Hindko and Gujari. c - SIL International

Gujari 151
The significant effect of education is not surprising, since
schooling is the principal means for learning Urdu. In Peshmal, it
was reported that Pashto is used as the medium for instruction in
the earlier grades, classes 1 through 5, while Urdu is taught as a
subject in those years. In contrast, Urdu is used as the principal
medium in class 6 and above. These patterns of language use in
schools support the threshold of higher proficiency in Urdu at six
years or more as demonstrated in the Peshmal data.
This highest education group shows the greatest withingroup
consistency in their scores, with a standard deviation of
only 5.5; no one in this group scored below 26 on the SRT,
which is equivalent to RPE level 2+, indicating good, basic
proficiency. Thus, those with substantial education tend to have
similarly high levels of proficiency in Urdu.
The lesser educated group and the uneducated group show
higher standard deviations: 7.9 for the primary level education
group, and 10.7 for the uneducated group. These higher measures
of dispersion indicate greater variability in the Urdu proficiency
levels of subjects within each of these groups; a few men with
little or no schooling do succeed in acquiring good Urdu. Only
28 percent of the uneducated and lesser-educated subjects’
performances on the Urdu SRT indicate RPE levels of 3 or
above, while 83 percent of the highly educated group do so.
These results correspond with expectations that the less educated
groups would not reflect the relatively uniform influence of
exposure to Urdu through years of education, but that their Urdu
proficiency is more seriously affected by their varied amounts of
language contact and use as a result of employment, travel, etc.
Age and Urdu Proficiency
Although one might expect Urdu proficiency to be affected
by age, the Peshmal data indicate no clear age patterning. In
order to overcome these limitations in the data distribution (in
that there are fewer older test subjects, especially in the educated
groups) and to control for the effect of education, the scores for
the uneducated subjects were isolated and evaluated according to
age groups, but no statistically significant differences between