Indigenous ethnic languages in Bangladesh: Paradoxes of the multilingual ecology

Abstract

Languages are at the centre of nationalistic discourses across South Asia since they have played a historically and politically significant role in defining nationhood and both uniting and dividing countries throughout the British Empire. Despite multilingualism and multiculturalism, and vast differences in individual access to, and command of, mother tongue, national and official languages, paradoxically a collective language is always considered as an important imagined marker of ‘national’ identity. It is this latter point I explore by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst Bangladeshi youths from indigenous ethnic communities who are designated as ethnic minority groups in Bangladesh. Positioning the paper at the nexus of multilingual ecology, I thereby investigate how youths from the indigenous ethnic communities perceive themselves with reference to their mother tongue, national language, and foreign language, and what impact their relationships, their preferences, and use have on the maintenance and sustainability of their mother tongue in the multilingual ecology. A qualitative content analysis of the data demonstrates that it is only by taking the varying potential scopes of language into account that we can fully appreciate these complex Asian multilingual ecologies, where the mother tongues, indigenous ethnic languages, national languages, and English have specific historical, political, and sociocultural significances. The discursive claims of Bangladeshi ethnic youth participants indicate that the presence of the ‘mother-tongue’ and ‘national language’ in these contexts is ideologically infused, layered, value-laden, relational, and paradoxical at the microlevel – as these languages are practiced and nurtured by the linguistically minoritized subjects themselves. They negotiate their relationship with these languages, strictly keeping in consideration the existence of other languages and their social, cultural, economic significance in the multilingual ecology. It is via the paradoxical role of these languages in contexts that the paper aims to identify the socio-psychological reasons behind language loss in Bangladesh.

<i>Research Developments in World Englishes</i>, Alexander Onysko (ed.) (2021)

“…Since WEs became an established paradigm in the 1980s and Bloomsbury even initiated a new series for publication in 2022, it is important to draw attention to the fact that the policies and practices in formal domains across the world are, in effect, monolingual, nationalistic, and chauvinistic, and communities also have monolingual biases, specifically towards powerful languages, such as those declared to be the national language and the official language (Sultana, 2021). For example, as the language of the British colonisers with more than 200 years of history in the Indian subcontinent, English is now the language of globalisation and international communication and, finally, as the language of the neoliberal education system, has also become one of the most powerful languages in South Asia (Sultana, 2014;Bolton and Bacon-Shone, 2020;Sultana and Roshid, 2021;Sultana, at press).…”

Indigenous Land-Based Perspectives on Environmental Sustainability: Learning from the Khasis Indigenous Community in Bangladesh

“…The climate crisis exacerbates these environmental challenges, increasing the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, altering rainfall patterns, and exacerbating seasonal variability [5,15,16]. Plainland Indigenous communities are particularly vulnerable to climate impacts due to their reliance on rain-fed agriculture and proximity to rivers and coastal areas prone to flooding and cyclones.…”

“…Sea-level rise threatens to inundate low-lying areas, displacing Indigenous populations and further exacerbating their vulnerability. Addressing these environmental challenges requires holistic approaches that integrate Indigenous knowledge, promote sustainable land and resource management practices, and enhance community resilience to climate change through adaptation and mitigation measures tailored to local contexts [5,9,[15][16][17][18].…”

“…In this paper, we critically used the three terms environmental sustainability change, land-based theoretical framework, and sustainability resilience strategies [5,15,16]. From an Indigenous land-based perspective, environmental sustainability refers to Indigenous landbased practice across ecosystems, societies, and economies [15,16]. It advocates for landbased identity, land-based strategies that honor interconnectedness, mitigating degradation, and safeguarding future generations [5].…”

Postcolonial Language Ideologies: Indian Students Reflect on Mother Tongue and English

“…Some have focused on genres like hip‐hop to foreground the ways youth use languages in transgressions of policy measures and language boundaries legitimized by the state (Pennycook 2007). Yet, scholars of language in India have pointed to the colonial origins of mother tongue and its contemporary use in the census (Khubchandani 1997; Mitchell 2009; Pattanayak 1981), and attested to the concept's continuing salience in institutional life and elsewhere in a vast array of nation states including Bangladesh (Sultana 2021), Sri Lanka (Davis 2022), Nepal (Hoffmann‐Dilloway 2010), and Malaysia (Albury 2017). English has received a great deal of attention across the postcolonial world in locales like India (Annamalai 2018; Auddy 2019; Kachru 1997), Sri Lanka (Kandiah 2010; Parakrama 1995), Bangladesh (Hamid and Hasan 2020), East Africa (Higgins 2009), Singapore (Babcock 2022), Hong Kong (Bolton 2002), and Malaysia (Pennycook 2013).…”