Plurilingual Practices in Multilingual Balochistan: Extent, Attitudes, and the Competence–Deficiency Debate

Abstract

This paper investigates the plurilingual practices of multilingual university students in Balochistan, Pakistan – one of the most linguistically diverse and under-researched provinces in South Asia. The study adopts a sequential mixed-methods design to investigate three research questions on the extent of plurilingual practices, speakers’ attitudes towards these practices and whether plurilingualism is a communicative competence or a linguistic deficiency. The study involves a Likert-scale questionnaire (n = 100) and recorded oral conversations at two public universities in Quetta. The outcomes confirmed the pervasiveness and functional motivation of plurilingual practices as the non-English or non-Urdu words accounted for 40–77% of the total words produced across the five activities recorded. Attitudinal data reveal a general positive attitude towards plurilingualism but one that is also modulated by residual negative perceptions related to monolingual ideologies and identity anxiety. Qualitative thematic analysis of the activity transcripts yielded seven functional categories underpinning plurilingual behaviour: absence of adequate vocabulary, societal and religious customs, habitual usage and convenience, incorporation of morphological forms, gap filling, taboo avoidance and humour. The results show that the plurilingualism of Balochistan is not a deficit but an observable communicative competence, following Canagarajah’s (2009) integrated competence model and the Council of Europe’s (2001) plurilingual approach, and one systematically overlooked by monolingual education policies.