Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development

ISSN: 0143-4632 (Print) 1747-7557 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmmm20

Linguistic diversity and social justice in

(Bangla)desh: a socio-historical and language
ideological perspective

Md Mijanur Rahman

To cite this article: Md Mijanur Rahman (2019): Linguistic diversity and social justice in
(Bangla)desh: a socio-historical and language ideological perspective, Journal of Multilingual and
Multicultural Development, DOI: 10.1080/01434632.2019.1617296

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2019.1617296

Published online: 13 May 2019.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 100

View Crossmark data

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rmmm20
JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT
https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2019.1617296

Linguistic diversity and social justice in (Bangla)desh: a socio-

historical and language ideological perspective
Md Mijanur Rahman
Department of English, Illinois State University, Normal, IL, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This paper analyses some key historical developments (from early Received 2 August 2018
twentieth century to present) in Bangladesh from a socio-historical and Accepted 2 May 2019
language ideological perspective to explore the social injustice faced
KEYWORDS
by the non-dominant and linguistically diverse population. These Language ideology;
developments sparked language debates involving questions of identity, Bangladesh; linguistic
nationhood, and political hegemony. The Bengal partition in 1905, for diversity; social justice;
example, flared up the Bengali monolingualism and the territorial international mother
principle so strongly that the British had to give in, putting the non- language day
dominant Bengali-speaking Muslims at a socio-economic disadvantage.
The 1947 partition brought to the forefront the ideologies of an Islamic
language, a Hindu language, and linguistic diversity as a threat to
national unity, making both the Bengali-speaking Muslims and the hill
people face social and political injustice. The birth of Bangladesh in 1971
was a welcome change but its monolingual Bengali ideology put the
speakers of minority languages at a long-term disadvantage. The 1997
Peace Accord, UNESCOS’s 1999 declaration of 21 February as the
International Mother Language Day, the 2010 educational policy, and
the creation of an International Mother Language Institute offered some
flickers of hope, but the underlying ideology remains Bengali
monolingual, still creating barriers for a socially just future for minority
language speakers.

Preliminaries
On 21 February 2018, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO) celebrated the 19th International Mother Language Day (IMLD), reaffirming the organ-
isation’s commitment to ‘defending and promoting languages’ throughout the world (UNESCO
2018). The organisation’s position statement for the day argued that ‘the diversity of languages
reflects the incontestable wealth of our imaginations and ways of life’. That’s why, the organisation
‘has been actively engaged for many years in the defense of linguistic diversity and the promotion of
multilingual education’ (UNESCO 2018).
The tradition began in 2000 after the General Conference of UNESCO announced that ‘21 Feb-
ruary would henceforth be known as International Mother Language Day’ (Mohsin 2003, 81) to be
observed annually by all member states (UNESCO 2008, 7). The decision was also an acknowledg-
ment of the Language Martyr Day, also called Ekushe (or the 21st), already celebrated in Bangladesh
since 1953, on which people in Bangladesh have been commemorating the struggle of the Bengali
speaking people, firstly, to resist the then West Pakistani leaders’ decision to make Urdu as the
only official language in the newly created Islamic state, Pakistan, and, secondly, to make Bengali

CONTACT Md Mijanur Rahman mrahman6@ilstu.edu

© 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 M. M. RAHMAN

as one of the state languages, alongside Urdu, as 56% of Pakistan’s overall population spoke Bengali
as their mother tongue (Thomson 2007, 40).
In their 19th celebration of IMLD, UNESCO also noted that it ‘supports language policies, par-
ticularly in multilingual countries, which promote mother languages and indigenous languages’,
recommending ‘the use of these languages from the first years of schooling, because children
learn best in their mother language’ (UNESCO 2018). Ironically, on the same day a national English
daily in Bangladesh, Dhaka Tribune, published at least two articles: (1) ‘Indigenous Language Text-
books Collect Dust’ (Manik 2018), and (2) ‘The Denial of Linguistic Diversity in Bangladesh’ (Tri-
pura 2018), putting into doubt the commitment of Bangladesh, the inspirational source country
behind UNESCO’s declaration of IMLD, to linguistic diversity and multilingual education. This con-
tradiction is worth investigating from a critical applied sociolinguistic perspective.

Research questions
In this paper, I critically analyse the key historical developments (from the beginning of the twentieth
century to present) in the geographical boundary now known as Bangladesh (Earlier called East
Pakistan for the period of 1947–1971 and East Bengal in the time before). The historical develop-
ments I look at are: 1. Partition of Bengal in 1905 and its unification in 1911 by the British,
2. Birth of Pakistan in 1947 and the Language Movement in 1952, 3. Birth of Bangladesh in 1971
and some subsequent developments like the 1997 Peace Accord in the hills and the International
Mother Language Day since 2000. These historical developments are fertile ground for a language
ideological and sociolinguistic analysis because they forced the country to re-examine its political
loyalty, question of nationhood, and language, including national monolingualism. I, however, ana-
lyse all these developments in an attempt to answer the following two research questions:

(1) What language ideologies inspired the political elite’s approach to nation building in
(Bangla)desh?
(2) How did/do these historical developments fare in ensuring linguistic diversity and social justice in
the region, especially for the non-dominant groups and/or the speakers of minority languages?

Research methods, theoretical perspectives, site selection, scope, and limitations

In order to find answers to my research questions, I firstly analyse the key historical developments
mentioned above, using three key theoretical frameworks: linguistic diversity and social justice,
socio-historical lenses, and language ideology. For the historical perspectives, I consulted a variety
of published materials, including articles, books, newspaper reports, annual reports, policy docu-
ments, and press releases, on each development, and analysed them, using the three angles, especially
by looking at how the question of language came up and intersected with the crucial questions of
identity, nation building, and inclusiveness.

Theoretical perspectives
The primary theoretical perspectives motivating this study come from what Ingrid Piller calls ‘critical
applied sociolinguistics’ (2016) that considers, among other things, linguistic diversity as a social jus-
tice issue, also uncovering individuals’ and institutions’ language ideologies and how they affect
different language groups materially. Here is a brief discussion of the three key theoretical lenses
and terms I used:

Linguistic diversity and social justice

The phrase ‘linguistic diversity’ in this paper means the variations in language/s: both intralingual
(various dialects and accents within the same language, e.g. African American English, Hawaiian
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 3

Creole, and Mainstream American English in the U.S.) and interlingual (the diversity of different
languages, e.g. English, Spanish, German, and Arabic in the U.S.). The term ‘social justice’ is used
to represent ‘full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet
their needs’ (Bell 2016, 3), a system in which people from all identity categories (e.g. race, sex/gender,
age, wealth, religion, ability) have equitable access to society’s resources, including education and
employment. The compound phrase ‘linguistic diversity and social justice’ means that people’s use of
a particular language, or a specific variety of it, will not prevent them from being fully functional mem-
bers of society and accessing its resources, including education, employment and a safe civic life. The
scholarship in the field of linguistic diversity and social justice is typically characterised by an effort ‘to
put linguistic diversity on the map of contemporary social justice debates’ (Piller 2016, 5).

Socio-historical lenses
This is an analytical perspective that emphasises the overarching cultural and historical context to
have a fuller understanding of a given phenomenon. It also focuses on ‘historicity’ which can suggest
two things: ‘to suggest that something is historical, is to suggest that it draws on the past; yet, it also
suggests that it is something that emerged at a particular, specifiable time, and did not exist before’
(Kabiraj 2006, 248). Because language ideologies are also constructed, rather than natural, this socio-
historical perspective helps me dig deeper in the issues in contention.

