LAHORE: Lahore School of Economics hosted its first International Conference on LanguagePolicyinInternational Agreements: The Asian Experience with Special Focus on CPEC here on Saturday.

A collation of three groundbreaking studies were presented at the conference with the fundamental objective to explore the implications of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) on the language practices of stakeholdersas there is no formal mutual language policy for the project between China and Pakistan; hence a high uncertainty exists about the roles of English, Urdu, Mandarin and local languages.

The conference comprised four sessions, which were attended by international and local delegates who presented their comments pertinent to its fundamental theme.

LSE Pro-Rector Dr Azam Chaudhry said one of the key problems in Pakistan, especially related to CPEC, is lack of language policy framework.

In the first session, Dr SabihaMansoor, the principal researcher, and Maiyda Shahid presented their research with the objective to explore the implications of industries and multinational companies operating in special economic zones (SEZs) under the umbrella of CPEC on the language practices of both Chinese and Pakistani people.

Dr Shahid Siddique said freedom of language use was very significant as it was an important identity marker but unfortunately, there was lack of properlanguage progress.

Dr Tariq Rahman said CPECwas a much needed project and in future also we would be seeing several new Chinese projects in Pakistan, hence it`s mandatory to talk about possible language policies in Pakistan.

Sohail Lashari said the rule of thumb was that foreigners learn local languages and not vice versa.

In the second session, principal researcher Dr Fareeha Zaf ar highlighted how CPEC infrastructure development had impacted the class structure of Pakistan through formal and informal language practices.

Dr Seyfeddinipur appreci-ated the study and said local researchers were conducting this study in lieu of foreigners.

Dr Fauzia Shamim said it was important to consider the language ideology because `language policies are not mutual documents (exchanged between two countries) but they are shaped by language politics of the country`.

In the third session, Shanzay Kamran and Munaza Hassan presented their research which examined the attitudes and motivations of policy planners, teachers and students towards Mandarin.