Language is one of the most powerful tools of social life. From time immemorial, human beings interact from dawn to dusk in any modern day society, and language plays a vital role in their day to day communication. Apart from being a mode of communication it is a main source of thinking as well as self-expression. The current constitution of Pakistan lays clear emphasis on the adaptation of Urdu language as an official language in 15 years (in 1988), however, until today no practical steps were taken, and still English is the de facto official language in Pakistan. Recently in the first week of September, the Supreme Court of Pakistan took notice of this situation, and ordered current government to adopt Urdu language in true letter and spirit. This ruling started a national level language policy debate in Pakistan, that whether to stick to English which is an international lingua franca or enforce Urdu in all offices which is national language of Pakistan, as well as symbol of national identity.
Scope of the Problem
Change of the language can be a drawback for smooth functioning of different 
offices, as English is used as an international language in many countries across the globe, and even in Pakistan up to today the official language is English from last sixty years. Although English is not the first language in Pakistan, it is still spoken and understood by the educated population. Most of the advertisements are in English in posh areas of major cities, and road signs are in both English and Urdu. In other words, English is very much part of the linguistic landscape of Pakistan. According to the country facts on Pakistan on the CIA website, Urdu is the first language of about 8% of the population, especially the immigrants from what is now India and their descendants, who came during the partition of the Indo-Pak subcontinent in 1947. The largest spoken language is Punjabi, which is the mother tongue of almost half (45%) of the population. If we compare Urdu with other languages, it is pretty new and still it does not has a rich lexical resources as English has. If Urdu is adopted as the official language, then English will be left behind in many walks of life in Pakistan. English is the language for science and technology, and it is hard to translate everything in Urdu. It will be hard for the officials to translate each and every word from English to Urdu. Also, somehow over the years Urdu adapted many English words, which are now part of the Urdu language. The problem is if Urdu is the official language, then there might be some serious official issues if each and every government office uses it.
Critique
This policy and decision can take the country of Pakistan 180 degree opposite from the rest of the world, where English is a predominant medium of communication. Nearly every village in Pakistan has a privately run English medium school, and these changes will affect those schools too. With the advent of Urdu promotion in all walks of life, people might not pay higher fees to send their kids to these schools. These English medium schools often use well trained English instructors and different curriculum as a tool to charge more fee from their students. These schools offer employment opportunities to many English teachers, so this new language policy might affect their livelihood. In nutshell, this should be a step wise process so people attached with current language policy are not affected by this new change in a big way.
Recommendation
Due to a high rate of illiteracy, the major portion of Pakistani population does not use Urdu. Making Urdu and some other major tongues as official languages would help to enable greater participation by people who do not know English; hence, making the government affairs more inclusive. Urdu is already a language of daily use and it has the capability to absorb other words from different languages, which we use daily without knowing that we are using words of any other language. Our media is already 93% in Urdu, so promoting an already popular language might affect global reach of our graduate and undergraduate students. Keeping this in mind, I would recommend a balanced step by step approach to adopt Urdu as an official language. Having said that, we should not divorce English as it is an international language playing key role in internationalization of our already marginal position in comity of nations.
Call to Action
Language plays an important role in everyday communication and international identity of any nation. Language play a significant role in the political economy of any country, by selecting one particular language over another can offer some benefits to a group commonly known as linguistic capital, and similarly depriving another group not having this linguistic capital. Pakistan supreme court has taken an important step to enforce Urdu as official language in Pakistan as promised in the constitution of 1973, this is done in an effort to restore status of Urdu as national language of Pakistan. This initiative is an important step for the language policy of Pakistan as it will change the linguistic landscape of country. It is expected that in the light of this policy all official communication as well as key competitive examinations for federal and provincial jobs will be conducted in Urdu. This will offer new opportunities to students from Urdu medium educational backgrounds. However, at this stage it is not quite clear how all courts, and government offices will translate their communication protocols to English.
Even though this policy change is an important toward promoting the national language of Pakistan, but still further actions are needed to make this change a reality in near future. This new language policy calls on policy makers and language professionals to:
- Translate the important official terms from English to Urdu
- Encourage English medium schools to lay solid foundations of their students in Urdu language so that can compete in different competitive exams
- Provide short term crash courses to key employees responsible for national and international communication
- Provide financial assistance to linguists so they can invest their time and energy to translate or develop new Urdu lexicon to replace English words