Distinct on status, poor on planning

Bangladesh}, which is customarily thought of as a monolingual country, is multilingual, with Bangla as a predominant language, spoken by about 12,47,74,000 people, according to the 1998 UN census.

In not quite a negligible proportion, Arabic and Persian are in use in the studies of Islam. Pali is used by the Buddhists for their religious functions. The Hindus use Sanskrit for the same reason.

There are about 5,31,000 speakers of Tibeto-Burman languages and 1,25,000 speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages, mainly spoken by the small ethnic minorities. There are quite a large number of speakers of Urdu.

The latest Ethnologue lists more than 34 languages in use in Bangladesh, including two extreme dialect varieties of Sylheti and Chittagonian, although Monsur Musa, an Institute of Modern Languages professor of Bangla who has worked on language planning and development and sociolinguistics, differs on the point that the actual number of independent languages should be less.

Just because Sylheti and Chittagonian have different sets of units of pronunciation and words and have in some cases different syntaxes, Monsur said there should be no reason to recognise them as different languages.

Bangladesh essentially remains a multilingual country. The education system also remains monolingual in theory, but in practice, it is dominated by English, especially at the tertiary level.

And in this multilinguality, Bangla continues to be the broad spectrum of all its variations of dialects and the level of use in words, structures, grammar and pronunciation in a continuous process of style shifting.

There are variations in social constructs, and the level of language in use according to situations. The language early writers such as Alaol spoke or wrote was once the standard, a manifestation evident in the written form of the language in Tripura and Rosang (Arakan) at the time.

The old form, around the 16th century, was replaced with a new variation called Sadhu Bhasha, or the Standard Literary Bangla, which Monsur Musa said was not a chaste, which is ‘sadhu’ in Bangla, variety of the language. The word ‘sadhu’ at the time meant ‘traders’ or ‘merchants,’ as in the phrase ‘amir-sadhu,’ the rich and the traders.

The traders travelled from one place to another and somehow normalised the language in a fashion that became the Standard Literary Bangla. The language later came to be normalised in the hand of the English people.

The form continued with the status for long. In 1913, Rabindranath Tagore and Pramatha Chowdhury tried to replace the Sadhu form with Chalit, a standard colloquial form of the language, which later became the de facto language of literature, Standard Literary Bangla.

In 1952, Monsur said, Rajshekhar Basu in an essay, Bangla Bhashar Gati (transformation of Bangla), said the linguistic characteristics of Bangla as used in Bangladesh would influence the Bangla in use in West Bengal. He talked of mainly two reasons for this: Bangla in Bangladesh is not pressured by any other languages as it is in West Bengal, mostly by Hindi, and migration of a large number of Bangladeshis to West Bengal.

But there remain a large number of tasks to be accomplished in relation to language planning, which is a large-scale, national planning often undertaken by the government. It means to influence the ways of speaking or literacy practices in a society. Language planning has three major aspects: status planning, corpus planning, and language-in-education planning. The aspects have policy, which means form, and planning, which means function, components.

The policy statement regarding the status planning is there in the constitution. Article 3 of the constitution says, ‘The state language of the Republic is Bangla.’ But, Monsur said, there should have been some supports and detailed layout for the policy implementation somewhere else.

Bangla in theory remained the state language from the first day after independence, but, he said, it has not been in practice in reality. Everything that is related to the state had been done in English. Even as the medium of instruction, especially at the secondary and tertiary levels of education, English continued to dominate for long, as a large number of textbooks needed to be translated into Bangla.

But it was not done in compliance with the policy. There were primarily not much of the efforts for such implementation and there was no generation planning, which is badly needed for such tasks. Over the years, Bangla has now come to be used as the medium of instruction even at the secondary level, and at the tertiary level to some extent.

Monsur said the Central Bengali Language Development Board, which merged into the Bangla Academy, made some efforts in this direction. The Bangla Academy, which had a single title in 1957, now has 5,000 titles to its credit. And Bangla, which was once the language of literature, came to be used in every sphere of life.

