This is one of my several essays published in the Urdu Daily Jung London in the 1990s. It deals with the gradual erosion of minority languages for immigrant children growing up in Europe and America. The challenge of mother-tongue maintenance in the face of the onslaught of dominant languages like English is an uphill task, something which first and second generations of immigrant parents experience everyday. This is particularly true of Urdu in the UK as well as here in America.  The desire to maintain one’s home language for one’s children seems like a losing battle against tremendous odds. A combination of factors including parental speech habits, mixed language environments both at home and abroad in the larger community, lack of adequate provision for mother-tongue and second-language teaching etc,. are contributing to the gradual diminishment of what may have started off as a bilingual landscape to begin with. I have tried here to outline this scenario, together with some solutions to the problem.

bunyad-e-zaban