This essay is part of Transpacific Literary Project’s monthly column, with art by Mit Jai Inn.

When I was pregnant with my son, I told myself I’d speak to him only in Urdu from the moment he was born. I grew up in Pakistan, and Urdu was my first language, despite the fact I had spent more than half my life in Canada and spoke it only a handful of times throughout the year. I managed to convince myself the Urdu I had learned in Pakistan would naturally find its way to the forefront of my brain, and I’d fluently speak it to my son, who’d soak it up like a sponge, and voilà—I’d have a bilingual baby without breaking a sweat.

Three years later, not only did my son not speak a single word of Urdu, but I, too, realized that my language skills were abysmal. It was impossible for me to put a sentence together in Urdu without throwing in a few English “filler words.” Rather than sound like a native speaker who grew up immersed in the language, I came across more like someone who had picked up the basics of Urdu on Duolingo and made up for the gaps in my knowledge with a healthy sprinkling of English. If there was any hope of passing my mother tongue on to my children, I first needed to strengthen my own Urdu skills, and even build them from the ground up.

Urdu is the official language of Pakistan and is spoken by more than 230 million people worldwide, mostly from the Indian subcontinent, making it the 10th-most spoken language around the world. Due to migration from Pakistan and Urdu-speaking populations from India, it is one of the fastest-growing minority languages in Canada. This growth in the Urdu-speaking population in Canada has outpaced the number of resources—such as in-person classes at schools and colleges, along with Urdu books at local libraries—available to families for successfully passing on the language to younger generations. In response, family-run businesses specializing in promoting Urdu have sprung up online. 

One such enterprise is Kids Bolo, which supports Urdu learning through books, educational products, and online classes. Based in Toronto, the company was launched in 2020 by Masooma Aftab. Masooma and her husband, who co-founded Kids Bolo with her, are both Pakistani Canadians who, like myself, spoke Urdu while growing up in Pakistan but struggled to teach it to their two kids in Canada. When Masooma’s eldest was four, she tried to introduce him to Urdu using books from Pakistan, but found the material lacking in relevance to their life in Canada.

“They were very traditional stories that were all in Urdu script,” Masooma tells me from her home in Toronto. “For kids who were born in Canada and have no idea what the Urdu script looks like, it was difficult for them to connect with the stories, and it was difficult for me to narrate  the books to them.” 

Frustrated by a lack of resources, she decided to make an Urdu book for children that leans on the roman script to help teach Canadian kids the basics of Urdu. With the help of her husband, parents, in-laws, and freelance editors, Masooma translated popular English children’s stories, like “The Hare and the Tortoise,” into Urdu. Kids Bolo released the first batch of translated, bilingual children’s storybooks using crowdfunding and, through social media, successfully marketed their products to families in Canada. “Kids Bolo” is itself a play on two languages—it means “kids, speak,” “bolo” being a gentle Urdu imperative meant to encourage its readers to actually speak the words they read in the books.

One parent who bought some of the books by Kids Bolo was Mehwish, who migrated to Canada from Saudi Arabia in 2021 with her husband and son, who was four at the time. Like Masooma, Mehwish was born and raised in Pakistan. She and her husband spoke primarily in Urdu with her son in Saudi Arabia, but couldn’t find relevant resources online to help her son learn the language as he got older. 

“A lot of the content on YouTube is very Hindi-centric,” Mehwish says. “My son would not find the videos and material engaging. So over time, we started speaking to him in English.” When their son started reading books in English and watching Western YouTube channels, it became harder for Mehwish and her husband to speak to their son in Urdu all the time, as they themselves were limited in their expression of more complex ideas and topics in Urdu.

Mehwish’s experience mirrors my own in that I would also fumble speaking in Urdu if a topic or conversation required more than a grade school-level understanding of the language. Even people born and raised in Urdu-speaking environments aren’t taught the language beyond a functional level of comprehension and understanding. 

“There’s this belief in Pakistan that if you want your children to be successful, you should teach them English and not Urdu,” says Dr. Rahat Zaidi. She’s a professor at the Werklund School of Education at the University of Calgary in Alberta and specializes in language acquisition and literacy. She’s spent close to two decades studying bilingualism in children, and as an Urdu-speaking Pakistani living in the West, she’s well aware of the challenges parents face when trying to teach their children their native language.

Dr. Zaidi explains how in elite and upper-middle-class circles in Pakistan, the goal for many families is to have their children move abroad for higher education, which requires proficiency in English. This comes at the detriment of learning Urdu. “Privatization in Pakistan is at its peak,” she says. “Private schools exist to give students and families access to better English, not to better Urdu, sadly. Media consumption for students and younger kids is primarily in English if they want to go abroad.”