Language ideology
Language ideology is a field of inquiry that falls in the intersection of linguistics and anthropology.
The term typically means language beliefs that materially affect our actions in the real world. How-
ever, in the literature, it has been defined in many ways, with one common point being that ‘ideol-
ogies of language are not about language alone’ (Woolard 1998, 3). Woolard defines it as the
‘representations whether explicit or implicit that construe the intersections of language and
human beings in a social world’, connecting ‘the very notion of person, and the social group, as
well as such fundamental social institutions as religious rituals, child socialization, gender relations,
the nation-state, schooling and law’ (1998, 3). In Marxist terms, it could be part of the society’s
superstructure legitimating the existing forces and relations of production. In other words, it
could be part of the overarching ideology dominating a culture in material ways. As language ideol-
ogy cuts through several related issues, any analysis requires a comprehensive perspective to produce
meaningful findings.
To illustrate, two interrelated threads of language ideologies, which have often been reported in
the literature, are 1. monolingualism and 2. territorial principle. The monolingualism often promotes
that the idea that the use of a single language provides national unity while multilingualism threatens
it (Potowsky 2010, 12). A corollary of this is the territorial principle, ‘which is a collective belief that
ties a particular abstract language to a particular place and that is enshrined in much linguistic-rights
legislation’ (Piller 2016, 35). These ideas promote the assumption that only one language belongs to a
particular territory. The idea that the U.S. has place only for the English language and that all other
languages do not belong here is a typical example.

Bangladesh as a research site

I chose Bangladesh as my primary area of investigation here because the political developments in
the region in the twentieth century have displayed all major threads of language ideologies like those
mentioned above. As a result, the country is a fertile ground for language ideological analysis. The
following details further clarify the connection.
Bangladesh is a south Asian country of the size of Illinois with an area of 55,598 square miles,
but with a population of some 162 million (BBC 2018). Bengali, also called Bangla, is the stat-
utory national language of the country (Simons and Fennig 2018) and 98% of Bangladeshis speak
at least one variety of Bangla (Rahman 2010, 341; WorldAtlas 2018). In terms of L1 speakers,
4 M. M. RAHMAN

Bangla is the 6th biggest language in the world with some 243 million L1 speakers and 19 million
L2 speakers (Simons and Fennig 2018). With more than a thousand years of literary tradition, the
language is ‘a direct Indo-Aryan descendent of Sanskrit’ (Thomson 2007, 35; Simons and Fennig
2018). Over time, the political changes in the Indian subcontinent have variously affected its
vocabulary that grew very rich with a huge borrowing from Sanskrit, Persian and Arabic (Thom-
son 2007, 35). However, this seemingly monolingual nation has a total 41 living languages: 36 of
them are indigenous, 4 institutional, 12 developing, 16 vigorous, and 9 in trouble (Simons and
Fennig 2018).
Despite this linguistic diversity, the monolingual rhetoric has always been a cause for concern for
the people speaking different languages or a different variety of the same language in this region, as
the political elites switched their loyalty and fretted over the questions of identity, nationhood, and
language throughout the twentieth century. The four historical developments mentioned above sym-
bolise these struggles and provide us with an excellent opportunity for analysis, using the lenses of
critical applied sociolinguistics.

Research scope and limitations

However, given the historical nature of the study, it is worth pointing out that different political
developments brought into being different categories of political elites and non-dominant groups
in region. Please see the Table 1 for these changes in different time periods.
As the Table 1 shows, despite the changes in politics, Bengali-speaking Muslims feature through-
out either as affected groups or actors. For this reason, the analytical focus here will be mostly on
them both as non-dominant and dominant groups. I’m also using the term ‘non-dominant’ instead
of ‘language minority’ for the Bengali-speaking Muslims because they were never really language
minorities in the region. Bengali was the language of the political elites in the first period while
56% people spoke Bengali in Pakistan, the second period. They were rather politically non-dominant
groups in the first two periods before turning into the dominant group or political elites and over-
whelming majority language speakers (now 98%) after the birth of Bangladesh.
This is why, even though the other minority language speakers in the hills and the plains will
receive some treatment in the discussion, this extensive focus on the Bengali-speaking Muslims
can be considered a limitation of this study. But given the nature of this study, it’s also necessary
because it is with regards to the Bengali-speaking Muslims that most of the questions of language
ideology appeared on the scene. I, however, partly address this limitation in the last two sections
of the discussion (sections 4.3 and 4.4) where the marginalisation of the non-Bengali minorities
becomes the major focus. I also believe that further research focusing specifically on the plight of
non-Bangali minorities including those in the hills and those scattered in different parts of the plains
(e.g. Biharis, Santhals and Garos) throughout the time period under study here can do further justice
to the topic at hand.

Table 1. Political elites and non-dominant groups and/or minority language speakers in the geographical boundary, now called
Bangladesh, in different points of history under the scope of this study.
Political status of the
geographical boundary under Non-dominant groups and/or minority
Time periods study Political elites language speakers
1905–1947 East Bengal under the Bengal The British; Bengali-speaking Bengali-speaking Muslims; Indigenous/
Province under British India Hindus from West Bengal tribal communities in the CHT and in the
plains
1947–1971 East Pakistan under Pakistan Urdu-speaking Muslims from Bengali-speaking Muslims; Indigenous/
West Pakistan tribal communities in the CHT and in the
plains
1971-Present Bangladesh Bengali-speaking Muslims Indigenous/tribal communities in the CHT and
in the plains; Urdu-speaking Biharis
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 5

