/users/goshti/index.htm.
CARLA (2009a). Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition. Retrieved
August 19, 2010 from http://www.carla.umn.edu.
. (2009b). Less commonly taught languages: Ask the experts. Retrieved August 19,
2010 from http://www.carla.umn.edu/lctl/resources/experts.html.
CeLCAR (2009). Center for Languages of the Central Asian Region. Retrieved August
9, 2010, from http://www.indiana.edu/~celcar/.
Engesth, Tarjei, Mahire Yakup, and Arienne Dwyer. (2009). Teklimakandin Salam:
hazirqi zaman Uyghur tili qollanmisi / Greetings from the Teklimakan: a handbook
of Modern Uyghur. Lawrence: University of Kansas Scholarworks. Online at: http://
hdl.handle.net/1808/5624.
Indiana University (2004). Languages on-line. Retrieved August 27, 2010, from http://web
.archive.org/web/20060524131102, http://languagelab.bh.indiana.edu/pashto.html.
Nasrullo, Khojayori. (2009). Tajiki: An Elementary Textbook. Washington, DC:
Georgetown University.
NCOLCTL (2010). National Council of Less Commonly Taught Languages. Retrieved
September 2, 2010 from http://www.ncolctl.org/node/1.
NMELRC (2010). National Middle Eastern Language Resource Center. Retrieved
August 27, 2010, from http://www.nmelrc.org/.
OELA (2004). National Clearinghouse for English Language Acquisition and Lan-
guage Instruction Educational Programs. Language and cultures of Afghanistan.
Retrieved January 29, 2005, from http://www.ncela.gwu.edu/resabout/culture/7
_languages/afghan.html.
Online Persian Language Learning Resource (n.d.). Retrieved August 9, 2010, from
http://www.u.arizona.edu/~talattof/persian/.
Resources for Learning Pashto (n.d.). Resources for the study of Pashto literature.
Retrieved August 30, 2010, from http://www.southasia.upenn.edu/pashto/.
SALRC (n.d.). South Asia Language Resource Center. Retrieved August 30, 2010, from
http://salrc.uchicago.edu.
UCLA Language Materials Project: Teaching resources for less commonly taught lan-
guages (2004). Retrieved August 30, 2010 from http://www.lmp.ucla.edu.
University of Arizona Critical Languages Program (2010). Critical Languages Series.
Retrieved August 19, 2010, from http://clp.arizona.edu/cls/.
University of Minnesota Learning Resource Center. (2002). Digital South-Asia Lan-
guage Archive. Retrieved August 27, 2010, from http://lrc.lib.umn.edu/dsala.htm.
CHAPTER TWELVE

CONCLUSION

Harold F. Schiffman

In our preface to this volume, we stated that our goal would be to


construct an updated picture of languages and language policy in the
region, and give potential language learners a clearer picture of what
kinds of resources exist, and what is still needed. One of the goals was
to attempt to define what model of multilingualism characterizes the
region as a whole, and to see if some definition of diglossia would
serve as such a model. The conclusion we can draw from a consider-
ation of this question for each chapter is that although the Ferguson
and Fishman models of diglossia are appropriate to a certain extent
in the area, it is clear that things are changing, and in particular the
language(s) that had previously been the clear H language(s) in a num-
ber of linguistic cultures of the region have now either been changed,
challenged, or reached a state where researchers cannot agree on how
to characterize them.
The question of the appropriateness of diglossia, either the classic
type (Fergusonian) or the extended (Fishman) type, is complicated by
the fact that diglossia is not an either-or proposition, but can vary
widely. Thus if Arabic is taken as the quintessentially diglossic lan-
guage, then since Arabic diglossia is probably the most extreme in its
difference between the H-variety (classical Arabic) and the L-varieties
(its dialects), all other languages pale by comparison, and one can con-
clude, as some scholars do, that a language like Persian, where diglos-
sia is less extreme than in Arabic, ought therefore not to be thought
of as diglossic, especially not in the Fergusonian sense. But this still
leaves the other modelthe Fishman or extended typewhich used
to be typical in situations like the relationship of Persian to Urdu
in South Asia, and to Pashto in both what is now Pakistan, and in
Afghanistan.
The dilemma of how to characterize multilingualism in the area is
writ large in Afghanistan, where over time there has been a kind of
fluctuation between Dari/Persian on the one hand, and Pashto on the
conclusion 355

other, with no clear final outcome emerging as to which will prevail


as the dominant or official language of Afghanistan. The new con-
stitution promulgated in 2003 also extends rights to other languages,1
but whether any of them have benefited so far from this is not clear.
Part of the lack of clarity is attributable to the ongoing war in the
area, and subsequent lack of political stability. Given the dearth of
available schools and the extremely low rate of literacy in the area,
questions about what language might be used for schooling are simply
moot. But the lack of clarity also surely has to do with the confusion
about what constitutes the standard version of Pashto, as shown by
Hakalas article on the subjectPashto seems to be a language that
lacks an overall agreed-upon high or standard versionwhat Kloss
(1978) once referred to as a dachlose Dialekt i.e. a (or a series of )
dialects that lack the overarching roof or protection of a standard
language. Kloss was of course referring to German dialects such as
Letzebuergesch, which lacked the protection of standard High Ger-
man. But since Pashto is spoken in both Afghanistan and Pakistan,
and particularly in the latter case clearly plays second fiddle to Urdu,
no agreed-upon standard has emerged. In Afghanistan, of course, it
has had to compete with Persian/Dari, which automatically has higher
prestige in the region.
In some parts of the region, as Robert Nichols points out (this vol-
ume). Pashto (or other regional languages) suffers from the dominance
of both Urdu and English, i.e., it is what we might call the low man
on the linguistic totem poleit may be the language learned at home,
but Urdu and English have more prestige, and it cannot compete in
a modernist environment, especially urban areas. Where it is used,
however, is in madrasas operated by militant Islamists, either as the
only medium of instruction, or as a language of explanation where
Arabic is the subject of study.
We also see that in the Central Asian republics of the former Soviet
Union, languages that were recognized as separate, (and mostly)
Turkic languages, were legitimized beginning in 19242 by the Soviets
in a divide-and-conquer mode, which emphasized their separateness

1
Article Sixteen states that From among the languages of Pashto, Dari, Uzbeki,
Turkmani, Balochi, Pashaei, Nuristani, and other languages spoken in the country,
Pashto and Dari are the official languages of the state.
2
See the article by Schlyter in this volume.
356 harold f. schiffman

