Pakistan, Jan. 29 -- While commenting on the gatekeeping of the English language, Bruce Gilley, in his essay "Guarding the Gates of Our Language," argues that once a culture loses control over its language, everything else is bound to follow. This argument opens up two important dimensions of English. The first is the dimension of colonial hangover, and the second is the role of English as a language shaped and circulated by twenty-first-century technology.

It is well known that Pakistan was born out of a colonial legacy when the Indian subcontinent was decolonised. Even before independence, the people of the Indo-Pak subcontinent were required-or at least strongly encouraged-to imitate the pronunciation and speech styles of their coloni...