Stories like mine, Mehwish’s, and Masooma’s are the by-products of a culture within upwardly mobile Pakistani families: Our parents send us to private schools, with an eye to us moving overseas. At those schools, we are given such a shaky foundation in Urdu that when we grow up, we are unable to pass it on to our own children. 

But Dr. Zaidi sees hope for younger generations. “Parents like Masooma, millennial parents, are advocates for Urdu and very different from my generation,” she says. “This is the generation of social media, where there’s sufficient awareness to use platforms in the right way, to offer learning opportunities to your own kids. So it’s a very different ballgame with ventures like Kids Bolo in the mix.”

Since 2021, Kids Bolo has come out with 15 bilingual English-Urdu books with unique stories written by Masooma and her passionate network of Urdu advocates. But the crowning achievement for Masooma has been the Bolo Pen, an innovative talking pen that makes Kids Bolo books come alive. It was this little piece of technology that convinced me to buy my first set of Kids Bolo books for my son last year when he turned three. The device is billed as the first talking Urdu pen and works with all of Kids Bolo’s story books. When a reader taps on the text or photos on the books, the pen sounds them out. My son was instantly enamored by the pen and how it sounded out not just the words, but also the sounds of the wind, waves, birds, and animals, with the option to hear the words in English and Urdu text side by side. 

“My son and I went to the Kids Bolo book launch and he was very fascinated by the pen,” Mehwish recalls. “There were a ton of kids there and my son read through each of the Kids Bolo books right then and there. He was really keen about it and still has a lot of fun playing with the pen. There’s a record button on the pen so he records himself speaking in Urdu and then plays it back for us.”

My older son didn’t start speaking the Urdu words he heard until about six months after we got the books and pen. One morning after breakfast, he grabbed the Kids Bolo book entitled Qudrat (Nature) and started tapping on the animals. He then looked at me and said, “Mommy, chooza” (baby bird). My younger son heard him say it and immediately repeated the word, though in a more baby-like babble. Both the boys then stood face to face, loudly saying “Chooza! Chooza!” to each other. Since then, topi (hat) and gari (car) have become two of their favorite words picked up from the books that they like saying to each other as they run around the house. My younger son is also very fond of the pen and books, and often grabs both to look at and tap while my eldest is away at school during the day. 

Since launching in Canada, Kids Bolo books have been made available for online purchase in the U.S., U.K., and the SWANA region. But requests to buy the books have been pouring in from Pakistan as well, which I was surprised to learn since parents there can purchase thousands of books and resources in Urdu for their kids. Why shop for Urdu-English books aimed at second-generation kids in Canada?

“Even in Pakistan, certain segments of the population feel that the resources available to learn Urdu are lacking in the country,” Dr. Zaidi explains. “Reading meaningful novels in Urdu doesn’t really exist anymore like it did in the 1960s. Over the years, the essence of reading Urdu books has been lost and Urdu has become this language that’s been hybridized with English. So many things have been anglicized because many words that you would need to communicate in the modern world don’t exist in Urdu.”

Talking to Dr. Zaidi made me realize that my situation wasn’t unique when it came to teaching my kids Urdu. Other Pakistani parents at my son’s school also lamented the fact that no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn’t speak to their children in Urdu 100 percent of the time, especially around topics like sports, history, technology, and the arts. But this phenomenon isn’t only taking place in the Urdu-speaking diaspora, but also within Pakistan, as well as other Urdu-speaking communities in the subcontinent.

“What I hear from people in Pakistan is that a lot of people speak English there now,” Masooma tells me in regards to the demand for Kids Bolo books in Pakistan. “Even if someone speaks Urdu, it’s a mix, so it’s no longer that you become fluent in one language and then another. It’s a hybrid model, which is what our books are, and why people are looking to buy them for their kids in Pakistan.” 

Because of shipping costs and currency conversions, it’s not financially viable for Kids Bolo to ship their books to Pakistan from Canada, but that doesn’t mean Masooma doesn’t have other plans for the business. Masooma and her team have recently launched the next language under Kids Bolo this year: Gujarati. And there are virtual summer camps offered for children ages five and up to help them practice their conversational skills with a teacher and other kids their age.  

What started out as one Pakistani family’s DIY project to teach their children Urdu has mushroomed into a successful language-learning business that seeks to address one of the most pressing matters of a modern, globalized society: ensuring that future generations know who they are, where they come from, and can understand the language of their ancestors.