and distinctiveness; they have now been cut loose from Soviet control,
and are struggling to define themselves based on their own percep-
tions, rather than having the Soviets do this for them. This has meant
that dialects of a language like Uzbek, if spoken in an area remote
from Uzbekistan itself, may be closer in some ways to whatever is
spoken locally than to standard Uzbek. And in some cases, speakers
may find it advantageous to declare themselves to be speakers of the
local dominant titular language, rather than retain their allegiance to
a standard language spoken far away. In the Soviet period, resources
were available to support education in these now dachlose dialects;
today that support is shrinking. Add to this the diluted status of Rus-
sian, formerly the clear H variety in a Fishman-type diglossia, and a
once-clear choice for a default language, especially in education, and
we have a hard time stating what model of multilingualism we are
dealing with. In other words, if Russian is no longer the H variety,
what will replace itEnglish? Persian? Or will the group succeed in
creating an H-variety of its own that can function as a language of
science and technology? The latter outcome, one that appeals to nation-
alist instincts, is one that is so fraught with difficulty that it probably
has no chance of succeeding, but is a factor ignored by nationalist
ideologies.
Another issue dealt with in at least one of the contributors to this
volume is that of reversing language shift in areas such as Kazakh-
stan, where speakers of local languages had in fact given up their lan-
guages in favor of an H variety. This was particularly prevalent in the
Central Asian republics of the former Soviet Union, because of the
massive influx of Russian speakers into some if not all of the republics.
Since Russians were first among equals in the Soviet Union, a covert
if not overt kind of russification became more common after 1938.
Subsequently, as Russian in-migration became more of a flood in the
1960s, and Russian schooling became available to all who wanted
it, upward-mobile members of the republics elites began to shift to
Russian, not only in their education and professions, but as a home
language. Now, in the post-Soviet period, there is a push to reverse
this shift, and return to the titular language. But as Fishman (1991)
has shown, RLS can be problematical.
What has happened in Kazakhstan, however, is that RLS has resulted,
not just in a shift from Russian as a language of wider communication
(LOWC), but also to some extent to English, as enrollments in the lat-
ter have increased dramatically. Russian is still an obligatory subject
conclusion 357

in schools in this republic, but other LOWCs are now seen as having
an important place, and the globalization of English has also reached
areas of the former Soviet Union. As for Pakistan, Afghanistan and
Iran, English had already occupied an important niche in the linguistic
ecology of those areas, and will not be easily dislodged.

References

Afghanistan, Constitution of. (2003). The Constitution of Afghanistan Year 1382 (2003).
Fishman, Joshua A. (1991). Reversing Language Shift. Clevendon: Multilingual Matters.
Kloss, Heinz. (1978). Die Entwicklung neuer germanischer Kultursprachen seit 1800.
2nd edition. Munich: Schwann.
INDEX

Abdul-Rahman Khan, 7-9 Ahmadzai clan, 325-6


Abdur Rahman, Amir, 32 Aitchinson, Charles, 312
Abrar, Sayedul, 73-4 Akbar (Mughal Emperor), 265
Acadmie Franaise, 35 Alam family, 325-6
Academy of Persian Language and Alexander I (Czar of Russia), 3
Literature, 111 alphabet reform: Iranian language policy
Achaemenian Empire, 9, 94-5 and, 111-2; Karakalpak language
Achaemenians, 6 and, 194; literacy rates and 97-8;
acquisition of language. See also Soviet initiation of, 97-9; for Uzbek
mother tongue: diglossia model of language, 181-2; Uzbek russification
multilingualism and, 16 and, 182-5
Adi Granth (Sikh religious text), 288-9, al-Zahir, Abd (Dr.), 40
292, 304 Amanullah (King), 35, 99
Afghan Empire, 324; Baloch culture and, American Presbyterian Mission, 298,
320 300, 304
Afghanistan. See also Democratic Amin, Hafizullah, 42-3, 46, 81
Republic of Afghanistan; Islamic Amir Habibullah, 34
Republic of Afghanistan: Balochi Amir Shir Ali Khan, 34
culture and language in, 320-2, Andropov, Yuri, 144
331-4; formation of, 6-9, 107; Angar, Faiz Muhammad, 38
geographic isolation of, 6-7; historical Anis (Comrad) (newspaper), 36
development of language policy in, Anjoman-i-Adabi (Literary Society), 35.
33-6; Iranian cultural and political See also Pashto Tolena
influence in, 99-101; language policy Ansari, Bayazid, 73, 265
in, 31-1, 339-47; linguistic diversity Arabic: diglossia model of, 14n.9; in
in, 31-3; number of languages in, 2-4; early Punjab society, 287; evolution
official language concept in, 36-46; of, 91; stability of, 16
Pashto status in, 8-12, 31-2, 36-51, Arabic script: New Persian use of, 9, 11
99-101, 109, 268; Pashtun cultural Aramaic script: Middle Persian in, 9
identity in, 56-63; Pashtun population Ataturk, Kemal, 99, 111
statistics in, 58-9, 58n.8, 263; Persian Atlas Linguistique des Parlers Dardes et
(Dari) language in, 35-6, 92-4, 103-4, Kafirs (Fussman), 77-8
109, 268; post-Taliban era in, 49-50; Aurangzeb, 75
Soviet invasion of, 4, 46-7, 268-9 Azari language, 111-2
Afghan languages: classification of, Azerbaijian: Cyrillic alphabet in, 97
55-63; geographical and historical
factors in development of, 4-9; Baba, Rhaman, 274
national and local identities, 4-9; Babur (Mughal King of India), 75
research history concerning, 2-4 Badakhshi, Taher, 42
Afghan Marxist-Leninist Party, 38 Baloch culture: Balochi language in
Afghan Millat (Afghan Nation), 42, 45 context of, 322-6; colonial stereotypes
Afghan Muslim Youth Organization, 42 of, 56n.5; ethno-linguistic awareness
Afghan Putsch of 1978, ix in, 55; history of, 320-2; national
Afghan Red Crescent, 38 identity and, 326-34; Pashtun
Africa: oral and literate culture in, 290-1 interaction with, 55, 56n.4
Ahady, Anwar ul-Haq, 32, 44, 48-9, 82 Balochi Academy, 2, 328
Ahmadi, Wali, 63 Balochi language, 44; Baloch history and,
Ahmadiyya community, 278 322-6; biography of, 319-34; dialects
360 index

in, 330-4; in early Punjab culture, Catalan: language shift with, 121-2
289-90; evolution of, 11, 13; future Center for the Publication of Uzbek-
status of, 332-4; as lingua franca, Language Textbooks (CPULT), 240-1
68n.18; national identity and, 326-34; Central Asia: economic change in,
standard-with-dialects system and, 17; 219-21; geographical factors in
written construction of, 320-2 language policies in, 214-6; lack of
Balochistan: education and literacy in language arbiter in post-Soviet era,
Pashto in, 271; links to Iran and, 218-9; language and cultural trends
325-6; post-Partition establishment in, 222-4; map of, 5; Persian language
of, 322-6 in, 7-8, 96-101; research sources for
Bangladesh: Balochistan history and, language policy in, 340-7; Soviet
323; Persian language status in, 89 language policy implementation
Barfield, Thomas J., 57, 83-4 and repression and, 216-8; Soviet
Barkazai clan: Baloch culture in Iran nationalities policy in, 13; technology
and, 324-6 development in, 221-2; Uzbek
Bartens, Angela, 121 language in, 208-7
Barth, Fredrik, 56n.4, 57n.7, 326 centrally managed economic policies: in
Bela, Las, 320 Central Asian republics, 219-21
Berdymukhammedov, Gubanguly, 230 Chaghatay language, 178-80, 178n.6,
Bible: Indian translations of, 296-7 189-91
bilingual cultures: power and solidarity Chatterjee, Partha, 63
in, 25-6 Chernenko, Konstantin, 144
bilingualism: Afghan Constitutional China: Persian language in, 10, 90-1, 95,
Monarchy and official policy for, 109, 115-6
39-42; in Afghanistan educational class politics in Afghanistan: ethno-
system, 37-46, 78-9, 82-4; in Central linguistic awareness and, 42-3; Pashto
Asian republics, 223-4; in Pakistan, language and, 81-4
279-80; in Pashtun communities, classical diglossia: extended diglossia
66-70 vs., 18-9; Pashto complexity and, 54;
Binawa, Abdul Rauf, 38 Persian and, 89, 102-4
Bolan literary journal, 328 colonialism: missionary encounters with
Bolshevik Russia: language policy in, Punjabi and, 294-304; Northwest
126-30, 214-6; Uzbek russification India language policy under, 282-315;
under, 182-5 Pashto language policies and, 263-7;
border politics: language policies in Persian language status and, 91,
Central Asia and, 214-6 107-9; prevalence of Urdu over
Brahui dialect, 330 Punjabi and, 301-12; Punjabi language
Brass, Paul, 56n.5 policies and, 291-4, 313-5
British East India Company, 307; communication technology:
Afghanistan and, 3 communication patterns and changes
Brown, Roger, 25 in, 2
Bugti tribe, 323-4 Communist Party of Kazakhstan, 147
Bustan (Persian text), 286 Constitutional Monarchy in
Afghanistan: official bilingualism
Cabuliwallah, The (Tagore), 54n.3 under, 39-42
Can Language Be Planned (Fishman), Crews, Robert D., 55
124-5 cuneiform writing: Old Persian and, 9
Can Threatened Languages Be Saved? Cust, Robert, 297, 310-2
(Fishman), 121 Cyrillic alphabet: abolition in
Cannon, G., 76-7, 84 Uzbekistan, 194; use in Tajikistan of,
Carey, William (Rev.), 295-8, 303 97-9; Uzbek russification using, 182-5
Caron, James, 53n.1, 63
caste system: in early Punjab society, Da Atam Jamiat text, 275
287n.15 Dames, M. Longworth, 329-30
index 361