Findings and discussions

The partition of ‘Bengal mother’, the injustice of the territorial principle and the ‘excluded’
CHT
In the early twentieth century, the whole Bengal region (currently Bangladesh, and India’s West Ben-
gal province) existed as one province of British India. The Bengal region ‘was as large as France but
with a significantly larger population’, leading to poor administration that put the Muslims in east
Bengal at a disadvantage (New World Encyclopedia 2015). On the other hand, the Hindus in west
Bengal were in control of ‘most of Bengal’s commerce, and professional and rural life’ (Encyclopedia
Britannica 2009). In 1905, the British viceroy, Lord Curzon, decided to rearrange the geographical
regions for administrative convenience, making Assam and 15 districts of East Bengal one province
that had a population of 31 million, most of whom were Muslims, with the capital in Dacca (now
Dhaka). The rest of Bengal (having predominantly Hindus) was joined by Bihar and Orissa pro-
vinces to make one province, i.e. West Bengal (Encyclopedia Britannica 2009).
The partition decision, however, was met with mixed reactions. The Muslims, after an initial cau-
tionary period, saw potential economic gains in the partition and so welcomed the decision. How-
ever, the economically privileged Hindus in west Bengal feared it would make them a minority in a
now enlarged province, saw it as a ‘divide and rule’ policy and started agitating against the decision
through ‘mass meetings, rural unrests and a swadeshi (native) movement to boycott the import of
British goods’ (McLane 1965; Encyclopedia Britannica 2009; Al-Masum 2012, 59).
What is important for the analytical purpose here is that in their effort to reverse the Bengal par-
tition decision, the Hindus invoked a monolingual Bengali Hindu nationalist ideology, representing
Bengal as their Kali Mata, a Hindu goddess of power and destruction, who they said should not be
split. This was originally created and then reinforced by the Bengali poets and writers who promoted
the concept of a unified Bengal mother under a same Bengali language. Rabindranath Tagore, who
won the Nobel prize in literature in 1913, wrote a song, ‘Amar Sonar Bangla, Ami Tomai Valobasi’
(My golden Bengal, I love you.), in 1906 imagining Bengal as a Land-Mother as ‘a rallying cry’ for the
annulment of the partition (New World Encyclopedia 2015). Before Tagore, Bankimchandra Chat-
topadhyay, another key Bengali writer, first imagined the Bengal-Land-Mother metaphor in the song
‘Vande Mataram’, now the national song of India (Kabiraj 2006, 253–254).
The British authority, ultimately, gave in to the demands of the Bengali Hindus, rescinding the
partition decision in 1911. But in so doing, they reinforced a never-ending Hindu-Muslim conflict
(McLane 1965), with the Muslims finding out that the Hindus didn’t want to see Muslim economic
gain and prosperity in the name of a unified Bengal mother. This is especially because the adminis-
trative restructuring and resources resulting from the partition led to an increased attendance of
Muslim boys and girls in all levels of education, including elementary, high school and college levels
(Al-Masum 2012, 71–75). It also paved the way for better opportunities for the Muslims in country-
wide government employments (Al-Masum 2012). Thus, the monolingual Bengali ideology and the
strong territorial principle as reflected in the united Bengal mother image did not turn out to be
socially and economically just for the Bengali speaking Muslims in East Bengal. It is also worth not-
ing that the people living in East Bengal and West Bengal speak two very different varieties of Bangla,
each being strongly influenced by the religious and cultural traditions of the two regions. So, the
Hindu-Muslim dichotomy had a linguistic dimension too.
However, this commotion about national identity division did not have any recognisable impacts
on the 13 indigenous language minority groups1 living in the geographical boundary known as the
Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) of Bangladesh. This is mainly due to the then special status of the CHT
as ‘an autonomously administered district’ (Panday and Jamil 2009, 1054) during the early twentieth
century under the protection of the CHT Regulation 1900 that ‘barred the sale and transfer of land to
non-indigenous people and restricted their immigration into the CHT’ (2009, 1054). This also insti-
tuted a locally representative tribal government who collected taxes for the British Raj. In 1920, the
6 M. M. RAHMAN

regulation was amended to make the CHT an ‘Excluded Area’ (Chakma 2010, 284), which then was
further intensified in the Government of India Act of 1935 that declared CHT a ‘Totally Excluded
Area’ letting the people there enjoy ‘relative autonomy’ (Panday and Jamil 2009, 1054; Siraj and
Bal 2017, 400) before the next big political development in the region.

The birth of a ‘Muslim’ nation, the injustice of an ‘Islamic language’ and troubles in the
CHT
Some 36 years after the unification of Bengal, the British decided to leave India altogether, bringing
an end to the 190 years of colonial rule in the region, albeit in the face of a rising national movement
on the part of the Indians: Hindus and Muslims. However, with the possibility of India’s freedom on
the rise, the Muslims reconsidered their situations. In view of the different political developments in
the first half of twentieth century, they feared a constant marginalisation by the Hindu majority in
post-independence India. Therefore, the Bengali speaking Muslims from East Bengal developed a
sense of belongingness with the Urdu-speaking Muslims in other parts of India, rather than with
the Bengali speaking Hindus in West Bengal (Thomson 2007, 37). This is also because the West Ben-
gal Hindus remained largely unconcerned about the incorporation of the Muslims into the Bengali
national identity. Thomson puts the scenario thus:
In the metropolis of Kolkata there were vastly more Hindus than Muslims and many of the urban Mus-
lims present there were actually Urdu speakers. As a result of this, from the middle of the nineteenth cen-
tury through into the twentieth century, the terms ‘Bengali’ came to be used by inhabitants of the city to
refer specifically to Hindus rather than speakers of Bangla in general, and so (perhaps unconsciously and
out of ignorance) excluded Muslim Bengalis from the conceptualization of Bengal identity. (Thomson
2007, 37)

With the Indian independence nearing, the Bengali Muslims were faced with ‘the challenging
question of where their loyalties should now primarily lie – with fellow Bengalis, speakers of the
same language from the same historical area, or with more distant, frequently Urdu speaking, co-
adherents of Islam scattered throughout India?’ The pan-Islamic movement and identity pushed
the elite Muslim leaders towards the latter, with a potential for ‘an improved and secure post-colonial
future’ (Thomson 2007, 38). As the Muslim League, the political party representing the Muslim
population, publicly endorsed a Pakistan Resolution that called for ‘the creation of an independent
Islamic state in regions of India where Muslims were a majority’ (Thomson 2007, 38), the British
authority officially approved
two independent successor states – India and Pakistan. Significantly, the single political entity of Pakistan was
set to consist of two geographically distant parts, the contiguous Muslim-majority districts of western British
India and the Muslim part of Bengal, creating a new Muslim nation separated by more than 1000 miles of
Indian territory (Thomson 2007, 39).

Thus, the religious consideration prevailed over the linguistic identity of the Bengali speaking
Muslims.
The new state of Pakistan in its nation-building effort, however, immediately exhibited some pro-
blematic language ideologies, pitting East Pakistan (which was earlier called East Bengal and now
Bangladesh) and West Pakistan against each other. Firstly, they went for the monolingual and ter-
ritorial principle, saying that one state language is necessary for national coherence and unity
(Mohsin 2003, 89). Secondly, they resorted to two other threads of language ideologies to prop up
their nation building effort linguistically: That Urdu is an Islamic language and so it should be
the state language of Pakistan, a country created along the line of a uniform Muslim identity, and
that Bengali is a Hindu language reflecting the Hindu culture, and so it is incompatible with an
Islamic nation that Pakistan is. All these three language ideologies apparently geared towards the
promotion of a uniform Islamic nation are worth investigating here.
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 7

Bangla as a Hindu language?

As for the Hindu identity of the Bengali language, we need to ask a question, ‘what could make Ben-
gali a Hindu language, if at all?’ The central Pakistani leaders who, for some reasons or other, were
almost always from West Pakistan argued that Bengali is written in Devanagari script like that of
Sanskrit which is typically identified with Hinduism.
This equals to saying, for example, that only Arabic is an Islamic language or English a Christian
one. While it is true that an overwhelming number of Arabic speakers are Muslims or those of Eng-
lish are Christians, the reverse is not always true. That is, Muslims are not always Arabic speakers or
Christians are not always English speakers. However, the religious argument continued to point out
that the Bengali language is ‘against the laws of Islam’ as ‘not only Bengali literature, even the Bengali
alphabet is full of idolatry’ (Mohsin 2003, 88). Each Bengali letter was said to be ‘associated this or
that god or goddess of Hindu pantheon’. So, to make sure Bengali has ‘a bright and great future’ in a
Muslim state, it was argued that Bengali must be written in an Arabic script (Mohsin 2003, 88). This
idea that a language’s writing system determines its religious orientation is deeply ideological. It is
ethnocentric, insensitive to the tradition of the language users, and impracticable for a developed
language like Bengali (Bengali has a lot more sounds in its system than Arabic and it is impossible
to change the vast world of Bengali literature).

