Bangla is a difficult language to learn. This isn’t another blonde moment from an English-medium elitist who can’t tell the difference between the three “sho” sounds and the two “ro” sounds and so on, although the hat certainly fits.
Put those stakes and effigies down and really listen for a minute. From politicians going “chudurbudur” inside the parliament, to blockbuster silver screen celebs talking about their “poti din er routine,” to badly transliterated or “Benglish” Facebook status messages, it is a little sad that for a country with Bangla in our name, we can barely scrape by with something that sounds somewhat like it.
Sure, there is a place for colloquialism, for dialects and casual talk. But there is also a need for formal, academic and professional Bangla, and that is where the speakers, irrespective of their medium of education, start to crumble.
An examination of how the language is taught in schools may shed some light on the problem. The curriculum and books for Bangla at the middle and high school level are set by the national board under the Ministry of Education.
These are the same “Amar Boi” series that pretty much all schools study, and in recent years, these have evolved to include more comprehensive glossaries, summaries for poems, etc. The selection is eclectic, with samples taken from must-know poets and writers, profiles of Bir Sreshto honorees and more. Admirable, but is it enough?
The long-standing criticism of the Bangla medium system remains the same: its emphasis on rote systems, as opposed to a practical application of skills. The stories about students memorising entire essays have long become legend. With a decline in the number of bookstores and libraries, and the reading habit as a whole, this problem is no longer offset by students supplementing their learning on their own initiative.
English medium students have it even harder. For the purpose of keeping things simple, we won’t even go into the topic of the quality of instruction, or how dry the teaching methods are, in comparison to other language courses.
The recent shift from the London to the Cambridge board for O’ and A’ levels has changed the syllabus to put a greater emphasis on Bangla grammar. Students now need to learn more idioms, learn how to split and unite portmanteau words, as well as bone up on their vocabulary the way they would for the SAT verbal test.
This might be a good thing, but a case of too little, too late, because all of this is only introduced in the eighth or ninth grade, around the time they start preparing for their O’ levels.
To make matters worse, with only two courses per academic year – Bangla Language and Bangla Literature – and all other subjects being taught in English, the students are missing out on the immersion necessary to pick up the language.
The faulty education system may be part of the problem, but perhaps a bigger share of the blame belongs to forces beyond the classroom. Have you noticed that hardly anyone speaks the same Bangla that the students study at school?
It used to be, even a decade ago, that the television shows, films and advertisements featured spoken Bangla that was close to the “shuddho” Bangla that the schools are trying to teach. Even the regional dialects used were pure, the characters speaking in the dialect sticking to form.
The current norm, however, is to use a bastardised form of spoken Bangla that mashes up several dialects with urban slang, colloquialisms, and “Benglish” terms.
Made popular by the telefilms by Mostofa Sarwar Farooki and the hugely successful youth campaigns by the telecom companies, this mongrel patois is everywhere – in our serials, in our ads, up on the billboards, blaring at us over the radio. And this is how everyone is speaking.
If schools want to build on the positive steps they’ve already taken to improve the Bangla proficiency of their students, they should encourage more public speaking and debate competitions in the language, and assign fun reading lists to supplement their curricula.
Parents can chime in by trying to instill in their children an appreciation for the arts – Satyajit Ray’s films, or Sukumar Ray’s poems, or Humayun Ahmed’s plays, to name just a few that our incredibly rich heritage has to offer.
Once a demand for purer Bangla is generated, the corporations and media have no recourse but to adapt. And then, maybe we can actually put the “Bangla” in Bangladesh.