Sociolinguistics through a Story

Sociolinguistics through a Story

Tamim and His Life with Languages

Talla is a typical suburb in Bangladesh where a teen named Tamim lives. Tamim is a curious boy. He loves to research, especially on language related things, with a curious mind. Thus, people say that he has the potentials to be a linguist in his career. However, as an intermediate student, Tamim has to study Bangla as a major subject in college. He speaks mostly in his local dialect, but he knows the standard Bangla well.  While he stays at home and with friends, he uses local dialect or the low variety of Bangla as he feels comfortable in it. On the other hand, he uses the standard Bangla, usually known as the book language, in any formal environment such as college, offices, writing etc. Sometimes, for academic discussions, he uses standard Bangla even with his friends as using the local dialect for academia would sound “odd”.

Tamim has two friends in college, Shamsher and Thong Pru. The former is from Chittagong district and the latter is a Chakma, the largest ethnic minority group in Bangladesh. In college, Shamsher speaks in standard Bangla with the teachers and his friends, but whenever he finds anyone from his district, he switches to Chittagonian, a distinct dialect of Bangla. Shamsher’s fellow classmates say that they can hardly understand what he says in his dialect. The most interesting situation comes for Thong Pru as he can speak both the Chittagonian dialect and his own language Chakma which is totally different from Bangla. Thong Pru speaks Chittagonian only with Shamsher and most of the time he has to use standard Bangla. He could not speak Bangla when he was a child, but later he learned it from school as he says to Tamim.  

Sociolinguistics through a Story

Tamim watches a lot of talk shows on TV. The thing which draws his attention most is that the speakers at the talk shows use a lot of English vocabularies and even full sentences though most of the time unconsciously. At the mosque, Tamim listens to the sermons and finds the Imam switching to and coating from Arabic, Persian and Urdu. He loves listening to sermons as these are full of linguistic elements which he finds interesting. While studying Bangla lexicology, Tamim finds that he himself uses a lot of foreign words every day those do not sound unfamiliar. Actually, Bangla language has been borrowing a lot of words from other languages for some hundred years as all the mainstream languages do.

One day Tamim was reading the history of Bangladesh. Bangladesh was a center of attractions for the foreign invaders and the merchants from the ancient period of time. A large number of people from Arab, Persia, and Turkey came at the medieval period. They came with their own languages Arabic, Persian and Turkish. By the course of time, they got assimilated with the Bangladeshi people and so did their languages. That is how a language shift occurred here. Today there is no Bangladeshi community who speak Arabic as their first language. Tamim heard that some of the children of his relatives who reside in U.S.A cannot speak in Bangla; rather they speak English as their parents were unwilling to teach any “unnecessary language”. Probably, after the second generation of that diaspora community, no one would know any Bangla.

Though Tamim knew the term “Lingua Franca”, he did not have a clear idea on it. He searched the internet and found some interesting information. If a student from China and another from Bangladesh want to talk in a situation where they do not know their languages, what would be the way? They must share a common language to communicate. That common language works as a lingua franca for them. English is considered to be a world language and it is used as a lingua franca by most of the people. Due to the British colonial rule and their strong economic condition, the English language got a chance to travel the whole world. Today, multicultural and multilingual people find English as a common language to share their views. There are many “Lingua Franca” or common languages throughout the world like Hindustani (Hindi and Urdu) in India and Pakistan; Classical Arabic in Arabic speaking countries; Spanish in Latin America; French in some European and African countries and many more. 

Once, Tamim was going through the Constitution of Bangladesh. In one of the chapters, he saw a sentence that Bangla is the national and official language of Bangladesh. Tamim could not differentiate between a national and official language, so he asked his Bangla teacher for an explanation. National language is the language which is the symbol of national unity. Most of the monolingual countries in the world have a national language and that is also used as an official language. Official languages are the languages which are used as means of conducting the official activities like administration, diplomacy, legal works etc. For example, India is a multilingual country and their constitution does not allow any national language, but they use Hindi, English and fourteen other languages as their official language. In India, English is a lingua franca and an official language, but it can never become a national language in India as there is no English speaking (L1) community in India. Turkish is the national language of Turkey because of having its role to unite the nation. Above all, languages play a vital role in policy making for a nation or a state.   

Note:

The text above introduced the following topics:

1.      Using languages in different situations (Paragraph 1)

2.      Diglossia and Polyglossia (Paragraph 2)

3.      Code Switching, Code Mixing, and Borrowing (Paragraph 3)

4.      Language Shift (Paragraph 4)

5.      Lingua Franca (Paragraph 5)

6.      National and Official Language (Paragraph 6)   
 
    
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MD.DIDARUL ISLAM  

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