The ideology of an Islamic language

What is an Islamic language? Is there such a thing in Islam? The whole argument put forward by the
West Pakistani leaders to scrap a writing system or the language itself is based on the idea that any
languages other than Arabic or at least the languages that do not look like Arabic have no place in an
Islamic country. If one considers the Quran as the source of defining what is Islamic or not, one can
see that the Quran declares the following: ‘And of His signs is the creation of the heavens and the
earth and the diversity of your languages and your colors’ (Quran 30:22). This clearly shows the
diversity of languages has not been seen in a negative light. Rather linguistic diversity has been pre-
sented here as Allah’s sign.
In another verse, the Quran says: ‘And We did not send any messenger except [speaking] in the
language of his people to state clearly for them … ’ (Quran 14:4). This verse shows that all messen-
gers or prophets spread the word of God in the first language or mother tongue of the people to
whom the messengers were sent. In fact, it is a given fact in the Islamic tradition that divine scrip-
tures were also in the first language or mother tongue of the prophet and his people so that the pro-
phet himself can understand it and thus make other people understand the same. Thus, L1
instruction or communication is Quranic or Islamic, mainly because it is efficient in making people
understand almost anything.
This also rules out the possibility that the Arabic language is inherently Islamic. Arabic was not
Islamic before the arrival of Islam in Arab in the 6th century which was a heyday of Arabic literature,
especially in terms of poetry. Arabic would not be Islamic at present too if people were to write por-
nography in it. In fact, the L1 tradition of spreading the divine message makes it perfectly okay for
someone to be a Bengali Muslim, a Chinese Muslim or an English Muslim. It would also mean that
taking away a people’s language or imposing a different language on them is both unnecessary and
un-Islamic as it goes against the divine principle of L1 instruction and the Quranic fact that linguistic
diversity is a sign of Allah’s existence.
However, the Quran being in Arabic and its messenger being an Arabic L1 speaker, and the
initial audience for Islam being the Arabic speaking people, and the fact that all Muslims are gen-
erally expected to perform their prayers in Arabic, Islam and Arabic have a long historical associ-
ation. This is why, not only the Pakistani politicians but also the general populace often the
carried the ideology of Arabic being the only Islamic language, or at least the marker of the
Quran. In fact, in recent times, the Capital City of Bangladesh, Dhaka, utilised the popular ideol-
ogy of ‘Arabic script = Quran or Islam’ to reduce the large scale public urination on the wayside
of Dhaka’s major streets. An instruction in Arabic that basically said, ‘Do not urinate here’.
8 M. M. RAHMAN

scared people away from urinating in public places (Faruq 2015). Still, a deeply ingrained ideol-
ogy does not necessarily make it universally true. The same is with the concept of Arabic as an
Islamic language. It is an historical construct.

Urdu as an Islamic language?

For the same set of reasons, the ideology of Urdu as an Islamic language does not stand the test of
scrutiny. While Urdu won much popularity with many Indian/Pakistani Muslims for its Persian/
Arabic script, it was not always the case. In fact, the Quran’s first translation into Urdu in the late
eighteenth century ‘was not well received’ (Rahman 2002, 220). This is because Urdu was originally
a Hindi language in the sense that people in India spoke it. A Muslim-led movement in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth century Persianized it while the Hindus waged another movement
in the nineteenth century to replace Urdu in the Persian script with Hindi in the Devanagari script.
The Hindi movement, according to Rahman (2002, 222), ‘strove to transform the existing equation
of ‘Urdu = Muslim + Hindu’ to ‘Urdu = only Muslim’, and ‘Hindi = Only Hindus’. So, what was
being advocated by the West Pakistani leaders as an Islamic language is basically an Indian language
with two different writing systems. The Persian-Arabic writing system, also called Nastaliq, was
being defined as Islamic which is not necessarily the case (Rahman 2002, 222). There was nothing
inherently Islamic in it except for the fact it looked like Persian which looked like Arabic which is
interpreted as Islamic.

The ideology of linguistic diversity as a source of disunity

In 1948, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader who spearheaded the formation of Pakistan, said that
‘without one state language no nation can remain solidly tied up together and function’ (Mohsin
2003, 42), invoking a kind of language diversity myth still visible in many parts of the world. How-
ever, the idea that linguistic diversity threatens national unity is still a myth (Potowsky 2010, 12).
Potowsky bolsters her argument by citing a study by Fishman (1991), which analyses 238 variables
in 170 different nations, and concludes that ‘linguistic heterogeneity could not predict either civil
strife or grass national product’ (2010, 12). Rather, civil strife was related to long- and short-term
deprivation and coercive power relationships while gross national product was connected to issues
of modernisation and industrialisation (Potowsky 2010, 12).
Piller (2016) makes a similar argument about the rhetoric of ‘linguistic diversity as an obstacle to
development’ which ultimately promotes ‘assimilation toward national monolingualism’ in many
most postcolonial settings (2016, 165). Piller cites the research findings/conclusions by Taylor and
Hudson (1972), which was used to prove the rhetoric in economic terms, saying ‘the greater a coun-
try’s linguistic diversity, the greater its poverty’ (166). Piller calls it ‘a correlational fallacy based on
static data’ (166–167). She continues to argue, ‘The fact that high levels of linguistic diversity and
disadvantage co-occur does not mean there is a causal relationship between the two nor does it
mean that changing the language variable toward linguistic assimilation will have the desired devel-
opment outcome’ (Piller 2016, 167).
Pakistan did not stay together and just after 23 years of its formation, Bangladesh seceded as an
independent nation in 1971. Many can attribute this separation to the linguistic difference, but it was
just one dimension of the greater social, economic, and political discrimination under the West
Pakistani rule (Riaz 2016, 16–19). Potowsky concludes that linguistic diversity does not create confl-
ict or threaten the national unity. Rather ‘what undoubtedly poses a greater threat to national unity
and leads to greater conflict among communities is the bullying of immigrants and minority
language groups’ (Potowsky 2010, 15). This is what happened in the Bangladeshi context. The
Urdu speaking Pakistani leaders started bullying the Bengali speaking population straightaway
after the birth of Pakistan. When the bullying incorporated the whole politics and economics, the
Bengali speaking people in East Pakistan ultimately revolted and set the country free after a lot of
blood shedding in 1971.
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 9

Troubles in the CHT

However, the India-Pakistan separation and the attendant ideologies discussed above caused
immense trouble for the people in the CHT as well. As Jhala observes, ‘the aftershocks of deco-
lonization in South Asia have placed the CHT in a critically vulnerable position as a religious,
ethnic and linguistic minority’ (2013, 108). First of all, the British decision to ‘award’ the
CHT to Pakistan enraged and divided them at the same time as one group (Chakmas) declared
their allegiance to India and another (Marmas) to Burma (now Myanmar). The Pakistani govern-
ment immediately subdued them militarily, establishing full control over the region (Uddin 2016,
324). To make it worse, Pakistan then ‘eliminated immigration restrictions and allowed large-
scale migration of Bangali settlers into the CHT’ who then reportedly ‘abused and misappro-
priated the lands and resources of the tribal people’ (Panday and Jamil 2009, 1055). Furthermore,
as if life in the CHT was not already bad enough, the Pakistani government built the Kaptai
Hydro-Electric Dam in 1962, which inundated ‘nearly 40% of the CHT’s arable land’ and dis-
placed ‘about 100,000’ indigenous people, most of whom were Chakmas, changing their lives for-
ever (Panday and Jamil 2009, 1055). Thus, the birth of a ‘Muslim’ country and its assimilationist
monolingual ideology not only excluded the indigenous people in the CHT from the overall
nation building effort but also threatened their very existence through immigration and ‘develop-
ment’ projects.