Daoud, Muhammad, 38-9, 43 language and society and, 285-91;


Dardic languages, 11, 77-8 shifting domains and, 25; stability
Dari. See also Farsi; Persian: decline of language in, 16; standardization
under Taliban of, 49; dominance in in, 16; standard-with-dialects vs.,
Afghanistan, 8, 12, 32-3, 37, 39-41, 17; time-related development, 18; in
80, 89, 268; linguistic nationalism Uzbekistan, 198-200
and terminology of, 105-9; military District Gazeteers: in Balochi, 328-34; in
use of, in Afghanistan, 60n.14; as Punjabi, 293-4, 305
national Afghan language, 43-8, 50-1, dominant languages: language shifts
99-101; national identity associated and, 122-3
with, 100-1; Pashtos coexistence in DOSAAF: Soviet language policy
Afghanistan with, 60-3, 79-84; in implementation and, 216-8
Pashtun culture, 55; Tajik links to, Dostam, Abdul Rashid, 82
231; Western attitudes toward, 101-4 Dupree, Louis, 58, 65
Darwezah, Akhwand, 73, 265 Duran, Mortimer (Sir), 7
Daud, Daud Khan, 273 Durand Line, 7, 32, 38, 49, 56
Dave, Bhavna, 141-2 Durrani, Ahmad Shah, 6, 8, 11, 32-3,
DDD (newspaper), 242 320; descendants in Iran of, 324-6
De Afghanistan Kalanai (The Afghanistan Durrani, Timur, 8, 11
Annual), 36 Durrani tribe, 32, 80
De Kabul Mojalla (The Kabul Annual), Dvoryankov, N., 65
36
democracy: ethno-linguistic awareness Eastern Caliphate, 95
and, 42-3 economic conditions: Central Asian
Democratic Republic of Afghanistan: republics language policies and,
language policy in, 41, 43-6 219-21; in Kazakhstan, 245-9, 253-4;
deported nationalities: in Kazakhstan, in Tajikistan, 233-7
216-8 education: in Afghanistan New
devanagri (Hindi script), 288 Democracy era, 76-7; in Balochi,
developers: linguistic registers and role 328-34; British colonial administration
of, 23-4 in Central/South Asia and, 266-7;
Diamond, Jeffrey M., 13, 282-315 Central Asian language policies and,
diglossia model of multilingualism: 210-57; future of Uzbek language
acquisition of language in, 16; in, 203-5, 249-56; in Kazakhstan,
age-related trends in, 141-5; basic 246-9, 253-4; Kazakhstan, Russian
components of, 14-26; classical dominance in, 139-40; Kazakhstan
vs. extended diglossia, 18-20, 54; reverse language shift and, 158-60;
classification of, 1-2; current and in Kyrgyzstan, 239-45, 251-3; Pashto
future research issues, 354-7; as official language for, 36-46, 267-80;
definition, 14; distribution in Soviet control of, in Central Asia,
language families, space, and time, 220-1; in Tajikstan, language policies
17-8; functional differentiation in, and, 232-7, 249-50; in Turkmenistan,
15; grammar in, 17; Kazakh language post-Soviet era policies, 226-30,
policy and, 148-50, 161-4; language 254-6; Uzbek dominance in Central
shift and reversing language shift, Asia of, 225-6; in Uzbekistan,
20, 122-6; lexicon in, 17; linguistic language proficiency in, 196-8,
culture and, 24-6; linguistic registers, 198-9
21-4; literacy and, 18, 24-5; literary electronic media: in Kyrgyzstan, 242-3;
heritage and, 15-6; Pashto language in Tajikistan, 237
and, 54-65, 263-80; Persian and, Elfenbein, Joseph, 319-20, 322
112-6; phonology, 17; power and Elphinstone, Mountstuart, 3, 6
prestige and, 18; power and solidarity Elphinstone, N. W., 311-2
in, 24-6; prestige as factor in, 15; English: linguistic registers and role of,
Punjab precolonial and early colonial 21-4; multilingualism and changes to,
362 index

2; in North West Frontier Province Kazakh RLS, 130-7; in Pashto dialect


schools, 268, 271-2, 275, 279-80; differentiation, 65-70
Persian similarities with, 103-4; Georgian language: survival in Soviet
popularity in Uzbekistan of, 201-2; Union of, 129-30
use in British colonial India of, 283 German language: in Uzbekistan, 202
ethno-linguistic awareness: in Balochi German population in Kazakhstan, 132,
culture, 330-4; democracy and, 42-6; 165-6
Iranian language policy and, 110-2; Ghauri, Aruf Ali Khan, 273
in Pashtun culture, 55-63; Persian Ghazni (Afghan city), 8
language and, 96-101 Ghilzai tribe, 32, 44, 68n.18, 80
ethno-politics: Western imperialism in Gilman, A., 25
Afghanistan and, 10-2 glasnost: impact on language research
European languages: value in Central of, 137n.37; Kazakh language policies
Asia of, 76-7 and, 144-5
extended diglossia: classical diglossia vs., Goody, Jack, 290-1
18-9 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 144
Graded Intergenerational Disruption
family: language use in, 152-3 Scale (GIDS), 124-6, 156-7
Farhadi, A. G. Ravan, 2-3 grammar: colonial-era Punjabi language
Farsi. See also Dari; Persian: Dari vs., and standardization of, 299-301;
99-101; evolution of terminology, diglossia model of multilingualism
92-101; linguistic nationalism and and, 16-7; in Pashto, literature
terminology of, 105-9; Tajik links to, sources on, 54-5, 68-70, 73-84; shared
231; use in Afghanistan of, 8, 40-1, grammar of Punjabi-Urdu and, 302-
89; as written language in Kyrgyzstan, 12; standardization of, 16
251-3 Grammar of the Punjabee Language, A
Ferguson, Charles, 14, 112-4, 122n.5 (Carey), 296, 303
Ferrando, Olivier, 234-5, 240-1, 250 Great Britain: Baloch history and role
Fierman, William, 12-3, 20, 121-70 of, 322-6; Democratic Republic of
Fishman, Joshua, 14, 18-9, 121-6, Afghanistan and, 44; Indian Empire
152n.69, 163-4, 170 of, 11; invasion of Afghanistan by,
Fitrat, Abdurrauf, 181 3-4, 7, 266; Punjab annexation by,
foreign policy: educational language 292-4; Urdu language policy during
policy initiatives and, 280 empire of, 92, 103, 109, 115-6, 266
Forsyth, Thomas Douglas, 311 Greek culture: evolution of Persian and,
Framework for Expanding the Sphere 94-101
of Functions of the State Language Gregorian, Vatan, 35
and Raising its Competitiveness for Grierson, George Abraham, 61, 300-1
20072010, 153 Groff, Cynthia, 339-47
freedom of the press: ethno-linguistic Gulistan (Persian text), 286
awareness and, 42-3 gurmukhi (Punjabi script), 288, 296-301,
Fuller, A. R., 303 303-5
functional differentiation: diglossia
model of multilingualism, 15; Pashto Haileybury College, 307, 310-2
limitations and, 60-1, 60n.14 Hakala, Walter, 12, 15, 53-84, 355
Fussman, Grard, 77-8 Halliday, M. A. K., 21
Haq, Syed Anwar ul, 275
Gazetteer of the Rawalpindi District, 294 Hashabeiky, 110
gender-balanced content: in Pashto Hashim, Muhammad, 37
textbooks, shifts in, 268-75 Hassan, Hazrat Imam, 274
geographical factors: Afghan language Hazarah organizations, 82
development, 4-9; Central Asian H domain, diglossia model: acquisition
language policies and, 214-6; diglossia of language and, 16; basic principles,
model distribution and, 17-8; in 14-5; classical vs. extended variants,
index 363

