Current Events
Punjabi Faces The Axe In Britain
SARIKA SHARMA
Exam boards in the United Kingdom plan to drop qualifications in Punjabi along with other languages. While the issue has worried scholars, it has become a political issue in the current British election season.
Punjabi is the third most spoken language in the country after English and Polish according to 2011 census.
If exam boards AQA and OCR go ahead as planned and discontinue GCSE's (secondary school level) and A level (college level) exams, foreign languages such as Polish, Punjabi, Gujarati, Bengali, Modern Hebrew, Turkish and Portuguese could face the axe.
Currently, Punjabi is an exam option that students can take at GCSE/A-level. Usually it is not offered at schools, but in many cases, like in Newcastle, one can take the exam at a gurdwara. Generally, a GCSE/A-level has to be offered officially through a certified exam board, main ones being AQA and OCR.
Punjabi scholars are wary of the development.
Dr Navtej Kaur Purewal, Deputy Director of South Asia Institute, SOAS University of London, says the move is a sign of the times.
"Modern languages are still widely associated with European languages such as German and French, while languages such as Punjabi are given lesser status and viewed as community languages. The irony is that in the 2011 Census, Punjabi was the 3rd most widely spoken language in the UK, having dropped from being 2nd in the 2001 Census due to the rise of Polish which has overtaken Punjabi," she says.
Navtej insists that this warrants more support of such languages and recognition of their presence in the UK. Even as she somewhere blames it on a trend amongst aspirational South Asian parents and students to value English more than languages of ancestry, she says the decline in uptake of Punjabi and other South Asian languages at GCSE and A level should be addressed by the examinations system, not viewed as a sign of a dwindling market.
Founder member of the Punjab Research Group, Prof Eleanor Nessbit, who is also professor emeritus University of Warwick, says it is sad that in a country in which the majority are monoglot English-users, members of bi- and multi-lingual minorities are not protesting more loudly at the reported disappearance of public examinations in their heritage languages.
"If families, schools and community organizations, such as gurdwaras, had pulled together to ensure that children were studying their 'mother-tongues', the sheer number of enrolments for GCSE (General Certificate of Secondary Education) examinations would have ensured their survival to that level and possibly, beyond this, to A level. Sadly, many young British South Asians never get beyond a very limited fluency in spoken Gujarati, Punjabi, etc.," says she who studied Hindi for O and A level.
Prof Eleanor too says it is regrettable that language classes and qualifications that could have helped bridge communities are under threat.
Dr Shinder Singh Thandi, principal lecturer in economics at Coventry University in the UK, says the issue of termination of some minority languages from the curriculum was announced by the department of education quite a while ago and some Punjabi teachers had raised the issue with their gurdwaras to follow up but nothing was done.
"It is worth pointing out that many Punjabi children only do Punjabi up to GCSE level and very few continue to the Advanced level. So in a way there is not going to be a significant change as most Punjabi children had already chosen to opt out of it," he says and adds that the culling of some languages does not surprise him as there wasn't much uptake and cost of offering them were high.
Also students aspiring to go to University focus on only 3 Advanced Level subjects which are regarded highly by universities in their admission criteria and these are usually science subjects and some core subjects such as economics and history.
Meanwhile, the Labour party has given it political colour. Punjabi MP from Ealing Southall, Virendra Sharma wrote to Tristram Hunt, shadow secretary of state for education, to raise awareness of the terrible threat the Tory government was posing to language A level qualifications.
He wrote: "This Tory government has chaotically changed the curriculum at a time when languages are needed most by British business. Communities thrive in Britain where people are bi-lingual, providing a link to their past while embracing modern Britain."
Following this, Hunt last week, spoke to the House of Commons and called for the education secretary to resolve the mess.
Dr Shinder Singh says it is not surprising that this should be raised as a political issue by the Labour Party as they are facing a challenge in holding on to the ethnic minority, especially Punjabi community votes.
THE CONSEQUENCE
Dr Navtej Kaur says that even if the languages will be withdrawn from the curriculum, these languages will remain spoken and taught at home and in large numbers without the literacy and expertise which a formalized system or learning can and has provided.
"At present, most students taking the exams in Punjabi are doing so outside of school in any case, for instance in community centres or gurdwaras. We should be mobilizing for these languages to be recognized by schools, especially with considerable South Asian populations, to have better infrastructure. Instead, they are withdrawing them altogether. It will be a tremendous loss if these languages disappear from the curriculum," she says.
[Courtesy: Times of India. Edited for sikhchic.com]
April 8, 2015
Conversation about this article
1: Oliver Smith (United Kingdom), April 08, 2015, 5:45 PM.
The Conservatives are playing a double game. On one hand they are trying to win over the Sikh community with promises of a Sikh regiment and with the recent change to turban-related regulations. On the other, they are trying to win the hard-liners back from the arms of UKIP. Which set of voters is more important to them? Just look back at the sham of the Amritsar enquiry, the 'go home' vans and the racist UKBA frisking to find out.