The birth of Bangladesh, a new monolingual regime, and some belated flickers of hope
In British India, the Bengali speaking Muslims in Bangladesh were not enough Bangalis because they
were not Hindus. In Pakistan, the Bengali speaking Muslims were not enough Muslims because they
spoke Bengali. In both cases, they were not considered part of the mainstream and consequently they
suffered some social, economic, and political disadvantages. It reached the breaking point in 1970
when Bangladesh Awami League led by Sheikh Muzibur Rahman won the national Pakistan election
landslide, and the ruling regime refused to transfer the power. A series of failed negotiations and the
genocide of the Bangladeshis by the Pakistani Army ultimately led to the declaration of indepen-
dence on 26 March 1971. After a nine-month war, Bangladesh secured the victory on 16 December
1971, promising the end of all forms of oppressions (Riaz 2016). However, when it came to the domi-
nant language ideologies, and their material implication for linguistic diversity and social justice, the
post-liberation developments were less than ideal.

The new monolingual regime

To begin with, the country was conceptualised along the line of a strong monolingual Bengali
language ideology. The preliberation movement based on a six-points demand did not even talk
about the ‘ethnic minorities, such as the tribal population in Chittagong Hill Tract, the Santhals,
and Garos’ (Riaz 2016, 21). Despite the fact that the economic and political disparity prompted
both men and women speaking the minority languages also to fight for the country’s freedom
(Bal 2017), the primary inspiration for the nation building effort post-liberation remained focused
on a supposedly uniform Bengali language and culture (Siraj and Bal 2017). The country was
named Bangladesh and the ideology of Bengal mother reasserted itself as the new nation adopted
the song ‘Amar Sonar Bangla’ by Rabindranath Tagore as the national anthem. As has been dis-
cussed above, Tagore wrote the poem in the context of 1905 Bengal partition to inspire the unifica-
tion of East and West Bengals, promoting a territorial principle and monolingual ideology. Mohsin
argues that ‘the [new Bangladeshi] government’s refusal to recognise the existence of non-Bengali
people as distinct cultural communities, combined with its identification and promotion of Bengali,
pushed the non-Bengali communities toward periphery’ (2003, 91). Thus, the regimes changed, but
the structure of monolingual nationalist ideology survived, this time creating a more stable linguis-
tically hegemonic structure as the new minorities apparently lacked the firepower to overthrow the
language dominance in any effective way.
10 M. M. RAHMAN

Silverstein’s ideas about the category error in language ideologies as reported in Hill (1998,
79) make some real sense here. Silverstein comes up with a pejorative definition of ‘linguistic
ideologies as distorting the actual forms and functions of language, attending to some at the
expense of others’, indicating that ‘such distortions occur universally in human communities,
because of relative cognitive limitations on human linguistic awareness’ (Silverstein 1985,
Cited in Hill 1998, 79). The monolingual ideology and territorial principle in Bangladesh in a
sense fulfils his prediction that ‘the specific content of ideological discourse, whether it is hege-
monic or counterhegemonic, will simply replicate core category errors … ’ (Silverstein 1985,
Cited in Hill 1998, 79). This Bangladesh scenario shows it upfront how ‘these category errors
doom counterhegemonic discourse to political impotency over the long run’ (Silverstein 1985,
Cited in Hill 1998, 80).
A similar case is reported in Francophone Canada where political developments brought about
dramatic changes in language regimes. It started with the French withdrawal from North America
in 1763, paving the way for ‘a new English-speaking government and upper class dominating
business and social circles’, shutting the French speakers out of ‘the most influential aspects of
official life’, effectively turning the Francophones into labouring classes (Lippi-Green 2012, 275).
However, the Official Language Act of 1974 and some subsequent laws by a Francophone dominant
government made ‘French the normal, everyday language of work, instruction, communication,
commerce and business’ to the point that the presence of an apostrophe in a public sign cost a certain
plumber named Bob Rice dearly in 2004 (Lippi-Green 2012, 275–276). Thus, the role reversal in
Bangladesh like that in Francophone Canada did not promote linguistic diversity and social justice.
Rather, the only change happening was that ‘the oppressed had become the oppressor’ (Freire 2000;
Cited in Lippi-Green 2012, 275).

Resistance and conflicts in the CHT

However, this cultural imposition did not go unchallenged. Even though the language minorities liv-
ing in the plains remained in the background, the 13 indigenous communities living in the CHT tried
to negotiate this imposition. For example, the hill representative ‘made sustained argument against
the assimilationist policy of the government’ (Chakma 2010, 288). In an often quoted statement in
the literature, M N Larma, a CHT representative, made the hill voice heard thus:
You cannot impose your national identity on others. I am a Chakma, not a Bengali. I am a citizen of Bangladesh
– Bangladeshi. You are also Bangladeshi but your national identity is Bengali … They (Hill People) can never be
Bengali. (Bangladesh National Assembly Debates 1974)

They also met the Prime Minister Sheikh Muzibur Rahman in person, demanding the region’s
autonomy and retention of the Regulation 1900 in the new Constitution of Bangladesh. None of
these demands, however, was met. Not only was their linguistic/cultural identity ignored, but also
were they told to assimilate to the Bengali nation (Panday and Jamil 2009, 1056–1057; Chakma
2010, 287–288). This led the hill people to create their own political organisation, ‘Parbatya Chatta-
gram Jana Samhati Samiti’ (PCJSS, translated as United People’s Organization of the CHT). The
assassination of Sheikh Muzibur Rahman and military takeover of the country’s politics in 1975
prompted the PCJSS to create their own guerilla force called ‘Shanti Bahini’, and later being aided
by India (Chakma 2010, 288), pursued a regional autonomy for the CHT. Perceiving this as national
security threats, the Bangladeshi government entered into an armed conflict with them, and started a
large scale official settlement of Bangalis (some 400,000 of them between the years 1978-1985) in the
hill, apparently to stop the insurgency from both the inside and the outside (Chakma 2010, 288–289).
This conflict and settlement led to what Uddin says ‘many incidents of massacre, attack and reprisal,
indiscriminate arrest, torture, … killing, rape, forced religious conversion, forced marriage, and
abduction … , often committed by the security forces and settler Bengalis against the indigenous
people’ (Uddin 2016, 321–322), which Chakma (2010, 282) describes as an example of ‘ethnocide’
in post-colonial Bangladesh.
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 11