18-20; Dari in Afghanistan and, of, 6-7; Persian as national language


62-3; functional differentiation and, of, 89, 96-104; Persian language status
15; grammar, 17; language shift and and, 106-9; Turkic languages in, 96
reversing language shift, 20; lexicon, Iranian Academy (Farhangestan), 110
17; linguistic culture and, 24-6; Iranian diaspora: Balochi language and,
linguistic registers and, 21-4; literacy 319-22; Persian language and, 101-4
and, 24-5; literary heritage and, 15-6; Iranian Empires of the Parthians:
Pashto and, 64-5, 72-84; phonology, Persian in, 9
17; power and prestige of, 18; prestige Iranian Plateau: nationalism and
of, 15; stability, 16; standardization, geography of, 9-10
16; standard-with-dialects model and, Iranian Revolution of 1978, ix; language
17; time-based development of, 18 policy following, 101; Persian
Hekmatyar, Golbudin, 42-3 language evolution and, 111-2
Henderson, Michael M. T., 65, 70-1 Irish Gaelic: language shift with, 121-2
Herat (Afghanistan), 7 Islah (Reform) (newspaper), 36
heritage language concept, 102 Islamic culture: Afghanistans isolation
Herodotus, 91, 93, 101 from, 3; in early Punjab society,
higher education: Kazakhstan, reverse 286-8, 287n.18; growth of, 11; literacy
language shift in, 159-60 linked to, 99-101; in Pakistani
Hikmatya, Gulbuddin, 82 textbooks and education system,
Hindavi language, 75 267-9, 274-80; Pashtuns and, 56n.4;
Hindi language, 92, 96, 288 Persian language in, 91-101; in
Hindko language, 64-5 textbooks for Pakistan, 274-5
Hindu culture: in early Punjab society, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, 47-8
286-7; Persian influence in, 95, 286-7 Islamist MMA Alliance, 269
Hindustani. See Urdu Islamiyat curriculum: in Pakistan
Hir Ranjha, 288 textboooks, 270-1, 276-80
historical factors: in Afghan language
development, 4-9; diglossia model of Jagdal dialect, 330
multilingualism and, 18 Jahanbani, Amir Amanullah, 325
Hizb-i Islami, 81-3 Jahani, Carina, 319-20
Hizb-i Watan (Homeland Party), 81-2 Jamiat-i-Islami-i Afghanistan (Islamic
hyperglossia: Pashto in context of, 60-1 Organization of Afghanistan), 38-9,
42-3, 45-6
Idiomatic Sentences, in English and Janubiy Qozogiston (newspaper), 248
Panjabi, 298 Janvier, Levi, 300
Ijaz, Niaz Muhammad, 273 Japan: alphabet and literacy rates in, 98
India: British imposition of Urdu in, jihad: as theme in Pakistan textbooks,
92, 103, 109, 115-6; colonial-era 274
Northwest India, language policy Jinnah, M. A., 274, 278
in, 282-315; Hindi vs. Urdu in, 100; Jones, William, 116
missionaries in, 294-301; Pashtuns
in, 57-63, 263; Persian language status Kabul (Afghan capital), 8
in, 11-2, 89-92, 96-7, 103, 115-6; Kabul Radio: Pashto programs on, 39
Perso-Islamic culture in, 285 Kabul University: Pashto literacy
international cultural heritage: Persian campaign and, 41-2
lanaguage status and, 105 Kafir languages, 77-8
internationalism: history in Russia of, Kalat Khanate, 320, 322-6
126-30, 214-6 Karakalpak Autonomous Republic, 194
Iqbal, Allama, 275 Karakalpak language: in Uzbekistan,
Iran: Baloch culture and language in, 191-4
324-6, 329-34; historical legacy of, Karimov, Islam, 204, 237
107-9; language policy in, 109-12; Karlanri Federal-Administered Tribal
literacy rate in, 111-2, 114-6; origins Areas, 57n.7
364 index

