The majority of textbooks in indigenous languages of the country are gathering dust on shelves due to a lack of teachers proficient in the languages.
Around a hundred textbooks under the new curriculum are being printed in five indigenous languages - Chakma, Marma, Tripura, Garo and Sadri – this year.
On recent visits to schools with students from the indigenous community, officials of the National Curriculum and Textbook Board (NCTB) found teachers struggling to teach students textbooks in indigenous languages.
Meanwhile, the students were focusing on English and Bangla, as they need these two languages to thrive in mainstream society.
Prof Md Moshiuzzaman, member (curriculum) of the NCTB, told Dhaka Tribune: “A government school in Bandarban has 12 students from the indigenous community enrolled. Many of the indigenous communities have no written form of the language and no teachers.”
He added that creating separate schools for the indigenous community was not an option, as it may encourage discrimination.
“Research to recover and store these indigenous languages requires a lot of resources. Unfortunately, the indigenous communities do not have proficient and skilled teachers in their languages among their members,” the NCTB member further said.
The indigenous community-based organization Kapaeeng Foundation said the International Mother Language Institute (IMLI) was established to research, collect and store all the languages, but it does not focus on indigenous issues.
International Mother Language Institute Director General Prof Hakim Arif told Dhaka Tribune the institute has been unable to carry out its duties with inadequate funding.
“We also found that many of the smaller indigenous groups can no longer write or speak their alphabet. It has become difficult to preserve these languages.
Currently, at least 30 million people of small ethnic groups live in several areas of Bangladesh, including the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Sylhet, and Mymensingh.
According to the IMLI, so far, 14 languages have disappeared while around 50 minority ethnic groups exist in the country.
According to the International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs (IWGIA), at least 43 %of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world today are endangered.
Many of these belong to indigenous peoples and if something does not change soon, UNESCO predicts that as many as 3,000 indigenous languages will be lost by the end of this century.
In order to create awareness about the preservation, promotion and development of endangered indigenous languages of the world, the United Nations declared the decade of 2022-2032 as the "International Indigenous Language Decade" on December 18, 2019.
In 2010, the Bangladesh government formulated a new education policy and took the initiative to provide primary education in their mother tongue to five ethnic groups out of 50, who have written forms of their indigenous languages.
The government has been distributing primary school textbooks in indigenous languages since 2017.