Some belated flickers of hope: 1997 peace accord and 2010 national education policy
However, things took a peaceful turn when the Government of Bangladesh and PCJSS entered into a
Peace Accord on 2 December 1997 (Chakma 2010, 295), which ended (at least for the moment) the
conflict and promised, among many other things, mother tongue education and a mechanism for
resolving disputes over the possession of lands on which the entire cultural life the tribal commu-
nities depended (Amnesty International 2013). However, lack of political commitment to implement
the accord, growing dissatisfaction in the CHT, continued military presence, continuous land dis-
putes, top-down nature of the treaty – failed to bring peace in the region. Multiple separatist groups,
hostile co-existence of the Bengali settlers, and militarised pursuit of security agenda made the CHT
neither secure nor peaceful (Panday and Jamil 2009; Chakma 2010; Wilkinson 2015; Uddin 2016,
2015).
The country, however, did again provide some flicker of hope in 2010 by announcing the formu-
lation of a new education policy, which among many other provisions, promised an elementary level
L1 instruction for the ethnic minorities, promotion of their languages and engagement of the com-
munities in achieving that goal (Ministry of Education 2010, 1–2, 8). As a result, some 1238 ethnic
minority students speaking Chakma, Marma, Sadri and Tripura languages received preschool text-
books in their own languages for the first time in 2017 (Haque 2017). In 2018, the number doubled to
some 25,000 (Dhar 2018).
Provision of indigenous language textbooks is definitely a step taken in the right direction.
However, the implementation effort faces some stiff challenges, including lack of accurate census
data about indigenous demography, settlement and language, lack of development of the indi-
genous languages most of which are still oral only, a centralised education system not
accommodating the local needs, widespread poverty (Rahman 2010, 348–353), and more impor-
tantly, lack of teachers, trained or not, to teach the indigenous language textbooks (Manik
2018). The last challenge is so paramount that the students are not being able to benefit
from L1 instruction despite the availability of textbooks, which are ‘collect[ing] dust’ (Manik
2018).
In examining the real trouble with the language and education of the African Americans, James
Baldwin observes that ‘language, incontestably, reveals the speaker’ and ‘it is not the black child’s
language that is in question, it is not his language that is despised: It is his experience’ (1979). He
also asserts that:
Language is also a political instrument, means, and proof of power. It is the most vivid and crucial key to ident-
ify: It reveals the private identity, and connects one with, or divorces one from, the larger, public, or communal
identity. (Baldwin 1979)

The real trouble with the language minorities in Bangladesh, irrespective of whether they live in
the hills or in the plains is not their languages per see. It is their collective experience that is
despised because they are different and vulnerable. They are the ever present ‘Others’, stigma-
tised as ‘backward tribal people’ (Amnesty International 2013, 14), looked down upon and
taken advantage of. Nagorik Uddyog, a non-government organisation, in a report on the
state of minorities in Bangladesh, states that ‘in 2011 at least 40 people belonging to ethnic
minority groups were killed, 94 were injured, 17 abducted, 18 raped and 40 families had
their houses destroyed’ (Amin, Al Amin, and Hossain 2016, 8). As the newspaper reports
show (Daily Star 2016, 2017; New Age 2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2018), currently there does not
seem to be any improvement to this scenario as the non-Bengali communities are still facing
a rising violence across the country (See also, Chakma and Maswood 2017; Maswood 2017;
United News of Bangladesh 2018). As was mentioned at the beginning of the paper that ‘ideol-
ogies of language are not about language alone’ (Woolard 1998, 3). The language oppression in
Bangladesh is an integral part of the grim reality that the language minorities face socially and
politically. The lenses of language ideology, and linguistic diversity and social justice enable us
to see through this tangle clearly.
12 M. M. RAHMAN

The ideology of an international mother language (day)

As has been mentioned at the beginning of this paper, UNESCO’s declaration of 21 February as the
International Mother Language Day (IMLD) recognises the need for first languages as ‘crucial mar-
kers of people’ (Mohsin 2003, 81), especially at a time when ‘one of the world’s languages disappears’
every two weeks, keeping ‘human history and cultural heritage’ under serious threat (UNESCO
2018). UNESCO acknowledges that ‘languages are the most powerful instruments for preserving
and developing tangible and intangible heritages’ and so urges all states ‘to encourage linguistic
diversity and multilingual education for the development of fuller awareness of linguistic and cul-
tural traditions throughout the world and inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance,
and dialogue’ (Mohsin 2003, 81). The declaration is thus a sincere effort to bring the value of L1
to speakers and its current endangerment to the notice of the international community on a regular
basis.
On Bangladesh’s side, this announcement was a huge image booster and sent the country in a
celebratory mood as some 188 countries in the world will now formally celebrate 21 February as
an International Mother Language Day, the day that has been considered one of the nation’s biggest
national events, on which many people participate in a barefooted procession in the early morning to
offer floral wreaths at the pedestal of Shahid Minar, a series of countrywide memorials built for this
purpose, and thus pay homage to the nation’s language heroes (Uddin 2006, 125). Indeed, Bangla-
desh has reasons to be happy in getting such a national day recognised worldwide.
The problem, however, is with how the day is being conceptualised and the impact it is having on
the very country that inspired the international day in the first place. As this section will show
through a critical discourse analysis of an OpEd piece and the annual report of the International
Mother Language Institute (IMLI), the IMLD is conceptualised as a tool for promoting the Bengali
language only and strengthening the cause of national monolingualism, hence not achieving the
goals of linguistic diversity it was supposed to achieve as per the UNESCO declaration.

An op-ed
I tested my assumption primarily by critically evaluating a randomly selected opinion article pub-
lished just before the IMLD in a leading Bengali newspaper, Daily Jugantor, focusing on what the
day means. In a 1634 word long article entitled ‘International Mother Language Day and the Glo-
balizing Process of the Bengali Language2’, the contributor proudly starts with the fact that the
day is being celebrated as the international mother language day of the whole world, details the his-
toric struggles that made the day prominent, its implications for the Bengali identity, how Bengali is
being studied as a subject in global universities, how radios and TVs are run in Bengali throughout
the world, and concludes by saying that ‘no nation can prosper without protection, development, and
practice of their mother tongue’ and the Bengali people are no exception. The ending line is: ‘Thus,
the Bengali language is growing day by day to be one of the media of globalization’ (Islam 2018).
Nowhere in the article, the author makes a single reference to what the day means for us when it
comes to other mother languages, including those spoken by the minority speakers. The article,
thus, is all about Bengali and represents what the ideology of the IMLD is in no uncertain terms,
promoting the prestige and use of Bengali and erasing any mention of other languages.

The discourse of an international mother language institute

On the wake of the UNESCO declaration, Bangladesh founded an International Mother Language
Institute (IMLI) in Dhaka ‘to research ways to maintain the status and rights of the world’s devel-
oping languages and endangered languages’ (IMLI 2017, 2). In order to test whether they are actually
achieving this goal, I analysed their latest Annual Report, 2016–2017.3 The report suggests the IMLI
has accomplished a number of things they can be proud of, including the following: 1. Celebration of
the IMLD with the theme of ‘Towards Sustainable Futures Through Multilingual Education’; 2. An
international seminar on ‘Language Documentation and Multilingual Education’; 3. A national
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 13

seminar on ‘Dialects of Bangla in Bangladesh: Collection and Maintenance’; 4. A popular cultural

function, featuring, among others, the indigenous cultural groups; 5. Workshops on local dialects;
and 6. collection of data for a scientific ethnolinguistic survey (IMLI 2017, 3–6).
However, the report also details how the IMLI (1) trained the Bangladeshi civil servants to use the
standard Bangla language in office, (2) trained the elementary and middle school teachers on how to
use and teach the proper/standard Bangla language in classes, and (3) trained the teacher trainers to
do the same for other teachers. These training sessions were also focused, among other things, on
correct pronunciation, and the avoidance of codeswitching and codemixing (IMLI 2017, 7–9).
Thus, the IMLI, which was supposed to research the endangered languages of the world, ended up
promoting a monolingual and standard language ideology for language in education in Bangladesh
under the rhetoric, through seminars and celebration, of promoting all languages of the world. As the
previous section showed, lack of teacher training is jeopardising the teaching of indigenous children
in their L1 textbooks. The IMLI could have undertaken teacher training programmes for those teach-
ing minority school children. Instead, what we see here is the effort to promote the teaching of Ban-
gla, a language spoken by 98% of the people and a language that is not definitely under threat. Bangla
is not the ‘developing’ language either, which the institution wanted to promote since its inception.