Karmal, Babrak, 42-6, 81 Kolbin, Gennadii, 145, 164-5


Kashmiri language, 289-90 Kunayev, Dinmukhamed, 145
Kayasths ethnic group, 286-8 Kurd ethnic minority: Balochs and,
Kazakh language: cultural support in 325-6
Kazakhstan for, 161-3; decline of Kurdish language: Balochi language and,
competency in Kazakhstan in, 141-5, 329-34; Pashto compared with, 59; in
253-4; education and mass media post-revolution Iran, 112
language policy in, 222-3; formal Kyrgyz language: in Uzbekistan, 198-9
state policy in support of, 146-57; in Kyrgyzstan: Uzbek language in, 237-45,
Kyrgyzstan, 251n.117; limitations on 251-3; Uzbek population in, 237-9
research concerning, 137n.37; reverse
language shift in fortunes of, 125-6, Lal, Munshi Charanjit, 293
130, 157-70; status in late Soviet era LAlmanach de Kaboul, 35
of, 137-45; in Uzbekistan, 198-9 lande (Punjabi script), 288
Kazakh SSR Council of Ministers, 147 language attitudes: colonial
Kazakhstan: birthrate trends in, 166-70; understanding of language and,
educational system, reverse language 301-12; formation of, 178
shift in, 139-40, 158-63; ethnic language families: diglossia model
breakdown of population in, 133-7; distribution in, 17-8
formal state Kazakh policy in, 146-57; language learning resources, 343-7
geography and demographics of, language of wider communication
130-7, 166-70; independent (LOWC): /current and future research
Kazakhstan language policy, 150-3; issues, 356-7; English as, 170; Russian
language evolution in, 12, 121-70; as, 170; utility of, 21-3
mass media in, Kazakh vs. Russian language planning: defined, 177n.3;
languages in, 140-1; population in Kazakhstan, 169-70; policy
statistics for, 130-2; Qazaq tili vs. implmentation and, 124-6; in
qoghami activities in, 153-7; reversing Uzbekistan, 176-8, 191
language shift in, 125-6, 130, 133-7; language policy: in Afghanistan, 31-51;
Soviet Kazakh language policy in Central Asian republics, 216-8;
in, 146-50; Soviet language policy colonial choice of Urdu over Punjabi
implementation in, 216-8; Uzbek and, 301-15; in colonial Northwest
language in, 245-9, 253-4; workplace India, 282-315; defined, 177n.3; of
environment, reverse language shift Democratic Republic of Afghanistan
in, 139, 157-8 (DRA), 43-6; implementation of,
Khair ul-Bayan (Excellence of 26-7; in independent Kazakhstan,
Expression), 73, 265 150-3; in Iran, 109-12; Karakalpak
Khaldun, Ibn, 322 language in Uzbekistan and, 191-4;
Khalq (Masses) party, 42-6, 81 literary Pashto and, 73-84; in NWFP
Khan, Abdul Gaffar, 267, 278-9 education system, 268-80; official
Khan, Amanullah, 267 language concept in Afghanistan and,
Khan, Dost Muhammad, 332 36-46; Pashto and, 36-51, 61-3, 263-4;
Khan, Garmanullah, 273 Persian language status and, 104-9;
Khan, Ismail, 82 in post-Taliban Afghanistan, 49-50;
Khan, Muhammad Alam, 273 research resources in Central Asia for,
Khan, Syed Makmud, 273, 275 339-47; reverse language shift and,
Khari Boli dialect, 307-8 122-6; Soviet nationality and, 126-30;
Khatris ethnic group, 286-7 in Soviet Union, 208-9; in Uzbekistan,
Khushal Khan Khattak, 59 12-3, 176-205
Khyber Pushtunkhwa, 13; Pashto language purists: linguistic registers and
language in, 63-5 role of, 22-4
Kieffer, Charles M., 69-70 language reform: in Uzbekistan, 176-8
Kipling, Rudyard, 54n.3 language shifts: diglossia model of
koine: Persian function as, 10-2 multilingualism and, 20-1; in
index 365

Kazakhstan, 121-70; in Tajikistan, British colonial concepts of, 293-4;


249-51 Democratic Republic of Afghanistan
language testing: in Kazakhstan, Kazakh campaign for, 45-6; diglossia model
status and, 159-60 of multilingualism and, 24-5; in early
Law of the Republic Of Kazakhstan Punjab society, 286-7; low rate of, in
on Language(s) of the Republic of Pashtun culture, 41-2, 59-63, 59n.9; in
Kazakhstan (LL97), 150-3 Pashto, 72-84, 100-1, 270-80; Persian
Law on Languages (1989) (Kazakhstan), as language of, 10-1, 90-1, 96-101; in
148-50 post-revolutionary Iran, 111-2, 114-6;
Lawrence, Henry, 306-10 in Punjabi, 303-4; Urdu as language
Lawrence, John, 306-12 of, 13, 92; in Uzbekistan, 181-2, 195-8
L domain, diglossia model: acquisition Literacy Corps (Iran), 111, 114
of language and, 16; basic principles, literary heritage: diglossia model of
14-5; classical vs. extended variants, multilingualism and, 15; in Pashtun
18-20; functional differentiation culture, 59-63; of Persian, 93-4,
and, 15; grammar, 17; lack of 96-101; in Punjabi language, 288-90;
standardization in, 16; language Uzbek language and, 180-2
shift and reversing language shift, literature: in Dari, 32, 40-1; in Pashto
20; lexicon, 17; linguistic culture language, 12, 32
and, 24-6; linguistic registers and, literature review of Pashto research,
21-4; literacy and, 24-5; literary 53-5
heritage and, 15-6; Pashto and, 64-5; literization, Pashto literature and,
phonology, 17; power and prestige 76n.22
of, 18; prestige of, 15; stability, 16; local identities: Afghan languages and,
standard-with-dialects model and, 17; 4-9
time-based development of, 18 Ludhiana Mission, 298-300, 302, 304
Leech, Robert, 302-3
Lenin, Vladimir, 44 MacKenzie, D. N., 59, 65, 71-2, 75-6
Le Persan Parl en Afghanistan, 2 madrasas: colonial language policies
less commonly taught languages: and, 266; Pashto language in, 268-9
Persian status as, 102-5 Mahabharata, 287n.14
*le Strange, 95 Majalla-i Kabul (Kabul Gazette), 35. See
lexicon: diglossia model of also De Kabul Mojalla
multilingualism and, 17; Pashto Makhzan al-Islam (Treasury of Islam),
literary tradition and, 73-84 73, 265
lingua franca: Dari in Afghanistan as, Makrani dialect, 329
32-3 maktabs (Persian schools): in colonial
lingua franca: Russian in Uzbekistan as, Punjab, 286-7
194-8 Malcolm, John, 292, 304
linguistic culture: diglossia model of Malik, Hazrat Imam, 275
multilingualism and, 24-6; in Punjab Marais, W., 14n.8
colonial era, 291-4 Maroof, Farzana, 273
linguistic diversity: in Afghanistan, 31-3 Marr, Nicholas, 128
linguistic register: defined, 22; Marri tribe, 323-4
development of, 22-3; diglossia model Marxist-Leninist ideology: Democratic
of multilingualism and, 21-4 Republic of Afghanistan and, 43-7
linguistic russification: in Kazakhstan, Masnavi (Persian narrative poem),
128n.25, 133n.35, 142; Soviet policies 288n.22
for, 12, 97, 128; in Uzbekistan, 182-5 mass media: in Balochi, 328-34; Balochi
Linguistic Survey of India (Grierson), 61, language and culture in, 331-4; in
300-1 Central Asia, Soviet control of, 220-1;
link languages: Pashto as, 60-1 in Central Asia, Uzbek dominance
literacy: alphabets linked to, 97-8; in of, 225-30; Central Asian language
Balochi language, 320-2, 328-34; policies and, 210-57; future of
366 index

