Inter-ethnic marriages’ significance highlighted

PESHAWAR: The Pakistan Institute of Development Economics (PIDE) new research has highlighted the significance of inter-ethnic marriages in Pakistan.

The research findings from the PIDE BASICS 1 survey indicate that such marriages play a crucial role in promoting assimilation, social cohesion, and stability, thereby blurring tensions arising from ethnic differences, said a press release here on Sunday.

Language, closely tied to ethnic background, has a profound impact on personal identities, which can sometimes be divisive and undermine unity within the larger identity, it added.

The survey employed a new approach to measure ethnic exogamy and homogamy by asking respondents three questions related to the ethnic backgrounds of their parents and the language spoken in their everyday lives.

The results revealed that only a small proportion (1.5%) of marriages in Pakistan are ethnically exogamous, indicating a strong trend of intra-ethnic marriages. However, slight variations exist among different languages, with Urdu, Potohari, Brahui, and Brushaski showing slightly higher rates of exogamy. Additionally, gender differences were observed in languages such as Urdu, Shina, and Kashmiri.

The study examined the language preferences of children in families with different ethnic backgrounds and found that when parents share the same ethnicity, 92.3 per cent of children spoke the same language as their parents.

However, children of exogamous parents exhibited a mixed pattern, with some languages influenced more by the mother’s language and others by the father’s language. The findings shed light on the role of inter-ethnic marriages and language dynamics in Pakistan’s social fabric. The latest research findings revealed that to capture the prevalence of ethnic exogamy, or homogamy, in Pakistan, the PIDE BASICS 1 survey asked questions in a new way to give a better insight into the issue.

In most surveys, language is captured by asking the respondents about the language they speak, and the response to this question is taken as representing their ethnic background.

But the question is misleading, and the results of the BASICS survey confirm this distortion in interpretation. The findings of the study revealed that only 1.5 per cent of the marriages in Pakistan are ethnically exogamous.

Ethnic exogamy is more prevalent in urban Pakistan (1.9%) than in rural but only by a very small margin,” the release said.