Conclusion
In brief, this research shows that the various historical developments in the Bengal region from the
early twentieth century to present raised the language issues again and again. The Bengal partition in
1905, for example, flared up the Bengali monolingualism and the territorial principle so strongly that
the British had to give in, putting the non-dominant Bengali speaking Muslims at a socio-economic
disadvantage. The partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947 brought to the forefront the
ideologies of an Islamic language, a Hindu language and linguistic diversity as a threat to national
unity, causing social and political troubles for both the Bengali-speaking Muslims in the plains
and the indigenous communities in the hill. The birth of Bangladesh in 1971 ultimately freed the
majority Bengali speaking Muslims from the clutches of any external control, but the subsequent
nation building effort solidified the ideology of national monolingualism, naming the country as
Bangladesh and excluding the minority language speakers from the national representation.
Those minority language communities were never taken care of either in 1905 incident or in
1947 freedom of India and Pakistan. The 1997 Peace Accord after decades of conflict promised lin-
guistic and social justice for the people in the CHT but it failed to bring any quality changes. It is only
in 2010 that the new educational policy of Bangladesh officially started the agenda for elementary
school education through the medium of some indigenous languages, though the actual implemen-
tation is facing stiff challenges. The announcement of 21 February as the International Mother
Language Day in 1999 and the creation of an International Mother Language Institute offered further
hope, but the underlying ideology remained Bengali monolingual, rather than a truly multilingual
one, doing little to protect the linguistic minorities in a country that boasts of being the inspirational
source for an international mother language day, which is reflected in the news headlines reported at
the beginning of the article: (1) ‘Indigenous Language Textbooks Collect Dust’ (Manik 2018), and (2)
‘The Denial of Linguistic Diversity in Bangladesh’ (Tripura 2018).
Overall, the Bengal region, especially what is now called Bangladesh, sparked the language debates
at almost all the major turning points of its history, involving the question of identity, nationhood,
political hegemony, inclusion and exclusion of the socially non-dominant groups and speakers of
minority languages. As this paper shows, the questions were there at beginning of the twentieth cen-
tury, and these are there now, with the national Bengali monolingual ideology still creating barriers
for a socially just future.
Finally, in understanding any system of oppression, the concept of privilege is a significant one.
According to Piller (2016, 208), privilege refers to ‘the unearned benefits of socially dominant groups
in systems of oppression’ and works in two ways, firstly ‘by sparing the privileged from
14 M. M. RAHMAN

discrimination,’ and secondly, ‘by awarding them unjust benefits’ (2016, 208). Privilege also makes a
particular identity category ‘hidden to the privileged’ and examples include the fact that mostly
women are aware of gender discrimination, people of colour of white racism, LGBTQ people of het-
erosexism. As a person and researcher, I have been one of those linguistically privileged in Bangla-
desh and am subject to similar questioning. This research on the linguistic diversity and social justice
results out of these questionings from a critical applied sociolinguistic perspective and provides us
with some informed and situated understanding of how language ideologies and linguistic injustice
work and how we can strive for a linguistically just world. However, further research focusing specifi-
cally on the non-Bengali minority groups both in the hills and in the plains throughout the time
period under study can provide more information for this purpose.

Notes
1. It is important to note that there is disagreement over how many different groups live there (See Chakma 2010;
Uddin 2016).
2. The article was published in Bengali. All translations provided here are mine.
3. The annual report of IMLI was published in Bengali too. All translations provided here are mine.

Acknowledgment
An initial version of this paper was presented in the Conference of the American Association of Applied Linguistics in
Chicago, IL, USA on 24 March 2018. I thank those who attended my session and provided valuable comments. Also,
special thanks go to Dr. Susan M Burt under whose guidance I completed the research and without whose support the
paper would not have been possible.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Md Mijanur Rahman http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2485-8568

References
Al-Masum, M. Abdullah. 2012. “Partition of Bengal (1905) and its Impact on Muslim Education in Eastern Bengal.”
Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 60 (3): 59–83.
Amin, Afsana, Muhammad Al Amin, and Zakir Hossain. 2016. Bangladesh State of Minorities Report-2016: Paving the
Way to Liberation. Dhaka: Nagorik Uddyog.
Amnesty International. 2013. Pushed to the Edge: Indigenous Rights Denied in Bangladesh’s Chittagong Hill Tracts.
London: Amnesty International.
Bal, Pritish Kumar. 2017. “The Undiscussed Chapter of History: The Role of the Indigenous People in Bengal’s Struggle
for Freedom.” Vorer Kagoz, March 28. http://www.bhorerkagoj.net/print-edition/2017/03/28/138703.php.
Baldwin, James. 1979. “If Black English isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What is?” The New York Times, July 29. http://
movies2.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials/baldwin-english.html.
Bangladesh National Assembly Debates. 1974. “Bangladesh National Assembly Debates” 1 (6), 23 January 1974. Dacca
[Dhaka]: Government of the People’s Republic of Bangladesh.
BBC. 2018. “Bangladesh Country Profile.” BBC News, February 14. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-south-asia-
12650940.
Bell, Lee Anne. 2016. “Theoretical Foundations for Social Justice Education.” In Teaching for Diversity and Social
Justice, edited by Maurianne Adams and Lee Anne Bell, 3rd ed., 3–16. New York and London: Routledge.
Chakma, Bhumitra. 2010. “The Post-colonial State and Minorities: Ethnocide in the Chittagong Hill Tracts,
Bangladesh.” Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 48 (3): 281–300. doi:10.1080/14662043.2010.489746.
Chakma, Shantimoy, and Manzur H. Maswood. 2017. “Few Ethnic Minority People Return Home.” The New Age, June
8. http://www.newagebd.net/print/article/17284.
 JOURNAL OF MULTILINGUAL AND MULTICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT 15

