By: Tahzeeba Bukhari
A hand went up in the seventh row, then stopped halfway. The girl glanced first at her teacher, then at the department head standing in the doorway, and let her arm drop back to the desk. Nothing was said, no rule cited, no voice raised. And yet the question, lodged in her throat, was never asked again. This is not an isolated scene. It is a pattern that recent monitoring by Pakistani press-freedom and digital-rights bodies has documented across newsrooms, classrooms and public offices — a quiet, undramatic narrowing of who gets to speak, and about what.
We have always measured language by what gets spoken aloud: phonemes, syntax, the shape of a sentence on the tongue. But in a society where power collects in a handful of hands, silence stops being an absence and becomes a language of its own, with its own grammar. Who is permitted to stay silent, and in front of whom; whose silence reads as deference and whose reads as insolence waiting to happen — children absorb this unwritten syllabus long before they learn to conjugate a verb, in what sociolinguists studying institutional socialization would recognize as habitus quietly taking shape.
Pierre Bourdieu gave this phenomenon its sharpest vocabulary. Speech, he argued, is not merely a vehicle for thought but a form of capital — one strand of what he more broadly called cultural capital, the unspoken currencies that, alongside wealth and connections, decide whose words are treated as worth hearing. Walk into any newsroom or university department here and this rationing is visible in real time. The higher the rank, the more license to speak; the lower the rank, the more silence is simply expected. A junior lecturer does not question a senior professor’s findings in a faculty meeting. A young reporter does not query the editorial line handed down from above. Each understands, without being told, that this particular capital has not yet been earned — and by the time it might be, most have grown fluent in the very silence they once resented.
Out of this arrangement, two distinct silences emerge, and though the literature rarely separates them, they function differently. The first is born of fear: it knows what speech costs here and has calculated that the price is too high. The second is born of exhaustion: it spoke once, went unheard, and stopped trying. The first still carries a pulse, because fear is only rational where a voice is still considered dangerous enough to punish. The second is graver, because an institution that can no longer hear its sharpest minds has already written its own decline — it has merely not been read aloud yet.
The mechanism by which such silence is manufactured has changed considerably since Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman first described their propaganda model, which traced media silence to ownership structures and institutional filters. That analysis still holds in newsrooms shaped by advertiser pressure and corporate ownership. But a newer, faster mechanism has since layered itself on top: what scholars of the modern attention economy now call the weaponisation of sheer volume. A serious question does not need to be banned when it can simply be buried — under a trending hashtag, a celebrity scandal, an algorithmically amplified distraction — so effectively that no one need notice a silencing has occurred at all, since everyone, on the surface, appears to be talking constantly.
This silence does not live only online. It sits, quietly, in the mind of the writer before a single word reaches the page. A sentence is drafted, reread, and reconsidered: will this survive editorial scrutiny? More often than not, the answer arrives before it is even consciously asked, and the writer’s own hand does the cutting. Surveys by Pakistani digital-rights researchers on self-censorship among journalists and academics have repeatedly found this internalised caution to be more pervasive than any formal restriction — a private tribunal that requires no external enforcer, because every writer has learned to preside over one themselves.
The same silence wears a gentler mask in our seminar rooms, where dissent is formally welcomed and quietly starved. “That’s a valuable point — we’ll take it under consideration” is, for all its courtesy, a door closing softly. Nothing is taken under consideration. Time simply passes until the person who raised the question grows too tired to raise it twice.
What such an environment eventually produces is a generation rich in words and comparatively poor in meaning. Young people today write constantly, publicly, incessantly — yet the willingness to risk something in that writing, the trait that has always distinguished genuine thought from performance, is measurably eroding, as more than one recent study of online discourse has noted. They have learned to write safely: sentences that offend no one, please the algorithm, and draw no institutional attention. This is not the death of language. It is a slower affliction, one that hollows out its spirit while leaving the vocabulary perfectly, deceptively intact.
Resistance to this kind of silence rarely begins with a manifesto. It begins with a teacher telling her class that a question is not disrespect but the surest evidence that learning is taking place. It begins with an editor telling a columnist: do not self-censor before you reach me; bring me the sentence, and we will sharpen it together, but do not remove the truth from it in advance. It begins with one person, in one room, choosing to interrupt their own particular silence — not with a slogan, but with a plain, honest question.
Years later, that same student stands where her teacher once stood. When a hand hesitates in the seventh row, she does not let it fall. “Go on and ask,” she says. “No one is punished for a question in this room.” The hand hangs there a moment, as if genuinely undecided — and then, slowly, it rises again. Perhaps that is precisely how a grammar this old finally begins, one hand at a time, to change.
👉The columnist is a research scholar of English Linguistics at the University of Gujrat.