Re: Sindhi Language on Identity Card
**Summary of this thread:
**1) Initially, in the early days of the country for earlier generation, some people could not speak and did not know any Urdu at all. As such, it would have been imprudent to hand them national identity card in a language they did not really comprehend.
2) Even more importantly, your Identity card is supposed to correctly identify your identity and name, not distort it. Sindhi has 13 more alphabets than Urdu. Consequently, many **Sindhi sounds and surnames cannot be written correctly due to fewer number of Urdu alphabets. **Hence the particular need for national identity card in Sindhi.
3) National Identity card in Sindhi are entirely optional. And a translation in Urdu is easily available. This solves the problem of what to do should you need your Identity card in some other part of the country where Sindhi is not understood.
4) There should be no compulsion in language. Even in colonial times, bureaucrats often had to learn Sindhi and the British used Sindhi for official purposes like recordkeeping of revenue generation.
5)**It is incorrect to believe that a common language can necessarily unify people. **And trying to impose a language to promote common national identity can be disastrous. The case in point being East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, where Urdu was tried to be imposed.
6) There can be unity in diversity as well. Although, for example, leading Sindhi writers have often embraced and promoted Urdu as well, languages like Sindhi are rich and beautiful with a long distinguished history that stretch back to thousands of years. These **are also Pakistani languages and hence they enrich Pakistani culture and heritage as well. **So when people speak, use, or promote these languages, they are helping Pak by not letting the languages that together comprise collective Pakistani heritage wither away.
This can also be summarized as this:
1) Regional languages should be promoted in school and at literary level with govt support, but national language should also be given equal importance and moreover should be used on national assets including ID cards, legal system etc.
2) That some sounds are not covered by alphabets in the national language is a** very weak argument, we have passports written in english where there is no alphabets to cover for several sounds from Urdu, Sindhi or Punjabi.** If we are fine with our names written incorrectly in English (a foreign language), we should not have any problem with our own national language. We are born in Pakistan where national language is Urdu, so learning it is by default and should not be taken as compulsion.
3) A common language does HELP uniting people. If people are able to freely communicate with each other, that helps overcoming lot of misunderstandings which otherwise appear due to translation related problems. Having lived in Germany, Russia, France I do know how big a difference it makes to have one national language. Urdu should be promoted, just as English is being promoted. That East Pakistan became Bangladesh is a different story and has a combination of different geo-political reasons not relevant to this discussion. If you want, we can start a thread about that topic.
