Silenced Tongues: Linguistic Erasure, Strategic Silence, and the Politics of Recognition in Pakistan
In the linguistic theater of Pakistan, silence is not an absence—it is a strategy. Across courts, ministries, and media, what is unsaid often shapes national identity as powerfully as what is declared. The suppression of certain voices, languages, and identities is not merely accidental; it is sustained through structured omission, bureaucratic misnaming, and strategic vagueness. Aaron Stibbe’s framework in The Stories We Live By helps us interrogate this silence as an active narrative, where ideologies operate not only through what is articulated, but through the silences that mask dissent and difference.
Religious, linguistic minorities are erased not by overt attack alone but by linguistic non-recognition. In official documentation, legal decrees, and even school textbooks, their identity is buried beneath euphemism or bureaucratic silence. “Non-Muslim” or 'Punjabi' becomes a blanket term, while constitutional clauses strip them of self-definition. Here, erasure becomes law.
A similar dynamic plays out in ethnic and linguistic domains. The Punjabi-Saraiki dynamic offers a case in point. For decades, Saraiki—rich with literary heritage and spoken by millions—has been treated as a dialect of Punjabi, rather than as an independent language. This classification is not linguistic but political: it functions to dilute demands for recognition, resources, and representation. Poor, simple, helpless, economically backward Saraiki speakers are systematically denied their linguistic identity and subsumed under the Punjabi label—an imposition maintained through the strikingly brazen collusion of Punjab-led political elites and state institutions. Despite protests, publications, and a growing body of Saraiki scholarship, state institutions, censuses, and educational systems persist in this categorization. The Pothwari identity, by contrast, has been quietly absorbed, its speakers less vocal in protest but equally invisible in national policy.
This erasure is further maintained through “ideologies of the unsaid.” These are not passive gaps but purposeful exclusions that construct a coherent narrative of national unity by refusing to acknowledge linguistic plurality. The myth of a monolithic Urdu-Punjabi core subtly sidelines Balochi, Brahui, Hindko, and others—rendering diversity unintelligible within the dominant discourse of the state.
Judicial discourse exemplifies this silence. In landmark verdicts that reshape national politics, courts often refer to “unconstitutional actions” or “technical violations” without naming the agents responsible. This strategic ambiguity protects institutional legitimacy while allowing systemic injustices to persist. The syntax of silence operates through vague modality, passive constructions, and buried agents—a grammar of plausible deniability.
Media, too, participates in this architecture. Coverage of sectarian attacks frequently omits the names of perpetrators or downplays ideological affiliations. Victims are rendered into numbers, and perpetrators into faceless “elements.” Here, silence is not neutrality—it is complicity.
Yet within these silences, resistance grows. Saraiki poets and linguists continue to insist on linguistic dignity. Writers, feminist legal scholars, and regional journalists work to articulate the unspoken. By naming what the state leaves unnamed, they contest not only policy but the entire narrative ecology of the nation.
Pakistan’s future lies not in suppressing difference, but in acknowledging it. Silence may protect power in the short term, but only recognition sustains legitimacy in the long run. As wise persons remind us, to change the story, we must first hear what has been left out of the script.
