Save indigenous languages
An article entitled “Strangers in a strange land”, published recently in The Star, a weekly publication of this daily, pointed at the other linguistic factions of Bangladesh, especially about the endangered state of hill people's languages.
Our language movement is now internationally recognised and the whole world knows that people of this land sacrificed their lives to protect their mother tongue Bengali against the imposition of Urdu and Pakistani culture. We are proud of 21st February because now we are able to speak, sing and write in our own language. But have we ever thought of the 45 ethnic groups in the country who have at least 38 different languages?
However, it is very unfortunate that a majority of non-Bengali children receive education in Bengali that they do not understand properly, because Bengali is the language of instruction in all government educational institutions in Bangladesh. As a result, as the article says, an estimated 55.5 percent of the children of the indigenous communities aged 6-10 years are not enrolled in school. The dropout rate is almost 60 percent.
It may be mentioned that our constitution guarantees the right to study in one's own mother tongue. But the government has not yet provided primary education to the indigenous children in their mother languages violating the Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord 1997.
Anyway, now it is obvious that any attempt to impose Bengali on the indigenous people at the expense of their mother tongue will have negative impact on them. So we hope the government will do the needful soon because a number of indigenous languages have become already extinct.
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