Afghanistan Times
Related Articles
The recent development of technology particularly the information and computer technology has actually brought a big change globally, simplifying the nations with different cultures to communicate to other people in the universe and shortening the ways and preventing the waste of time people had to spend to reach in the past.
The computer and internet could obviously be good examples of our assertion, in which we can find anything we need and contact the persons we need to get information within seconds just by clicking a button that was considered a dream a few decades back.
Despite these goodness and beauty, the new phenomenon has an ‘ugly’ face as well that makes us not to take easy and not to be reckless against. That is the cultural invasion which is vastly trying to target the cultures and languages.
As the basic language of computer and websites is English, we have to blindly imitate it. This can target Afghans’ culture more than any other nations because the long war in the country has dissuaded the people of working on the improvement and advancement of their own culture and especially language that is a sweet and very interesting language and was once formally used by the India’s Mogul empire.
In addition to the war problem, there are some other issues that welcome this cultural invasion. Many Afghans (not everyone) particularly the youth love to use English in daily conversations or in writing letters, billboards and advertisements to show they are educated, and have command the international language. In fact, English is going to replace our alphabet used by some people in writing the billboards and working with computer or messaging by the mobile phones. You can see English alphabet used when a person writes something in Farsi or Pashto, “chetor asti?” (How are you?). Vice versa, you can see the signs and billboards around the cities in which English words like ‘chicken soup’, ‘body building gym’,’ property dealer’, etc. have been written in our alphabet which are meaningless for the majority of people.
The government and ministry of culture in particular are responsible to these matters. Other countries have put their own languages in computer and mobile phone that people use. You will not see the signs and advertisements written foreign words and expressions with their alphabets.
Maintaining our culture and language means to protect our identity, territory, honors and history.
So, let’s struggle to protect our identity and honors by prevention of this deadly invasion. Let’s not waste our time in the worthless so-called cultural efforts as a senior official had said that he would translate books “from Farsi to Dari”.
