Who Gets to Sound Educated?

BY : Syeda Tahzeeba Bukhari
​Every selection board has a moment when the room quietly changes its mind. The candidate has been answering for perhaps four minutes. The answers are sound. Then he says “skedule” where the chairman says “shedyool”, or drops an article, or reaches for an Urdu word mid-sentence and apologises for it, and a pen moves across a notepad. Nobody announces anything. The questions that follow become shorter and a little more patient, the way one speaks to a guest who has turned out not to be family.
​I am describing a composite, not a single afternoon. But anyone who has sat on either side of that table will know him: the young man from a tehsil town, first in his family with a master’s degree, who knows his subject better than the panel suspects and is about to lose to someone who knows it slightly less and says it more smoothly. The verdict, when it comes over tea, is never “he was poor”. It is “sharp boy, but weak in communication skills. Won’t represent us well.” Put a young woman in his chair and the verdict acquires a second layer, about her tone, her confidence and whether she will “suit” the office.
​That phrase about communication deserves more suspicion than it gets. Communication is what happens between two people. If the panel understood every word he said, then communication took place, and what they are marking down is something else: how the words sounded, and what the sound told them about his school, his street and his father’s occupation.
​We treat education as a condition of the head and test it as a condition of the mouth. A degree can be framed and hung on a wall, yet no one asks to see it in conversation. What gets inspected is the ear’s first impression, which arrives in seconds and is almost never revised. Sociolinguists have said for half a century that no accent is more logical than another, and one hardly needs a doctorate to see it. A Punjabi-inflected English and a convent-school English can deliver exactly the same sentence. The difference is that one arrives with an invoice attached, and the speaker is expected to pay it privately.
​The invoice has a history. Article 251 of the 1973 Constitution required arrangements to be made for Urdu to replace English as the official language within fifteen years. That deadline passed in 1988. In 2015 the Supreme Court reminded the state of the obligation and ordered it to act. Little visible changed in the superior courts, the statute book or the civil service examination. English stayed where it was, at the gate, checking credentials. The Federal Public Service Commission’s own examiners’ reports have repeatedly lamented the quality of candidates’ English expression. They seldom ask what sort of system produces that result, or whom it was built to produce it for.
​Think about what two candidates have actually been through. One spent twelve years being taught in English by people who also dreamed in it. The other spent those years being taught about English by people who had rarely needed to use it, from textbooks printed in a language neither teacher nor pupil spoke at home. Then both sit the same paper, are interviewed by the same panel, and are measured with the same ruler. We call this merit. It is closer to a handicap race in which the handicaps have been hidden from the judges.
​The ruler is hard to challenge because it has no name. Nobody says, “We are declining you on grounds of class.” We say the candidate lacked polish, or presence, or confidence. These are comfortable words for a prejudice that would embarrass us if stated plainly. And the candidate, who often accepts the verdict, goes home and concludes that the fault is his. He enrols in a spoken-English academy. He watches dramas with the subtitles on. The walls of every Pakistani city carry the same promise, “Learn English in 30 days”, and behind it a small, hopeful industry built on the belief that a mouth can be repaired.
​It would be dishonest to stop there, because the other side has a case too. English really does open things. It opens journals, scholarships, software manuals and jobs in Dubai, and it is condescending for the comfortable to tell the poor they can do without what the comfortable already own. Young people who want the language are not dupes. The trouble begins when we attach a moral grade to it, so that a stumble in syntax is read as a stumble in character.
​Nor should Urdu speakers feel smug. The ear that mocks the village English speaker is often the same ear that corrects a Saraiki or Pashto speaker’s Urdu and calls his accent rough. Urdu has its own aristocracy of pronunciation, its own idea of the correct, largely borrowed from a few cities that happened to write the dictionaries. A man who gets a consonant wrong can be corrected at a wedding by someone half his age. The hierarchy did not begin with English. English merely added a second staircase to a building that already had one.
​Meanwhile the cost of all this listening for the wrong thing is paid by the institutions themselves. Somewhere a department needs a statistician and hires the better talker. Somewhere a clinic needs a doctor who can explain a diagnosis in the patient’s own language, and is offered one who is splendid at conferences. When a panel says a candidate will not represent the organisation well, it is worth asking who, exactly, the organisation imagines itself to be.
​What would it take to do better? Less than we pretend. Panels could be required to score the substance of an answer before its delivery, and to write one line of reasoning beside any mark awarded for “communication”. Advertisements could state honestly whether a post truly needs polished English, as a diplomatic posting might, and stop demanding it from posts that do not. Universities could let a first-year student build his argument in whichever language he can build it best, and teach him the examiners’ language alongside, rather than punishing him for not owning it on arrival. None of this lowers standards. It moves them to where they belong.
​The harder change is private, and no rule will make it. It is the habit of the listener who flinches at a flattened vowel, who finishes the sentence of a hesitating speaker, who decides within a minute that the person across the table is lesser. That habit was learned, and what is learned can be dropped. So here is a small exercise for the next time you sit on a panel, or simply in a room where someone struggles to say what he means. Write down what he said, not how he said it. Read the page afterwards. It is an uncomfortable test, because the page is very often better than the performance you were about to mark him on.
👉The columnist is a research scholar of English Linguistics at the University of Gujrat.