Uzbek language in, 203-5, 249-56; 13-26; current and future research
in Kazakhstan, 140-1, 160-1, 247-9, issues, 354-7; language policies and,
253-4; in Kyrgyzstan, 242-5, 251-3; in 1; Pashto in context of, 60-5; in
Tajikistan, limits on Uzbek language Uzbekistan, 198-9
materials, 235-7; in Turkmenistan, Muscadine Empire, 325-6
post-Soviet era policies, 226-30 Muslim culture: Punjabi literary
Masud, Ahmad Shah, 82 tradition and, 288-91
McIntosh, Angus, 21 Muslim League: Pashtun culture and,
Mektep textbook publisher, 246-9 267
Memlekettik qoghamdyq til qozghalysy
(State Language Public Movement) Nader Shah (King), 11, 35-6, 325-6
(Kazakhstan), 155-7, 161-3 Nahv (Fitrat), 181
Memlekettik til qzghalysy (State *Najibullah, 46-7, 81-2
Language Movement) (Kazakhstan), Nanak, Guru, 289
155-7 Napoleon, 3
Metcalfe, Charles, 307-8 nastaliq (Punjabi script), 288, 299
Mezon (newspaper), 242 national anthem: Pashto as language of,
Mezon TV, 243 49-50
Middle Persian, 9, 90, 99 national identity: Afghan languages
Middle Turkic Chaghatay language, and, 4-9; in Baloch culture, 326-34;
179-80 Pashto designation as official language
migration: within Kazakhstan, 166-70 and, 36-46; Uzbek language as state
military in Afghanistan: Pashto as ritual language and, 185-9
language in, 60n.14 nationalism: Afghanistan historical
Minhas, Rashid, 274 events and shaping of, 8-12;
minority languages: Afghanistan nineteenth-century emergence of,
awareness of, 42, 45-6; in Central 3-4; Pashto language policies in
Asia, 225-6; Pashto language as, 78-84 Afghanistan and, 34-6; Pashtunistan
Minorsky, Vladimir, 329-30 self-determination and, 38-41; Persian
Miran, M. Alam, 78-9 language status and emergence of, 89,
Mirs, Talpur, 320 95-101, 104-9; Taliban and Afghan
missionaries in Central and South Asia: resurgence of, 48-9
Punjabi language and, 294-301, 304 nationality policies: in Central Asia,
Moazzam, Anwar, 109 214-6
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, 111 nativization (korenizatsiya) policy: in
Mohmand, Syed Ahmed, 273 Uzbekistan, 180, 182-5
Momyshuly, Bauryzhan, 142 Nawid, Senzil, 12, 15, 31-51
Mongols, 11, 90 Nazarbayev, Nursultan, 145, 155, 164-6,
monoglossic language environment: in 230
Kazakh workplace, 139 New Persian: emergence of, 9, 90, 99-100
Montgomery, Robert, 307 Newton, John, 299-301
Morgenstierne, Georg, 2-3, 77-8, 264 Nichols, Robert, 13, 263-80, 355-6
mother tongue: Balochi language as, Nimroz province: in Pashtun culture,
328-9; diglossia model of 55-6; Urdu dominance in, 83
multilingualism and, 16, 124-6; Niyazmand, Hamidullah, 83-4
linguistic register and role of, 21-4; Norgate, James, 57
standard-with-dialects systems and, 17 North West Frontier province: culture
Mughal Empire, 6-7, 75, 90-1, 103, 109, of, 3; Pashto in, 13, 63, 263-80;
285-6 Pastunistan issue and, 49; Persian
Muhammad Zaher Shah, 8, 325 in, 103; refugees in, 58; textbook
mujahedin: takeover of Afghanistan by, publication in, 269-80
48 Northern Alliance, 82-3
multilingualism models: age-related Nuristani, 44
trends in, 141-5; basic elements of, Nurtazin, Muhit, 153n.75
index 367

October Revolution, 179 Pashto: in Afghanistan, 31-2; as


official language policy: bilingualism Afghan national language, 8-9, 11-2,
under Constitutional Monarchy, 36-51, 89; Arabic script used for,
39-42; evolution in Afghanistan of, 11; Balochi language and, 324-6;
36-46; in Kyrgyzstan, 238-9, 244-5; dialect differentiation in, 59-60,
Persian language and evolution of, 65-84; historical development in
90-4 Afghanistan of, 33-6; lack of prestige
Old Persian, 9, 90 for, 15; language policies concerning,
Olfat, Gul Pacha, 38 263-4; literary tradition in, 12,
On Improving the Study of the Kazakh 32, 59-63, 72-84; in North West
Language in the Republic, 147 Frontier province, 263-80; origins of,
Origin of the Sikh Power (Prinsep), 292 59n.10; in Pakistan, 13, 53-4, 63-5;
orthography: comparative survey of Pashtunistan issue and, 38-9; Pashtun
Urdu, Persian and Pashto, 60n.12; nationalist ambitions and advocacy
of Pashto, research on, 54-5, 59-60, for, 267; Persian coexistence with, 12,
72-84; Uzbek russification and, 36-41, 60-3, 68-9, 99-101; prescriptive
183-5 grammars of, 3; radio programs in,
Osh sadosi (newspaper), 242-5 39; research and scholarship on,
Osh TV, 243 263-4; resurgence under Taliban of,
Ottoman Empire: Afghan language 48-9; secondary sources on status in
development and, 6-9; Persian Afghanistan of, 53-84; sociological
language in, 10, 90-2, 108-9, 115; research on, 53n.1; standardization
tanzimat period in, 110 of, 70-4; Taliban and resurgence of,
Ottoman Turkish, 11 48-9, 51, 81-4; two-branches model
of, 66-70; in Uzbekistan, 198-200,
Pahlavi (Middle Persian), 9 202-3; varieties of, 65-70; as written
Pahlavi, Reza Shah, 325-6, 332 language, 54, 59-60, 74-84
Pakhto Dars Kitab (Pakhto Class Pashto Maraka (Pashto Society), 35
Book) textbook series, 272-5 Pashto Tolena (Pashto Academy), 36-8,
Pakhto Kaaidah (Pakhto System) 41-2, 61-3, 80
textbook series, 272-5 Pashtu, Muhammad Rasul, 38
Pakistan: Afghan Pashtun refugees in, Pashtun culture: Baloch culture and,
58, 63-5, 79-80, 268; Afghan relations 324-6; characteristics in Afghanistan
with, 38-42; Balochi language of, 55-63; colonial stereotypes of,
in, 323-6, 332-4; creation of, 38; 56n.5; democracy and ethno-linguistic
democracy vs. military rule in, ix; awareness in, 42-3; early history of
Durand Line with Afghanistan and, 7; Afghanistan and, 7-8; geographic
educational system and textbooks in, boundaries of, 56-63; impact of war
268-80; Federally Administered Tribal and politics on, 58-63; nationalism in,
Areas in, 53n.7, 263, 271; Pashto 8-9, 11-2, 38-9; trial dynasties in, 8
language policy in, 53-4, 63-5, 268-80; Pashtun ethnic group: in Pakistan, 58,
Pashtun cultural identity in, 57-63; 63-5, 79-80, 263; population statistics
Pashtun population in, 58, 63-5, on, 58-9, 58n.8, 263
79-80, 263, 267-8; Persian language Pashtunistan: Pashto language
status in, 89, 96, 109 policies and support for, 267; self-
Pakistan Studies: in NWFP educational determination for, 38-41; Taliban and
system and textbooks, 270-1, 276-80 resurgence of, 49
Panjabi: evolution of, 13 Penzl, Herbert, 68-72, 77
Parcham (Banner) party, 42-4, 81; Peoples Democratic Party of
ascendance of, 46-7 Afghanistan (PDPA), 42-8, 50-1, 81
Parthians, Iranian Empires of, 9; perestroika: Kazakh language policies
evolution of Persian and, 94-5 and, 144-5
Partition of British India, 322 Persian. See also Dari; Farsi: Balochi
Pashai, 44, 331 language and, 319-22, 329-34; cultural
368 index

