Has anyone besides me felt this?
I’ve been working in the dev sector in Islamabad for about 10 years now. I’m a Kashmiri/Punjabi mix, and honestly, I’ve always enjoyed working with Pathans—nice people generally.
But lately, I’m hitting a wall. In my current team of 4, I’m the only non-Pathan. My last team was the similar —5 out of 7 were Pashtoons.The issue is the "language bubble." They’ll be talking to me in Urdu or English, and then suddenly switch to Pashto whilst taking to each other. It happens in the middle of work meetings, team lunches, or just random office chat. I’m just standing there and having no clue what’s going on.
It’s not that I have a problem with the language itself, but:
- It feels kind of rude when we’re mid-conversation and I’m suddenly excluded.
- I feel like I’m missing out on work info or "in-the-loop" office stuff.
- I have to work much harder to build a bond with them because they already have that instant connection through their language/background.
I expect something similar would happen if I were working with any ethnic group like Sindhis in Karachi e.g. I have not seen this phenomena with punjabis though.
Has anyone else dealt with this? How do you handle it without sounding like a hater or "policing" how people talk? Do I just sit there and ignore it, or is there a way to politely ask them to keep it in a language we all speak?