Attitudes of Parents and Children towards Multilingualism in Pakistan

Abstract

This study investigated the attitudes of parents and children towards multilingualism in Faisalabad. In Faisalabad, many languages are spoken but in this study three main widely spoken languages, Urdu (national language), Punjabi (mother tongue) and English (international language) were selected. The attitudes of parents and children greatly vary towards these languages. This research took into account the variable of social status, education, age, gender and family context to probe into the reasons behind different language attitudes. This study aimed to find out how these variables play their role in shaping language attitudes. The data was collected through interview and questionnaire .The questionnaire was used to know parent’s attitudes while group interview to know children attitudes about multilingualism. Questionnaire data was analyzed by using SPSS software while interview data was analyzed qualitatively. Results depicted that children are more are conscious about English language and they have same assumptions as their parents have. On the other hand parents want their children to speak only Urdu and English.