Quoted By:
Suppose, the language used as medium of instruction for education and for general formal purposes in a region differs from the most prevalent spoken mother tongue, how long would it take for the mother tongue to be completely replaced by the instruction medium language as the home language or the language of common casual speech?
In Pakistan, all educational institutes teach using either Urdu or English as the medium of instruction. However, Urdu is the mother tongue of only about 8 percent of the country, making it only the fifth most common mother tongue. In fact the largest mother tongue is Punjabi, which is spoken by nearly half of the country's population as their native language/home language. Despite this, Punjabi is not used in education in the province of Punjab, and even Punjabi language newspapers are rare. All formal writing is done in Urdu, even though the home language of the region may be Punjabi, Pashto, Sindhi or Balochi. Given how little non-Urdu Pakistani languages are used for writing in most situations, would it be reasonable to expect that Urdu will some day replace all regional languages as the language of the household if more and more people get educated? In fact one Pashtun Pakistani anon living in the Pashto-speaking belt of Balochistan told me that Pashto wasn't even mandatorily taught in his school, and he couldn't write Pashto despite being a Pasthun living in a Pashto-speaking area.
A similar scenario seems to exist in Indonesia, where all education and almost all formal writing is conducted in Bahasa Indonesia, while it is the home language of about 20 percent of the country, the second largest after Javanese.
