Punjabi in school

In Indian Punjab, Punjabi is the official language and is compulsory in schools, including in private and CBSE schools, and legislation has been passed repeatedly to enforce this because it is repeatedly not enforced.

The pressure is from parents. English-medium education is understood as the route out, to a job or to a visa, and Punjabi is treated by many families as an obstacle to that.

In Pakistani Punjab, Punjabi is not the medium of instruction at any level and is not compulsory. Urdu and English occupy the space. A hundred million people are educated in a language other than the one they speak at home.

The consequence in both places is a generation that speaks Punjabi and cannot read it, or reads it slowly and without pleasure.

A language does not die when people stop speaking it. It dies when they stop reading and writing it, because that is when it stops being able to hold anything new.

Punjabi has around 150 million speakers and is on nobody's endangered list, and its position in education is worse than that of languages with a tenth as many speakers.

Punjabi is the medium and a compulsory subject in Indian Punjab's government schools, and it competes with English medium private schooling for the same students.

Punjabi is taught as an optional subject at a small number of Pakistani universities and there is a department at Lahore. That is close to the whole institutional provision for the first language of the country's largest province.

The consequence is a very large population that speaks Punjabi and cannot write it. That is true on both sides and it is much worse on one of them.

What we don't know

  • Punjabi literacy rates as distinct from speaker numbers, which neither country reports.

Where to check this

  1. UNESCO and census language data. Census of India 2011 - Punjab district census handbooks ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Punjab Official Language Act and subsequent amendments.
  • Pakistani education policy documents.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 220 accounts in When the Water Went, the chapter of this site covering Punjab since 1947: land, water, debt and everything after.