Sazia Sharmin discusses the significance of our mother tongue, Bangla
Dhaka is a city haunted by the colonial ghost the British left behind. We insist on using English for everything even if it is laughably imperfect or pompously verbose and completely unnecessary. We only read trendy English paperbacks in public. We send our children to the so-called international English medium schools as dictated by our class identity. Even the national curriculum is now delivered in English all over the country. Many schools forbid children to speak Bangla even among themselves during recess. They demand parents speak English to their children. More often than not, you hear children speaking in English with each other at the Pizza Hut play area. The popular GrameenPhone ad about long distance learning shows a cute kid from the Chittagong hill tracts learning English at his online school and teaching his grandmother: “A for apple.”
As a nation, we seem to have decided that Bangla, our mother tongue is at best an ornamental part of our identity without any real practical function. Yet every year, we make a big fuss in February. Even the garden variety English medium schools put up nice little Shaheed Minars and ask children to come to school wearing “traditional clothing.” Is this an attempt at kitschification or a true recognition of the pivotal role language plays in the formation of identity? Why should we really still bother about Ekushe February?
I don’t want to bore you by repeating what we already know: how language, culture and identity are intricately intermeshed and how Ekushe February laid the foundation of our national identity. I don’t want to make you feel guilty by reminding you of the Shaheeds who sacrificed their lives for our language. I want to give you some practical reasons why Bangla still matters and most importantly, why our children should learn it well. It’s obvious why we obsess over English. We want our children to be successful in the global workplace. Now, what if I told you that learning Bangla will help children learn English better? English as a Second Language (ESL) student in international schools have been observed to learn English better and faster if they maintain and develop their proficiency in the mother tongue. Experts tell us that when children first learn to read in their first language well, it accelerates the development of reading skills in the second language. English medium schools currently practice the exact opposite! It seems that in Bangladesh, we are afraid that learning Bangla first would damage our children in a way that would forever get in their way of learning English even though educational and linguistic experts tell us otherwise.
A report commissioned by UNESCO tells us that children’s ability to learn a second language does not suffer when their mother tongue is the primary language of instruction through primary school. Fluency and literacy in the mother tongue lay a cognitive and linguistic foundation for learning long term. When children are abruptly forced to switch to a second language, their first language acquisition is often deterred or even lost. On the other hand, when children gradually transition into academic learning in a second language, they learn it quickly. If they receive the necessary support for continual development in the first language, they emerge as bilingual learners. Maybe this explains why Bangla medium students continue to enjoy spectacular academic success at an international level, especially when it comes to merit-based scholarships. The kind of English language learning environment we see in Dhaka has been described as language “submersion” rather than immersion. Our children spent a lot more time talking to each other rather than people who speak the language well enough to help them learn it. The English they end up hearing most often is the imperfect varieties spoken by classmates (and dare I say by adults, including parents and teachers) rather than standard verities. When we stop using Bangla with our children, we run the risk of not letting them develop neither their Bangla nor English to the best of their ability.
Our children should learn Bangla well so that they can actually listen to and understand their parents and grandparents. They need it to engage into greater issues around them beyond household matters. They need it to thrive at work and in personal life. The loss of the mother tongue is associated with a disruption of family ties. While children living in Bangladesh may not entirely lose Bangla, we have to admit there is a clear decline in advanced mastery of Bangla as a medium of communication. You may not think it’s necessary for your children to delve into Bangla grammar or literature, but you have to admit that the ability to make a cogent argument in their mother tongue is a formidable communication skill. Our growing economy and promising workforce makes Bangla a useful business language for future entrepreneurs. It is also an essential skill for future leaders of our nation. Mastering our mother tongue gives us a sense of pride and connectedness to our cultural heritage. It enables us to become global citizens and strengthens us against prejudice and racism.
I’ve been trying to convince you of the instrumental value of Bangla as a language for the future generation, but I’d like to end with a brief reminder about its value as a medium of expression and thought. I worry about the children in this country whose inner voice that speaks their mother tongue is being silenced by society. What if these children forget how to think in Bangla? Can they really have an inner life entirely in English or some other language? In what language do they ponder about the universe? If we don’t equip them to think and express themselves in their mother tongue, I worry that they will end up caught between languages. Belgian writer Luc Sante writes of such children: “He has two tongues: one is all quivering, unmediated, a primal sensation, and the other is detached, deliberate, and artificial. To give a full accounting he would have to split himself in two.”
Eva Hoffman writes about her experience as an immigrant child, “For a while, I was in effect without language, and from the bleakness of that condition, I understood how much our inner existence, our sense of self, depends on having a living speech within us. To lose an internal language is to subside into an inarticulate darkness in which we become alien to ourselves.” While Hoffman experienced her inner silence upon emigration, the global pressures experienced locally makes it just as relevant for our children right here, right now. Don’t let them sink into the realm of silence that Julia Kristeva has hauntingly described as the silence of the polyglot:
“Not speaking one’s mother tongue. Living with resonances and reasoning that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood. Bearing within oneself like a secret vault, or like a handicapped child — cherished and useless — that language of the past that withers without ever leaving you. Thus, between two languages, your realm is silence. By dint of saying things in various ways, one just as trite as the other, just as approximate, one ends up no longer saying them.”
Please help children speak, read, write, and most importantly, think in Bangla. It is the language we cuddled and cooed with when they were just born. It is our language of love and laughter, the language of our inner voice. Don’t let them lose it.