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Purpose of the report
The purpose of this report is to provide
some background to the presence of Pahari language in Birmingham and its
implications for service provision to its speakers
Background
Pahari is the name of the language (some
would say it was a dialect!) which is spoken by people who originate from Azad
Kashmir. The language is sometimes described as Mirpuri as many, though not
all, of its speakers in Birmingham actually come from the Mirpur District (see
Annex A for further details)
The spoken language of nearly all Kashmiris
in the UK is Pahari, when it comes to reading, some read Urdu but many are not
able to read their mother tongue. Statistically, it is recognised that over 80%
of the local ‘Pakistani’ community are actually from this disputed part of the
Indian sub-continent. To put some figures on it, the recent census showed the
community to form over 10% of the City of Birmingham. In Education, over 18% of
the school population are speakers of the language, thus making them the
largest non-white community.
Many British decision-makers, in an attempt
to make services accessible, have invested in interpreting and translation
services. However the languages offered to people originating from South Asia
have been limited to Urdu, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, and Gujrati. There has been
little reference made to Kashmiri community or the Pahari language; instead
decision-makers have incorrectly tended to use Urdu or Punjabi to communicate with
Britain's Kashmiri community. In such instances, members of the Kashmiri
community unable to communicate in English have had to settle with another
group's language. A main factor for not providing Pahari as a language is
because there has been no official recognition of the Kashmiri community
residing in Britain nor their language and communication needs.
Provision (or lack of) in Pahari
Lack of provision in Pahari has had a
significant impact in the way in which services have been delivered. There are
many examples of situations where people have not been able to understand what
was being communicated to them in English nor in Urdu or Punjabi. These
situations have included the law courts, schools and health services.
However, it is not all doom and gloom!
There are isolated examples of good practice where service providers have
recognised the linguistic needs of the Kashmiris community. These have included
the British High Commission in Islamabad who were quick to pick up the
different language needs of the community and employed Pahari speaking
interpreters. This then was followed up by the BBC world and Asian radio
networks. In 1990s a Pahari magazine called Chitka was launched from the North.
For a few years now the BBC Asian Network
has been broadcasting a twice-weekly Mirpuri programme; Radio XL has a similar
programme.
There are now quite a few Pahari writers in
Britain who have had their works published.
Example of the Leeds Health Trust
A number of service providers have slowly
begun to recognise the need to provide information in Pahari. The above Trust
carried out a survey of its patients language needs in 1999 and found that:
The Kashmiri community was the principle
community which needed interpretation
The trust had very little knowledge of the
Kashmiri community and it relied on interpreter’s advice.
Although the interpreters pretended they
could speak the community’s language, when they were formally tested it was
discovered that they could not speak Pahari
The Kashmiri community, not realising their
right to demand interpreters, enlisted the support of their school-age children
who often missed school in order to help their parents out.
Leeds City Council and the health trusts
have since recognised the Kashmiri community and Pahari language and have
included Kashmiri and Pahari in their monitoring system.
Education
The under-achievement of Pakistani children
is well documented. However, in our view if the problems of the Kashmiri
children are even worse than those who are true Pakistanis.
There are many examples of ‘good’ practice
where schools have at least tried to accommodate the needs of Kashmiri
children. Sadly, even in these situations it is wrongly assumed that the
children speak Urdu, thus even that communication fails to reach them.
There are isolated examples where LEAs have
begun the recognise the Kashmiri community and target its projects at them.
Telford and Wrekin LEA are one such example. They have a project which is
targeted at the Mirpuri-speaking community.
Local education departments as well as the
DfES do from time to time produce advice, information and guidance for parents.
This usually starts off in complex and extremely technical English. It is then
translated in to complex and technical Urdu; to read it one needs to be a
graduate. Sadly, the Pahari speaking Kashmiri community yet again misses out.
Occasionally, schools enlist the support of interpreters in order to help at
parents’ meetings. Even here there is no systematic way of making sure that they
communicate effectively with Pahari speakers, many of whom are illiterate
mothers.
Such none-engagement and misinformation
give rise to confusion and mistrust and create a sense of alienation and
marginalisation for the Kashmiri community. This results in none-attendance at
parents' evenings and other important education meetings with the result of
parents not playing their role in their children’s education which can often be
critical in the process.
The problem also carries on into Adult
Education. Here many of the learners are being taught English through the
medium of Urdu, both of which are foreign to them. This invariably impedes
their progress.
The situation in Birmingham
We are aware that there is recognition by
Birmingham LEA that the educational achievements of the pupils from the local Pakistani
community are low as illustrated by the production of the Asian heritage
Achievement Action Plan and allocation of the Ethnic Minority Achievement Grant
to set up a research project aimed at underachieving Pakistani pupils. It has
also set up a Pakistani Advisory Group to help address the specific needs of
the community.
