DISTORTED MOTHER TONGUE

A casual glance at a busy street plastered with signs and posters reveal plenty of errors -- you can see a sign saying “poster lagano nished” or “dukan bara hobe”. Or you might have found yourself flailing to describe something, and ended up calling a landscape “bhoyongkor shundor” in your high school essay. Then there are the ubiquitous Bangla mistakes that most people, even writers and journalists, make, like writing “shorbojonin” as “sharbojonin”. Ironically, you will sometimes find people haughtily calling others “oshikkhit” or saying that they find poor grammar “oshojjhokor”.

Waiting outside a Bangla exam hall revealed snatches of conversation between parents, which intrigued a mother of one. “I heard one parent say to another that her children can hardly speak in Bangla. They find it extremely difficult and hate studying it. This made me realise that most kids nowadays take no interest in Bangla outside their textbook. I think this is because children do not read any Bangla books while growing up,” she says.
In fact, listening to contemporary Bangla speakers reveals all the signs of language death. 'Language death' is a linguistic process through which native speakers of a language slowly lose competence over the language, so that the language they use becomes poor and non-fluent. Eventually, no fluent speaker of the language may be left, though that would be an exaggeration in the case of Bangla. It is not very likely that an ever expanding population of 16 crore will suddenly become lost for words. But the fact remains that a large portion of young Bangla speakers have little linguistic control over this beautiful and diverse language.
A look through linguistics books reveal that language loss occurs when a population becomes bilingual, and starts adapting to the second language easily. This could explain the 'Banglish' hybrid that some people today speak, with an emphasis on the guttural 'r'. Other signs of language loss are also present in modern Bangla conversations, such as mixing up of word order (“biraat goru chhagoler haat”, instead of “goru chhagoler biraat haat”) and code-switching (switching between two languages in a conversation).
Some might argue that this loss of language is only limited to English medium students. But Phanindra Chandra Banik, senior Bangla Language teacher of St. Joseph's Higher Secondary School, who has been in the profession for more than thirty years, disagrees. “I don't think this has anything to do with English or Bangla medium. I have seen many English medium students who are very eager to learn Bangla, and have taught Bangla medium students who are complacent,” he says. “I think this has more to do with the way teachers teach Bangla. They do not bother about the correct spelling of words any more. I see reputed newspapers in Bangladesh and even Kolkata try to make spellings 'easy'. But making the spelling 'easy' only runs down the language.”
A language stays active and intact only when it is practiced. Language acquisition starts early, in the first few years of a person's life. If Bangla is not presented to children in an attractive way, it is natural that they will lose interest in it. We grow up watching cartoons in English (and nowadays, Hindi). The nursery rhymes we learn are all English, the Ladybird books or comics we read are also in English. There is no quality Bangla cartoon on TV today. As we grow older, the only children's books we can read in Bangla are Muhammad Zafar Iqbal books, which only employ everyday words on a superficial level without really exploring the extent of the language, as the writer himself agreed. The radio stations employs RJs who speak a strange form of Bangla that most people in Bangladesh do not practice, and telefilms contain dialogues which try to be informal but are in fact a jargon. And so we are left with a generation of Bangla-speakers who are just average in their mother-tongue.
This profligate misuse of language is the source of some concern and a lot of humour. Many pages have popped up on Facebook which make fun of the way some people type their own language, the most famous of which is Murad Takla, with more than 80 thousand fans. The internet is rife with photographic evidence of our nation's inability to spell the word “prosrab” in Bangla.
But we can only afford to take this misuse of mother tongue in good fun because a young person today who does not know Bangla will not face many difficulties in their professional life. They can continue with minor setbacks, as Bangla is now the language limited to official forms or applications. A shallow understanding of it is enough to go on communicating every day. Though recently, the High Court passed a rule that will require the government to use Bangla in all public offices, announcements and advertisement, until its implementation, the harsh truth is that it does not matter if a sign spells “shamney school” wrong, we will still understand it. The loss a poor speaker of Bangla may face is on an individual level; they will lose the opportunity to enrich themselves. A language is more than just utility -- the teenager today who cannot understand Bangla will never feel the deep melancholy of Jibanananda Das, or the absurd humour of Sukumar Ray. The loss will also be cultural, for great literature can only come out of a language when there are writers who have mastered it. Without a thorough understanding of Bangla, we can never innovate with it or bend the rules. Then what is the point of knowing a beautiful language when one will never wholly exploit the scope of it?

"According to Tapan Bagchi, deputy director of the department of compilation at Bangla Academy, this language loss is occurring because of a flawed education system. “I want Bangla to be the medium of communication everywhere, from the High Court to the classroom. Today, most students do not get to practice the language according to their whim. The language is limited to writing questions and answers in the classroom.” Though he does not think that Bangla will one day become obsolete, as it is still the fifth most widely spoken language in the world, he does think that it is inevitable that the language will lose its richness in the face of a powerful and adaptive language like English."