status in Afghanistan of, 9-12, 34-8, language of Uzbekistan, 199-200; in


40-1, 62-3, 75-84; current status Uzbekistan, Russian language loss of
of, 89; decline in prestige of, 76; prestige in, 194-8
diglossic aspects of, 112-6; evolution primus-inter-pares status: for Russian
of, 94-101; geographical distribution in Uzbekistan, 195-8
and history of, 89-94; historical Princely States. See Balochistan
legacy of, 107-9; in India, 75, 282-3; Prinsep, Henry, 292
influence on Pashto of, 12, 73; Iranian *Pstrunsin*ska, Jadwiga, 80-1, 84
language policy and, 109-12; medieval Punjabi Century, 314n.104
status of, 114-6; multilingualism and Punjabi language: colonial policies
changes to, 2; nationalist language and selection of Urdu over, 301-12;
policies and future of, 104-9; origins current status of, 313-5; dialects
of, 91-4; Pashtos coexistence with, of, 287n.16; dictionary in, 300;
36-41, 60-3, 68-9, 263; prescriptive intelligible vs. spoken distinction
grammars of, 3; prestige of, 15; concerning, 289-90; missionary
prominence in Kyrgyzstan of, 251-3; encounters with, 294-301; oral nature
promotion in Afghanistan of, 35-6; of, 303-12; in pre-colonial and early
Punjab precolonial and early colonial colonial Punjab, 284-91; as Urdu
language and society and, 285-7; dialect, 302-12; vernacularization
spoken and written forms of, 12; in and, 282-315; written forms of, 288
Tajikistan, 89; Tajik links to, 80, 231; Punjab School of colonial
Urdu links to, 308-12; use in Central administration, 306
and South Asia of, 7-8, 75, 107-9, Punjab state, 6; British annexation of,
265-6; Western attitudes towards, 292-4; colonialism and culture of,
101-4; as written language, 91-2 291-4; geographical characteristics
Persianate culture, 95 of, 285; oral and literate cultures in,
Perso-Arabic alphabet: early Punjabi 290-1; pre-colonial and early colonial
language and, 288-90; in Tajikistan, language and society in, 284-91
98-9 Pushtu language, 289-90
phonology: diglossia model of
multilingualism and, 17; Pashto Qadiani minority, 278
dialects and, 65-70, 72-84; Pashto Qadir, Maulana Abdul, 275
orthography and, 54-5 Qajar dynasty, 325
poetry: in Balochi, 329-30; in Pashto, Qandahar (first Afghan capital), 7-8, 35
73-84; in Persian, 92 Qasmi, Maulana Abdul Sabooh, 275
Pokrovsky school, 126-7 Qaydarov, A., 154-7
politics and language policy: Afghan Qazaq tili qoghami (Kazakh Language
language reforms, 5-9; democracy Society), 153-7, 161-3, 167-70
in Afghanistan and, 42-3; Pashto Qizilbash, 11
language textbooks and, 269-80; Quran: Arabic stability and role of, 16;
Pashto research on, 54, 80-4; in post- evolution of Persian and influence of,
Soviet Uzbekistan, 190-1 91, 97
Pollock, Sheldon, 75, 76n.22
Porter, Joseph, 300 Rabbani, Borhanuddin, 42-3, 48
power: diglossia model of Rahman, Tariq, 73-4, 264, 271, 323
multilingualism and role of, 18, 25-6 Rahman Baba, 59
Pozitisiia (newspaper), 242 Rahmon, Emomali (Tajikistan
prestige of languages: colonial language president), 232-7
policies and, 266-7; diglossia model Ramayana, 287n.14
of multilingualism, 15, 18; historical Rashid al-Bayan (Guide of Expression)
development of Pashto and, 33-6; (al-Rashid), 73, 75
Pashto dialects and, 68-70; Pashto in Raverty, H. G., 59n.10, 264-5, 267
hierarchy of, 60-3; Persian language Report on a Linguistic Mission to
status and, 90-1; Uzbek as high North-west India (MacKenzie), 71
index 369

Republic of Karakalpakistan, 191-4 Sart (Uzbek literary language form),


research sources: for language policy in 179-80
Central Asia, 339-47 Sasanians Empire, 6; evolution of
Reversing Language Shift (Fishman), 121 Persian and, 9, 94-5, 108-9
reversing language shift (RLS): Saur Revolution of 1978, 80
cultural support in Kazakhstan Schiffman, Harold F., 1-27, 53n.1, 125,
for, 161-3; current and future 264, 354-7
research issues, 356-7; diglossia Schlyter, Birgit, 12, 20, 176-205
model of multilingualism and, school-based language study: limitations
20-1; family language patterns and, of, 124-6
152n.69; in Kazakhstan, 125-6, 130, Seleucid Empire: evolution of Persian
133-45, 163-70; moderate success and, 94-5
in Kazakhstan of, 157-63; Soviet Septfonds, Daniel, 58, 66, 70
Kazakh language policy and, 147-50; Seraj al-Akhbar newspaper, 34
theoretical background, 121-6 Serampore Mission: Punjabi language
reversing languag shift (RLS): political and work of, 295-8, 304
context in Kazakhstan for, 143-5 Setam-i-Milli (National Oppression),
Reza Shah Pahlavi, 92, 99, 110-1 42, 45
Rishtya, Sayyid Qasim, 36-7 Shackle, Christopher, 64-5
Romainzation: Persian language and, 111 Shah, Waris, 288
Ronkin, Maggie, 340 Shahid, Qazi Ahmad, 275
Rubin, Joan, 26, 81-2 Shah Mahmud Khan, 37
Russia. See also Soviet Union: British Shakespear, John, 304
relations with, 6-9; expansion in Asia Shakhanov, Mukhtar, 155-7
by, 107-9; history of language policy shifting diglossias: classification of, 2;
in, 126-30; invasion of Afghanistan Pashto in modern Afghanistan as
by, 3-4, 33; population in Kazakstan model of, 60-3
from, 132-7 Shiism: historical legacy of, 108-9
Russian language: in Afghanistan, Shoja (Shah), 3
teaching o, 77, 80-1; in Central Asia, Shola-i-Jawid (Eternal Flame), 42, 45
current and future research issues, Sikh culture: in early Punjab, 285-6, 288,
356-7; decline of Uzbek proficiency 292-4, 304
in, 196-8; in Kazakhstan, 12, 125-6, Silk Route, 6-7
137-45, 139-45, 157-63; in Kyrgyzstan, silyaniye, Marxist-Leninist ideology of,
status of, 237-45; multilingualism 45
and changes to, 2; post-independence Sindh state, 6
Kazakhstan language policy and Sindhi, 289-90; Baloch history and, 320;
continued influence of, 151-3; in post- emergence of, 11
Soviet Central Asia, 208-57; Soviet Singh, Maharaja Ranjit, 286
Kazakh language policy in relation Siraj al-Akhbar, 62-3
to, 148-50; in Tajikistan, 89, 97-9; in Sketch of the Sikhs (Malcolm), 292, 304
Uzbekistan, 189-91, 194-8 Slavic population in Kazakhstan, 132,
Rzehak, Lutz, 68n.18, 83 165-6
Smagulova, Zhuldyz, 169-70
Safavid (Iranian) Empire, 6, 7, 108-9; Society for Alphabet Reform, 111
Afghan invasion of, 9-10 sociolinguistic models: components of,
Safr (Fitrat), 181 13-4; Pashto research and, 55
Salam, Abdus, 278 Soghd haqiqati (newspaper), 235-6
Saljuq Turks, 11 solidarity: diglossia model of
Salnama-i-Kabul (yearbook), 35. See also multilingualism and role of, 25-6
De Afghanistan Kalanai South Asian languages: classical vs.
Sanskrit: in early Punjab society, 287; extended diglossia models in, 19n.15
vernacular languages in India and, South Korea: alphabet and literacy rates
285 in, 98
370 index

Southwest Asia: map of, 5 Tagore, Rabindranath, 54n.3


Soviet Communist Party: language Tajikistan: leaders in Afghanistan
policy in Central Asia and, 216-8; from, 82-3; Pashto speakers in, 55-6;
language policy in Kazakhstan under, Persian language status in, 89, 93-4,
128-30, 164-70 109; tojiki, renaming of Persian in, 97;
Soviet Union. See also Russia: Central Uzbek language in, 89, 99-100, 109,
Asian economic policies under, 230-7, 249-51; Uzbek population in,
219-21; Central Asian language trends 230-2; Western imperialism and, 6
following collapse of, 208-57; collapse Tajik language: Dari and Farsi and, 80,
in 1991 of, ix; Democratic Republic 231; in Uzbekistan, 198-9
of Afghanistan and influence of, 43-7; Taliban: linguistic violence in regime of,
formal Kazakh language policy under, 84, 331-4; madrasa education of, 269;
146-50; invasion of Afghanistan by, resurgence of Pashto under, 48-9, 51,
4, 46-7, 268-9; in Kazakhstan, 125-6, 81-4
137-45, 164-70; language policy in Tandon, Prakash, 314n.104
Tajikistan, 97-8; language policy in T and V pronouns: power and solidarity
Uzbekistan and, 176-8; nationality and use of, 25-6
and language policy in, 126-30; Taraki, Nur Muhammad, 38, 42-6, 81
Pashtun culture and invasion by, 58, Tarikh-e-Zilla Dera Ismail Khan, 293
79-84; Republic of Karakalpakistan tarikhs: in colonial Punjab, 293-4
and, 193-4; Russian language status Tarzi, Amin, 55
following dissolution of, 194-8; Tarzi, Mahmud, 62-3
standardization of Uzbek as Soviet Tawfiq (Iranian satirical weekly), 111
language and, 178-80, 199-200; Uzbek technology: in post-Soviet Central Asia,
language in, 179-80; withdrawal from 221-2
Afghanistan by, 48 territorial borders: communication
spelling standardization: Pashto dialects patterns and changes in, 2
and, 72-84; in Persian, 98 textbooks: in Central Asian republics,
Spooner, Brian, 1-27, 89-116, 125, 214-5, 217-9; in Kazakhstan, 159-60,
319-4 246-9; in Kyrgyzstan, 239-45; in
stability: diglossia model of Pashto, 74, 269-80; in Tajikistan,
multilingualism and, 16 232-7, 250-1
Stalin, Josef, 128-30 Thailand: alphabet and literacy rates in,
standardization: diglossia model of 98
multilingualism and, 16; in Pashto Thomason, James, 306
language, 70-84 time factors: diglossia model distribution
standard-with-dialects systems: diglossia and, 17-8
model of multilingualism and, 17; tojiki: linguistic nationalism and
Pashto language and, 70-84 terminology of, 105-9; national
State Program on the Development identity associated with, 100-1; Soviet
of the Kazakh Language and Other renaming of Persian as, 97-9, 109;
National languages in the Kazakh SSR Western attitudes toward, 101-4
in the Period Up Until 2000 (SP90), tojiki (Persian), 9
149-50 top-down language policies, 27
Strevens, Peter, 21 Torwayana, Najibullah, 37
Sufism: in early Punjab society, 287-8, Transoxiana (early state), 6
287n.18 Trazi, Mahmud, 34-5
Suleimenova, Eleonora, 169-70 Treaty of Golestan, 110
Sunnis: historical legacy of, 108-9; Treaty of Turkmanchay, 110
Pashtuns as, 56n.4 tribal culture: Pashto language in
Swat State: Pashto language in, 267 Afghanistan and, 32, 81-4; Pashtun
Syed, Aslam, 109 identity with, 55-63
Syria: early boundaries of, 6 Trudgill, Peter, 21
index 371

Turkestan: establishment of, 178-80 language in, 191-4; language policy


Turkestanian reform movement, 181 and development in, 12-3, 176-205;
Turkic cultures: Persian language and, minority languages in, 198-200; post-
10 Soviet changing language attitudes in,
Turkic languages, 125-6; evolution of, 189-91; Russian language in, 189-91,
12-3; Karakalpak language as, 191-4; 194-8; Western imperialism and, 6
Latinization of, 181-2; regional Uzbek Khanates, 7; Persian language
expansion of, 95-6, 109; Soviet and, 10-1
standardization of, 178-80; Uzbek Uzbek language: in Afghanistan,
language and, 180-2 33; Central Asian politics and
Turkish: as language of literacy, 10-1; development and, 256-7; in Central
Ottoman Turkish, 92 Asian republics, 208-57; Central
Turkmani: as national Afghan language, Asian republics education and media
43-6; in Uzbekistan, 198-9 and, 225-30; current and future
Turkmenistan: border politics in, 213-4; research issues, 355-7; expansion in
education and mass media language Uzbekistan of, 194-8; future trends in,
policy in, 226-30; post-Soviet 204-5, 249-56; in Kazakhstan, 245-9,
education and media in, 226-30; 253-4; in Kyrgyzstan, 237-45, 251-3;
Uzbek language in, 219n.8, 222-3, literary Uzbek, formation of, 180-2;
226-30, 254-6; Western imperialism as national Afghan language, 43-6;
and, 6 orthographic reforms, 218-9; Pashto
Turk tili/Turki language terminology, and and Persian and, 12; policy and
178-80 reform in Uszbekistan concerning,
Twelver Shiite Islamic ideology, 108-9 176-205; russification of, 182-5; Soviet
standardization of, 127n.24, 178-
Uighur language, 179 80, 199-200, 218; as state language,
Ukrainians: in Kazakhstan, 132 national independence ideology
Umar, Hazrat, 275 and, 185-9; in Tajikistan, 89, 99-100,
Umar, Mullah, 49 109, 230-7, 249-51; technology
UNESCO: Pashto literacy campaign development and, 221-2; terminology
and, 41 regarding, 222-4; in Turkmenistan,
Urdu: in Afghanistan, 100; Balochi 226-30, 254-6
language and, 320-2; British Uzbek National Cultural Center
imposition of, in India and Pakistan, (UNCC), 240
92, 103, 109, 115-6, 266, 282-315;
in early Punjab culture, 289-90; vernacularization: Pashtos status and,
emergence of, 11; as mother-tongue, 60n.13, 75-6; Persian language and,
17; in Pakistan, 13, 63-5, 100, 91-4, 115-6; in Urdu and Punjabi,
267, 271-2, 275, 279-80; Pashtos 282-315
coexistence in Pakistan with, 60-3, vocabulary reform: linguistic register
73, 883-4; Persian links to, 308-12; and, 21-4; in Uzbekistan, 189-91, 200
standard-with-dialects system and, 17;
vernacularization and, 282-3, 301-12 weak languages: Fishmans
USAID funds: Pashto textbooks characterization of, 123
produced with, 280 Weekly Worker, The (newspaper), 44
users: linguistic registers and role of, 23-4 Weish Zalmian (Awakened Youth)
Usman, Hazrat, 274 manifesto, 38-9, 44
Uzbek culture: in Kazakhstan, 132, Western hegemony: Persian status
247-9, 253-4; in Kyrgyzstan, 251-3; within, 102-9, 112
resistance to Pashto in, 37, 82 Western imperialism: Afghan language
Uzbekistan: decline of Russian language development and, 5-9; ethno-politics
proficiency in, 196-8; foreign language in Afghanistan and, 10-2; Persian
proficiency in, 200-1; Karakalpak language status and, 91, 107-12
372 index

West Pakistan: Balochistan history and, Yasmin, Nighat, 273


323 Yuan dynasty (China): Persian language
White Revolution of 1963 (Iran), 111 and, 10, 90
women: role in Pashto literacy of, 74-84 Yusuf, Muhammad, 39-41
workplace: reverse language shift in
Kazakhstan and, 139, 157-8 Zahir Shah, 36-7, 38-9, 43, 50
Zhorgenbayev, M. A., 158
X-ish language policies: in Central
Asia, 215-6

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