KP govt urged to own all languages

PESHAWAR: A literary and cultural organization, Gandhara Hindko Board, has urged the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government to own and give due attention to all the languages spoken in the province.

In a statement issued here on Sunday, the general secretary of the board and research scholar of the Hindko language, Muhammad Ziauddin, said Ethnologue is the world’s most comprehensive catalogue of languages that provides information on the languages of the world. He said the 2022 edition of Ethnologue says 77 languages are spoken in Pakistan.

He said the KP alone is home to 30 languages, adding preservation and promotion of all languages is the constitutional right of their speakers.

Ziauddin, who has to his credit a number of Hindko language books and publications, complained that smaller languages in KP were receiving insufficient attention at the official level.

He said Hindko, Seraiki, Khowar, Kohistani, Gujari, Torwali and other languages were spoken and understood in KP as well.

The literatus believed that smaller languages were not being given the required official attention due to, what he deplored were, the chauvinistic tendencies of a handful of individuals serving the public sector bodies. Citing one such example, he said a big activity was arranged recently in Peshawar where Hindko and other smaller languages were totally ignored. He lamented that the representatives of the lesser spoken languages were not invited to the programme which had been arranged with public funding.

“Such discriminatory practices do not auger well for the national unity and the KP government should discourage such practices in the future,” stressed Ziauddin who has overseen publications in various languages and hosted several conferences to highlight the importance of native languages and the cultures associated with them.