Teaching and Learning Mother Tongue
Written By : Riaz Hussain
Our forefathers
had better relations with other lingual groups and peace in their time because
they did not have exposure to Urdu or English for one or other reason and could
not learn a language other than their mother tongues, ultimately they had to
learn other local languages in order to communicate which brought them closer
to each other.
Mother tongue
connects us to our self. We better speak to ourselves in mother tongue, we
better express our happiness, grief and sorrows to ourselves in mother tongue
and the best negotiation one can have is to one’s self and only mother tongue
in the best source of this negotiation. Any second language/ lingua franca
connect us to others but not attaches us to them; this connection is for
material purposes like business, work, politics etc. But when we speak others’
mother tongues, we join our heats and feelings which make connecting not for
material purposes but for feelings, emotions and relations. So instead of
agreeing on a lingua franca we must try to learn and speak others mother
tongues; this will build our relations and ultimately we understand not only
their needs and wishes but their feelings, emotions, self, cultures traditions
and out look towards life and we can build a better society with less hatreds
and enmities.
Gilgit
-Baltistan luckily is rich with several local language; all having unique roots
and histories and more importantly almost all of local languages spoken in GB
are totally different from each other in terms of their origin, history,
developments, speakers, vocabulary, accents etc. when we communicate with our
friend family or anyone around in our mother tongues we feel a real and natural
attachments towards them which we cannot experience in case of lingua franca.
When speakers of Brushaski, wakhi and Shina etc sit together we use
Urdu/English as a lingua franca but that does not create personal and emotional
feelings rather when we speak in our mother tongues we feel more relax and comfortable
in conversation and understanding because this makes a natural environment of
understanding instead of an artificial or a formality of sharing information
for material purposes. Even on social media when we write and speak to each
other in local languages we feel a natural and emotional attachment rather
using English or Urdu for just information sharing and answering the posts.
Being a multi
lingual society, we have a great opportunity to practice multi-lingualism in
our society and the best place is to experiment this is our educational
institutes where students of multi lingual back grounds like: shina, Brushaski,
Balti, Wakhi, Khawar, Pashtu, Panjabi etc sit together but unfortunately we
prefer to speak Urdu as lingua franca in order to do the job easy. This
approach is creating distances among many lingual groups who otherwise were
closer to each other in past when they did not speak or understand a lingua
franca.
We don’t need a
rocket science to teach mother tongue in a classroom. The teachers, textbooks,
syllabus, instructions, homework are not necessarily required. What we need to
do is very simple that our schools especially primary levels must spare a
period for local languages where students should be given free hand to speak in
their respective mother tongues. They must share local proverbs and explain
them, narrate folk tales or stories and most importantly sing songs in local
languages. This practice will provide students an opportunity to get refresh
and relax from other formal subject and more importantly they will be able to
present their own language and learn others. They get close to each other and
develop a better environment in classroom as well as a better society free of
lingual, regional , national sectarian and religious prejudices.