This reader’s letter was originally published as a comment by Marie Thaut, Project Manager of the Sylheti Project – SOAS in Camden, on this Whitechapel London article: With third-generation British Bangladeshis losing their mother tongue, the community faces a tipping point
‘Yes, it is confusing [defining the Sylheti and Bangla languages]. It can help to separate the national politics of neo-colonial nation-state building from linguistic sciences.
There are in fact over 50 languages spoken in Bangladesh today, from three different language families. This is what linguistic studies have shown.
However, politically, these languages aren’t recognised because Bangladesh is a neo-colonial nation-state following the colonial goal of cultural assimilation, that is, ‘one nation, one religion, one language’ that started in Europe and was spread around the world through European colonialism.
Examples of this are English killing off the other languages in what was Great Britain (Note that some today misidentify Scots are a ‘dialect’ of English when it is a ‘separate’ language with its own history), standard French killing off many of the other now endangered languages spoken within the borders of the current nation-state, Italy promoting only standard Italian in schools to the detriment of all of Italy’s other languages, etc. Article 9 in Bangladesh’s constitution recognises only Bengali/Bangla, which creates some hypocritical situations where the supposed ‘dialects’ are concerned.
For example, Chittagonian/Satgaia and Rohingia are ‘twin-sister’ languages that are very much related to each other. Yet, for various political reasons, like not granting Rohingia refugees citizenship in Bangladesh, the Bangladesh government declares Chittagonian/Satgaia to be a ‘dialect of Bengali/Bangla’, but not Rohingia. (The Bangladesh government has even made it illegal to teach Bengali/Bangla to Rohingia refugees. Language being used as a political weapon.) Linguistically, Chittagonian/Satgaia and Rohingia are related, but according to Bangladesh political decisions, they are not.
Another example, Chakma is a ‘sister’ language to Sylheti/Siloti and Chittagonian/Satgaia, but the Bangladesh government doesn’t consider Chakma speakers to be ‘racially Bengali/Bangla’ so Chakma isn’t diminished to a ‘dialect of Bengali/Bangla’. Linguistically, Sylheti/Siloti and Chakma are related, but according to Bangladesh political decisions, they are not. (This is in line with the Bangladesh government’s ethnic cleansing of the Chittagong Hill tracts in the 1980s, which inspired Myanmar to only offer citizenship to certain communities, not including the Rohingia speakers, resulting in today’s refugee crisis of stateless Rohingia speakers.)
Politics follows its own logic when interpreting reality to fit neo-colonial goals of assimilation of minorities. Political messaging warps reality to fit a bias. With Independence and Partition in 1947, technically Bengali/Bangla which is based on the Gaur language of Nadia (re-named ‘Bengali’ by the British) is a foreign language in Bangladesh…
For the regional languages spoken today in Bangladesh, they are separate languages from Gaur/Bengali/Bangla because they are separate systems – sound systems, grammar systems, etc. with separate histories. But Bengali/Bangla domination is trying to erase their separateness, and many people repeat the political propaganda that they have been taught.
According to Article 9, without understanding the complicated linguistics and history that make them separate languages. While some of Bangladesh’s regional languages are spoken by millions of people and have survived Persian and British colonial pressures to assimilate, that is, lose their separate cultural identities and languages, Bangladesh’s neo-colonialism along with global pressures is causing more and more parents to no longer pass on their mother languages to their children, in favour of what capitalist values say would be ‘better’ languages, that is, languages for jobs sanctioned by neo-colonial governments, instead of the languages that allow people to speak to their grandparents and continue cultural transmission, which can have negative social and health repercussions.
The ideology of monolingualism hurts everyone. Humans are naturally multilingual. Learning additional languages is good for the brain.
A major difference between the Gangic Gaur/Bengali/Bangla language and the languages from the Meghna and lower Brahmaputra river basins is that Gangic languages aren’t tonal, while all Sylheti/Siloti, Chakma, Chittagonian/Satgaia, and Rohingia are tonal languages, a feature that took hundreds of years to evolve, separately from languages like Bengali/Bangla.
A simplified example to demonstrate tonal differences is:
in Bengali/Bangla, [bhat] ‘rice’, [bat] ‘arthiritis’
(in Hindi-Urdu [bhat] ‘rice’, [bat (rog)] ‘arthiritis’)
in Sylheti/Siloti [ba/t] ‘rice’ with high tone (no [h] sound in Sylheti/Siloti like Bengali/Bangla), [bat] ‘arthiritis’ with low tone.
And multiply these differences in high, mid, and low tones for hundreds of pairs and triplets of words in Sylheti/Siloti to have thousands of words that are not the same as in Bengali/Bangla. In fact, above Bengali/Bangla is more similar to Hindi-Urdu than it is to Sylheti/Siloti. Lexical tone isn’t an ‘accent’, it’s a feature that takes hundreds of years of evolution.
Related languages will have similar-sounding words from a shared origin, standard/High German ‘Vater’ – English ‘father’. Standard German and English are Germanic languages, but English is not a ‘dialect’ of today’s standard German.
Bengali/Bangla [car] ‘four’ – Hindi-Urdu [car] ‘four’ – Sylheti/Siloti [sair] ‘four’ – Assamese [sari] ‘four’ – …
It’s not politically acceptable to call Bengali/Bangla a ‘dialect’ of Hindi-Urdu, and it shouldn’t be acceptable either to call Sylheti/Siloti and Assamese ‘dialects’ of Bengali/Bangla, but politics don’t describe reality, they manipulate reality.
The Bangladesh government grouping different languages together to create a (false) Bengali/Bangla-speaking majority isn’t uncommon. India does it too to create a (false) Hindi-speaking majority.
The Indian government groups together over 60 major languages, some like Bhojpuri with over 50 million speakers and Rajasthani with over 25 million speakers, diminishing them to political ‘dialects’, but they remain linguistically ‘separate’ languages. (The linguistic use the term dialect is not this political use of ‘dialect’.) The British grouped together the different Anglo-Saxon languages, with a couple hundred years of advance on south Asia, so that the last speakers of non-English Anglo-Saxon languages died in the 1990s.
Lastly, language and group/ethnic and national identities may overlap sometimes but they can also be quite separate. It’s important to not confuse those either when they’re different. In the 19th century, a large number of Sylheti speakers migrated to Hojai, Assam and they do not identify as Bengali, because they have been living in a different political situation.
In London, many don’t realise that not all Sylheti speakers are Muslim, nor Bangladeshi, nor identify as Bengali, which is fine. Everyone doesn’t need to follow the dominant politics of one country. Minority groups, just like minority political ideologies, do exist. No community is a monolith. All communities also have diversity within them.
Today, there are over 7000 languages spoken around the world, with fewer than 200 countries. All countries are multilingual, even if governments refuse to recognise this reality and promote cultural assimilation of minority groups.’
Thaut also said: