Regional Language

Few days back I was discussing with my friend Noor Muhammad regarding the regional languages. Since he belongs from the Northern Areas of the country he told me there are around seven (might not have remembered exactly) different languages in the NWFP. Some of them have been evolved from Persian, Arabic and other languages thus they are relatively very different from each other.
Belonging for the same area Noor is a master of his language but also knows few more language because he has lived few years in the hostels with students from other background. He told me even living in the North it is uncommon to see someone understand the other language that is spoken there in the North only.

We both arrived at the conclusion that having so many languages in every different region is troublesome sometime because it is just leading to communication gap, lack of understanding, hurdle to diversity and pluralism, problem in development and growth of tourism. We said that learning, respecting and preserving the local dialect, regional languages are very important but the locals should also be fluent and comfortable in some other very popular language that is understood everywhere which could be as in this case could be English or Urdu.

The event that made me write this bog is the news in DAWN Newspaper of February 11, 2007 of a woman who was found after 15 years (hope memory working well). The story was like that around 15 years ago she went to nearby town for purchasing some goods on way back she sat on some wrong bus. The bus reached some other town where nobody could understand her dialect and they made her in the intention of helping made her sit to a wrong bus again which lead to her to some other town. In this town again nobody could understand her language and then she had to live many years begging. For the last few years she had been living in some orphan house where few days back few students came to volunteer from her village who found her singing their language. They were astonished and asked her how you know the language. This made them know the whole story they communicated this to her family. Her son who was 7 years when he last saw his mother came to pick her.