In our view, the problem of
underachievement by Kashmiri children is made worse through misdiagnosis and
lack of proper communication with parents. Many of the schools do provide
classroom assistants and others who try to reach the children through their
mother tongue. Sadly, even these fail to achieve their desired outcome, as
often they are Urdu and not Pahari speakers.
Recommendations and issues for
consideration
Monitoring and recognition: Birmingham
education department should recognise the Kashmiri community and Pahari
language and monitor for their presence in its schools.
Auditing of the provision: there should be
auditing of the needs and the provision currently being made; the numbers of
Pahari speakers amongst the staff; their competence etc
Awareness and training: in our view there
is a great deal of confusion about Kashmiri community and their needs and the
Pahari language. It is essential that steps are taken to raise the awareness of
all staff within the Authority
Information for parents: there is an urgent
need to raise parents awareness of the education system around things like
homework, school attendance, extended holidays, need for extra reading, leisure
activities which complement schooling and career planning for their children.
This needs to be through audio/video tapes. (Please let’s have no more
expensively produced glossy written information which experience has shown that
many of the parents cannot read.)
Accreditation: opportunities need to be
provided for school pupils to have their competence in Pahari accredited
through appropriate examinations.
Employment opportunities: steps should be taken to highlight
the many employment opportunities which have begun to appear for Pahari
speakers in a range of frontline service areas. These are present in all
sectors such as education, health, finance, sales including tele-sales and
voluntary/community organisations, wherever knowledge of customers language can
add value.
Annex A
Pahari is a language of the Indo-Aryan
family of languages. It drives its name
from Pahar meaning" hills and mountains " for it is spoken over a
very large area starting from Nepal and running throughout the foothills of the
Himalayas, in the Hamachal Pardesh (Northern Indian province), the Indian
controlled part of the state of Jammu Kashmir, the Pakistani controlled Jammu
Kashmir and through out the Northern Pakistan, up to River Indus and Chitral.
The language spoken in Pothwar in Northern Punjab is by all means Pahari
language, deriving its so-called name from the Pothwari region which consists
of four districts, Rawalpindi, Jhelum, Chakwal and Attock. It is called
Pothwari in this region for much the same reason as the Pahari spoken in the
district Mirpur (especially in Britain) is some time referred to as Mirpuri. A
great deal of work is being done in Pahari amongst the Kashmiri community in
Britain
Pahari like many other languages of the
world has seen rise and fall in the course of history. Its written historical
story is as old and as complex as the language itself. Pahari was initially
written in Landa script which is a form of Sharda which was invented by
Buddhists.
It can be said that arguably Sharda Pahari
is the oldest written language in South Asia and it has contributed in
developing other languages old and modern including Urdu.
Pahari and other similar South Asian
languages are not taught in the
Classroom but are very much alive within
the people and overlap a lot
through Population physical contact and
interaction.
Although, the language is available in a
written form and has its own alphabet, many of its speakers who are able to
read, actually read Urdu. This complicates it somewhat when it comes to data
gathering because many of its speakers, when asked to record their mother
tongue, put down Urdu.
Post-1947, Pahari, like Punjabi, has
suffered from the division of India and the written forms got divided too in
the shapes of Shah Mukhi and Gurmukhi broadly speaking. Punjabi seemed to have
made some progress on the both sides of the border but Pahari in Jammu Kashmir
got further suppressed through this neo- colonial status between Hindi and
Persian scripts, However, recently there has been efforts made on both sides of
Kashmir to revive the language and as a result of that last ten years has
witnessed many books being produced this includes poetry, prose, short stories,
novels, nursery rhymes and people's folk stories. These are mainly written in
Persian script.
Similarly 99% of the Kashmiris emigrated
from the districts of Mirpur, Kotli, Bhimber, Pounch, Mehendar, Muzafrabad,
Rajori, Jammu and Noshara, around 1% from the Valley, Gilgit, Baltistan and
Ladakh/Kirgil. Thus nearly all of the people of the state of Jammu and Kashmir
and northern India and Pakistan in Britain speak Pahari. This arguably makes
Pahari the largest language in Britain after English.
Most social commentators write that in
Britain 80% to 90% of the so-called Pakistanis are in fact of Kashmiri origin.
Professor Nazir Tabbasam in his paper A Phonological Analysis of Pahari
language (a research paper written under the supervision of J.M.Y. Simpson, the
senior lecturer in the department of English language, University of Glasgow),
writes
"People who immigrated to UK on
Pakistani passports, 80% were of Kashmiri origin. They are quite distinct from
the rest of the south Asians not only culturally and linguistically but
ethnically too".
Dr Tahir Abbas, of Birmingham University,
one of the few Kashmiri academics in Britain, sates:
“There are 747,000 Pakistanis in Britain. I
estimate that about 80% of Pakistanis are from the Mirpuri region - which means
that over half a million people are Mirpuri speakers in this country. In
Birmingham, there are 100, 000 Pakistanis - one in ten of the population.
Therefore, with 80-90,000 speaking Pahari they are by far the second largest
language group in the City.
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