Daily Star. 2016. “Violence Against Ethnic Minorities Increasing.” The Daily Star, March 24. https://www.thedailystar.
net/city/violence-against-ethnic-minorities-increasing-1198804.
Daily Star. 2017. “23 Ethnic People Killed Last Year”. The Daily Star, February 27. https://www.thedailystar.net/
backpage/23-ethnic-people-killed-last-year-1367746.
Dhar, Bijoy. 2018. “Textbooks for Chakma, Marma and Tripura Children in Their Languages.” Dhaka Tribune, January
2. https://www.dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/education/2018/01/02/indigenous-language-textbooks-children/.
Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009. “Partition of Bengal: Indian History.” Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.
com/event/Partition-of-Bengal.
Faruq, Sufi. 2015. “The ‘Language Matters’ - Concept to Address Public Urination Problem of Dhaka City.” YouTube,
May 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6wDbd4-McI.
Fishman, Joshua A. 1991. “An Inter-polity Perspective on the Relationships between Linguistic Heterogeneity, Civil
Strife, and Per Capita Gross National Product.” International Journal of Applied Linguistics 1 (1): 5–18.
Freire, Paulo. 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30th ed. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Haque, Ziaul. 2017. “Indigenous Students Get Books in Mother Tongue.” Dhaka Tribune, January 2. https://www.
dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/education/2017/01/02/indigenous-students-get-books-mother-tongue/.
Hill, Jane. 1998. “‘Today There is No Respect’: Nostalgia, ‘Respect,’ and Oppositional Discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl)
Language Ideology.” In Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A.
Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 68–86. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
International Mother Language Institute. 2017. Annual Report, 2016–2017. Dhaka: International Mother Language
Institute. http://imli.portal.gov.bd/site/page/80b7ce66-124c-4bd6-954b-8a1b55a40e09/Annual-Report-2016-2017.
Islam, B. P. Rakibul. 2018. “Antorjatik Matrivasha Dibosh O Bangla Vashar Bishayan Prokria [International Mother
Language Day and the Process of Globalizing the Bengali Language].” Jugantor, February 19. https://www.jugantor.
com/viewers-opinion/19535/.
Jhala, Angma D. 2013. “Daughters of the Hills: Legacies of Colonialism, Nationalism and Religious Communalism in
the Chakma Raj Family, Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bengal c. 1900–1972.” South Asian History and Culture 4 (1): 107–
125. doi:10.1080/19472498.2012.750460.
Kabiraj, Sudipta. 2006. “The Making of a Language of Patriotism in Modern Bengali.” In Nationalism and
Ethnosymbolism: History, Culture and Ethnicity in the Formation of Nations, edited by Athena Leoussi and
Steven Grosby, 248–264. Edinburg: Edinburg University Press.
Lippi-Green, Rosina. 2012. English with an Accent: Language, Ideology and Discrimination in the United States. 2nd ed.
London and New York: Routledge.
Manik, Nuruchsafa. 2018. “Indigenous Language Textbooks Collect Dust.” Dhaka Tribune, February 21. http://www.
dhakatribune.com/bangladesh/education/2018/02/21/textbooks-in-indigenous-languages-remain-shelved/.
Maswood, Manzur H. 2017. “Insecurity Grips Young Girls, Women of Ethnic Minority.” The New Age, June 11. http://
www.newagebd.net/print/article/17495.
McLane, John R. 1965. “The Decision to Partition in Bengal in 1905.” Indian Economic & Social History Review 2 (3):
221–237.
Ministry of Education. 2010. National Education Policy. Ministry of Education, Government of the People’s Republic of
Bangladesh. https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/02.National-Education-Policy-2010-English.pdf.
Mohsin, Amena. 2003. “Language, Identity, and the State in Bangladesh.” In Fighting Words: Language Policy and
Ethnic Relations in Asia, edited by Michael E. Brown and Sumit Ganguly, 81–104. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
New Age. 2016. “Police Attack Killed 4 Santals: Ethnic Minority Leaders Claim.” The New Age, November 12. http://
www.newagebd.net/print/article/2618.
New Age. 2017a. “Violence Against Ethnic Minority Women Increasing: Rights Activists.” The New Age, June 13.
http://www.newagebd.net/print/article/17662.
New Age. 2017b. “Woman Dies as Ethnic Minority Houses Set Ablaze.” The New Age, June 3. http://www.newagebd.
net/print/article/16890.
New Age. 2018. “Ethnic Minority Child Killed After Rape.” The New Age, July 29. http://www.newagebd.net/print/
article/47201.
New World Encyclopedia. 2015. “Partition of Bengal 1905.” New World Encyclopedia. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.
org/entry/Partition_of_Bengal_(1905).
Panday, Pranab Kumar, and Ishtiaq Jamil. 2009. “Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh: An
Unimplemented Accord and Continued Violence.” Asian Survey 49 (6): 1052–1070. doi:AS.2009.49.6.1052.
Piller, Ingrid. 2016. Linguistic Diversity and Social Justice: An Introduction to Applied Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Potowsky, Kim. 2010. “Language Diversity in the USA: Dispelling Common Myths and Appreciating Advantages.” In
Language Diversity in the USA, edited by Kim Potowsky, 1–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rahman, Tariq. 2002. Language, Ideology and Power: Language-learning Among the Muslims of Pakistan and North
India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
16 M. M. RAHMAN

Rahman, Tania. 2010. “A Multilingual Language-in-education Policy for Indigenous Minorities in Bangladesh:
Challenges and Possibilities.” Current Issues in Language Planning 11 (4): 341–359. doi:10.1080/14664208.2010.
537816.
Riaz, Ali. 2016. “Making of the Nation, Making of the State: Nationalism and Mobilization.” In Bangladesh: A Political
History Since Independence, 9–37. New York: I. B. Tauris.
Silverstein, Michael. 1985. “Language and the Culture of Gender.” In Semiotic Mediation, edited by Elizabeth Mertz
and Richard Parmentler, 219–259. New York: Academic Press.
Simons, Gary F., and Charles D. Fennig, eds. 2018. Ethnologue: Languages of the World, 21st ed. Dallas, TX: SIL
International. http://www.ethnologue.com.
Siraj, Nasrin, and Ellen Bal. 2017. “‘Hunger has Brought Us into this Jungle’: Understanding Mobility and Immobility
of Bengali Immigrants in the Chittagong Hills of Bangladesh.” Social Identities 23 (4): 396–412. doi:10.1080/
13504630.2017.1281443.
Taylor, Charles L., and Michael C. Hudson. 1972. World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators. 2nd ed. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Thomson, Hanne-Ruth. 2007. “Bangladesh.” In Language and National Identity in Asia, edited by Andrew Simpson,
33–54. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Tripura, Prashanta. 2018. “The Denial of Linguistic Diversity in Bangladesh.” Dhaka Tribune, February 27. http://
www.dhakatribune.com/special-supplement/2018/02/21/denial-linguistic-diversity-bangladesh/.
Uddin, Sufia M. 2006. Constructing Bangladesh: Religion, Ethnicity, and Language in an Islamic Nation. Chapel Hill:
The University of North Carolina Press.
Uddin, Ala. 2015. “Education in Peace-building: The Case of Post-conflict Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh.” The
Oriental Anthropologist 15 (1): 59–76.
Uddin, Ala. 2016. “Dynamics of Strategies for Survival of the Indigenous People in Southeastern Bangladesh.”
Ethnopolitics 15 (3): 319–338. doi:10.1080/17449057.2015.1037060.
UNESCO. 2008. International Mother Language Day (IMLD), Report of Member States’ Activities to Promote Linguistic
Diversity and Multilingual Education Development, 2000–2007. Paris: UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/
0016/001624/162418e.pdf.
UNESCO. 2018. “Message from Ms Audrey Azoulay, Director-general of UNESCO, on the Occasion of International
Mother Language Day, 21 February 2018.” UNESCO. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0026/002614/261469e.pdf.
United News of Bangladesh. 2018. “32 Ethnic Minority Women, Children Face Sexual Violence in Seven Months.” The
New Age, August 8. http://www.newagebd.net/print/article/47937.
Wilkinson, Matthew. 2015. “Negotiating with the Other: Centre-periphery Perceptions, Peacemaking Policies and
Pervasive Conflict in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh.” International Review of Social Research 5 (3):
179–190. doi:10.1515/irsr-2015-0017.
Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. “Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of Inquiry.” In Language Ideologies: Practice
and Theory, edited by Bambi B. Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity, 3–47. New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
WorldAtlas. 2018. “What Languages are Spoken in Bangladesh?” WorldAtlas.com. https://www.worldatlas.com/
articles/what-languages-are-spoken-in-bangladesh.html.