The relegation of Bangla to a second language would have meant that the Muslim middle class would suffer in professional and competitive sectors. The policymakers were keenly aware that language has some links to consciousness our subjective experience is linked with phenomenal consciousness. On each Ekushey, we tend to focus on the imposition of Urdu as a state language for Pakistan. Having an alphabet to give shape and voice to the innermost thoughts and desires is a freedom that was earned with the creation of the flag of an independent country in 1971, the seeds of which were sown in 1952.įor all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel. While researching on the use of Roman scripts to write Bangla, I came across an interesting debate during the pre-independence period that goes on to show how the forces that tried to slight the spirit of Ekushey in 1952 continued to do the same in the succeeding years.
I probably can do the same with Unicode input with other popular Bangla tools. I am not very proud of my unfamiliarity with the Bangla keyboard-occasionally I would use Google online input to write Bangla. Many of our Facebook comments are written using English I too, am guilty of such lapses. Given the rise of many digital interfaces, we often use Roman (Latin) scripts to represent Bangla pronunciation. Revisiting such a history will make us more aware of our commitment to our own language. What does it tell us about us as a nation and our attitudes towards our mother tongue? Interestingly, such code-switching or code-mixing has a political history that we often tend to overlook. There is also this mental switch that makes us travel between option one and two even when there is no button to press. Many of the call centres have this linguistic option. But we often switch to number two at any given opportunity. Is it a second language or a foreign language? There should not be any such question about our first language, our mother tongue in our everyday life. In academia, the status of English is often contested in the Bangladeshi context.
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