Maan boli or mother tongue is the earliest struggle of a child to start the communication process. After achieving some proficiency it is time to learn some of the other languages spoken around him or her. It is such a pleasure to ask someone Pukhto poi? And he asks Sangi ra, and you quip Nakhre ma kava. It immediately creates a sense of intimacy. Similarly, Sindhi and Baloch friends may form an immediate bond.

When Pakistanis meet abroad, they usually start their conservation in Urdu. When they learn about their common ethnicity, they are overjoyed and often switch to their mother tongue. Apart from Urdu, which is almost the lingua franca of Pakistan, English, too, is very much a part of our culture. We need to retain it as a compulsory subject after schooling the children in mother tongue in primary classes. Our students are able to compete abroad thereby getting admissions in some of the highest seats of learning. Some of the best brains of Pakistani origin abroad are mostly there because of ‘brain drain’. But that is another story that needs another column.

Some people freely use words and even whole sentences from English while speaking Urdu, which is not right. Such bilingualism is noticeable mostly among children enrolled in expensive private schools. It is not literary expression, rather a bad trend. Other sections of the so-called elite, too, try to impress those around them by resorting to the use of English language. This may be due to globalisation and the use of internet searches. Perhaps since the days of pictography, for the first time, we are using an international parlance in the form of emojis.

Languages evolve continuously to conform to the new trends and to cope with the new requirements. All universally used words from various languages that have become part of our parlance need to be retained e.g. school, bus stop, TV, computer; the list is endless. Door darshan might sound melodious, but TV, or television, is the universally accepted word. Parhakuan da kotha for school, as suggested by some Sikhs friends, would be too much. Purifying a national language is mainly a Third World complex. It was witnessed in the Pahlavi Iran and in the Kemalist Turkey. In Turkey, there is a campaign for Oz Turkce that avoids all words of Arabic and Persian origin and seeks to replace those with words from Central Asian, even Chinese Turkic languages. In 1949, in the wake of communist take-over, many Chinese of Uygur origin, initially came to Pakistan. They were later welcomed by Turkey and given the nationality because of their ‘purer’ Turkish. During their stay in Pakistan, they had learnt Urdu reasonably well. They made karakoli caps and leather gloves and shoes. Some of them opened Chinese food restaurants. When they shifted to Turkey, I met many of them in Istanbul. It was such a delight to hold conservations with them in Urdu. They had become very rich by plying trade in sheepskin jackets. Mostly Hindu merchants in the USA came to Istanbul to purchase these.

Mustafa Kemal’s adoption of Latin alphabets has been a subject of controversy. It effectively deprived the new generation of their rich classical literature. I realised this when I was given a special permission to read their manuscripts in Topkapi library while researching on the times of Murad III for my doctoral thesis. Now “Osmanlica” has been introduced as a language, because the current Turkish leadership considers it a great loss that the new generation cannot read even the names of their ancestors when visiting their graves. Yet, Turkey was able to achieve almost 100 percent literacy and the highest education in all subjects including medicine and engineering is imparted in their own language. At the high school level, students are given the option of choosing a foreign language; it can be English, Italian, French or German. All doctoral candidates have to acquire proficiency in another language so that they can read more references books in the original language.

Facility for learning another foreign language is available at Oriental college, Lahore, where one can easily enroll in the evening classes. The PILAC (Punjab Institute of Language, Art and Culture) also offers classes in Mandarin Chinese. Turkish is perhaps the easiest to learn for most Pakistanis. It is mainly due to the fact that the word “Urdu” itself comes from the word ‘Ordu’ which means army. Its grammar too is similar. Many words from Persian and Arabic too are common. Yet many words need to be used with great caution because they denote altogether different meanings. For example, tecaviz is not encroachment, it means rape; sohbet means to ‘bed’ with someone; aadet is not habit, it means mensuration. Sik(h) is a male gland. When India invaded Sikkim, there was an uproar in all of Turkey not for any sympathy with Sikkim but the very headlines in the press was taken to be obnoxious: Hindistan Sikimi yedi. Koluma girme, demis biri. Ben namehrimin koluna girmem. The next remark was: Ilaki beni rahat birak.

Since the best fruits in the world are found in Turkey, they would ask you about the best Pakistani fruit. You must name mango in English only but strictly refrain from calling it aam. Here are many seemingly resembling words having different means. Celik means steel while cilek means strawberry. Esek, Esik and Isik are rather confusing. To start with C, S, and soft G should be clearly differentiated. The rest is easier to pronounce. The Turks are very proud of their language, country and history. Once you converse with them in their own language, they go out of their way to help their Pakistani Arkadas, which means brother. Landing at Yesilkoy airport is more like homecoming. The same is true of any foreigner visiting Pakistan, if he communicates with us in Urdu. Mr Makko from Ireland, after retiring from fire brigade, opted to stay back in Pakistan. He lived at Infantry Road, and married a local Christian lady. He knew near-perfect Urdu and cycled around the city. He told me to get a certificate from the Fire Department in case of a fire incident, you never know years later one might need a certain document destroyed in an inferno.

My father learnt Bengali and was greeted by the Bengalis when he visited the then East Pakistan. During the 1960s there was a regular Bengali teaching programme on the newly introduced PTV. It was such a delight to learn that many words were common between the two languages with only a slight difference in pronunciations. This Bengali lessons should have continued. I don’t know if they relayed a similar programme from Dhaka to reach Urdu.

Italiano to is quite easy to learn. One can make oneself comfortable within a few weeks of stay there. It has many Urdu words. Numericals like due, tre, sette, otto, nove seem to have come from gypsy sources. Its pronunciation is very easy because it has equal stress over all the alphabets and there are no silent letters. Phonetically it is more like Punjabi. Its grammar, too, is regular. Much of the vocabulary has Latin origins, shared by English. They were much delighted when I tried to express myself in rudimentary Italiano. Come va? would only bring smiles: Non sto male. My Italian teacher Dr Butler, a Swiss, was equally well versed in Urdu. Sayin Muharran Guzeldir, teacher of Turkish language at the Oriental College, acquired reasonable knowledge of Urdu in spite of the script divide.

Learning another language is bringing humanity closer and creating universal brotherhood.

The column is dedicated to Dr RA Butler.