CONSTRUCTING THE NATIONAL LANGUAGE: A CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF URDU LANGUAGE POLICY DISCOURSE IN PAKISTAN’S NATIONAL EDUCATION POLICIES (1959–2018)

Abstract

Pakistan's National Education Policies (NEPs) have always made Urdu as the symbolic pillar of the national identity but at the same time failed to remove the English from power. This study adopted qualitative research design. The publically available policy documents were collected through purposive sampling. The principle of this research is to explore the Urdu ideology, using the three dimensional framework for Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) of Fairclough (1992, 2003) by analyzing seven NEP documents covering the period 1959-2018. In addition to the ideological square as conceptualized by Van Dijk (2008), the analysis used the theory of linguistic capital by Bourdieu (1991) as a supplementary framework, and four discursive strategies emerge: nationalist legitimation, promissory deferral, exclusion of elites and symbolic erasure of regional languages. The study reveals that the use of NEP discourse constructs Urdu as a language of morality and unity and English as the language of economic opportunity, reflecting a set of discourse for marginalization of speakers of more than sixty indigenous languages.