As part of corpus planning, deliberate or not, individual groups have always worked to better the corpus, in private hand. But such efforts were not coordinated and the state almost never came forward to facilitate them. Monsur said the state has a responsibility and it can help in such research work. Many funds are created to help research in language, literature and education. The state can at least encourage the rich by making a decision that if individual groups shell out certain amount of money for such research and work, they will be exempted from certain amount of taxes and other such measures. He feels there remains an ample scope for such coordination and development.

One of the main components of corpus planning is the curriculum, at all the levels of education, and textbook design. The curriculum for primary education is excellent, said Monsur, but the textbooks have problems.

Textbook design faced several setbacks in its history in this region, which began with the inception of the Calcutta School Book Society, founded in May 1817. By then the Hindu College was set up and before it, there was the College of Fort William, which also printed some textbooks, mainly for the English people to help them learn Bangla for civil administration.

The books published by the School Book Society were mainly translations from English textbooks. And the design of textbook contents reached certain stage towards the end of the British rule.

It faced a setback after the partition of India. Pakistan came into existence on certain ideological basis, causing its reflection on textbooks, Monsur said. Its course changed once again when Bangladesh came into existence. Different state ideological propositions left their mark on textbook designs. He said there would always remain an ideological pressure in congruence with the state policies. But it becomes problematic for a good education system when such pressure goes beyond limit or becomes sectarian. Some cases are evident in the change in textbooks with the change in the government.

Monsur said the curriculum of primary education is based on targeted competence such as literacy, numeracy and the like. The levels of competence are set in grades, in accordance with the state policy. But the textbooks do not conform to or corroborate the curriculum. Language and literature at primary level of education are customarily divided into two broad sections: poems and prose.

And the textbook board always tends to use ‘authentic text,’ contents written by great poets or authors who never thought that their work would find way into such textbooks, to educate students at the primary level. But what is the use in having the children to read Alaol or excerpts from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, who will by no means add to their desired competence at the level?

The textbooks also have anomalies in horizontal and vertical symmetry. Research on textbook design says that all the textbooks of a class should have the same set of language components, which is called horizontal symmetry, and books for the classes upward should also have a progressive difficulty, which is called vertical symmetry. Monsur believed that many such discrepancies are not deliberate, but they kept creeping into textbooks.

Such research also shows that 70 per cent of a textbook should focus on what was earlier learnt and 30 per cent should concentrate on new topics. But according to a study, to which Monsur was party, the textbooks for Class I have about 850 words; but general average of words learnt by children of the age is around 2,000. Such discrepancies, Monsur said, are likely to be in a large number in textbooks for secondary education as most such books are not written, but compiled with the works of noted writers, which makes grading on a par difficult. The curriculum affairs and the textbook affairs of the textbook and curriculum board should have coordination of a sort to make corpus planning in education fruitful.

One of the important aspects of such planning is the use of the language in a given state, which is often influenced by lexicography or dictionaries, which hold the entire world of words used by a population. Taking this consideration into account, Monsur said, the only notable job was the Bangladesher Anchalik Bhashar Abhidhan (dictionary of the Bangladeshi dialects), edited by Dr MuhammadShahidullah and first published in 1965. But then again, the dictionary has not been of much use as it does not show the pronunciation, as the International Phonetic Alphabet has not been used and it has no defined purpose, as its entries are to be used only by linguists and some enthusiasts.

Even these days, serious readers use dictionaries published in West Bengal and written by their scholars. The Bangla Academy published a practical Bangla dictionary, which was later brought out in a concise form for students. It has also published two translation dictionaries of Bangla and English, which have successfully catered to the demand of the Bangla speakers in Bangladesh, Monsur said — the only achievements in such a broad area.

Akkas, Abu Jar M, (2005 Feb. 20) Distinct on status, poor on planning. New Age Ekushey special

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