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      Indigenous ethnic languages in Bangladesh: Paradoxes of the multilingual ecology

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      Ethnicities
      SAGE Publications

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          Abstract

          Languages are at the centre of nationalistic discourses across South Asia since they have played a historically and politically significant role in defining nationhood and both uniting and dividing countries throughout the British Empire. Despite multilingualism and multiculturalism, and vast differences in individual access to, and command of, mother tongue, national and official languages, paradoxically a collective language is always considered as an important imagined marker of ‘national’ identity. It is this latter point I explore by drawing on ethnographic fieldwork amongst Bangladeshi youths from indigenous ethnic communities who are designated as ethnic minority groups in Bangladesh. Positioning the paper at the nexus of multilingual ecology, I thereby investigate how youths from the indigenous ethnic communities perceive themselves with reference to their mother tongue, national language, and foreign language, and what impact their relationships, their preferences, and use have on the maintenance and sustainability of their mother tongue in the multilingual ecology. A qualitative content analysis of the data demonstrates that it is only by taking the varying potential scopes of language into account that we can fully appreciate these complex Asian multilingual ecologies, where the mother tongues, indigenous ethnic languages, national languages, and English have specific historical, political, and sociocultural significances. The discursive claims of Bangladeshi ethnic youth participants indicate that the presence of the ‘mother-tongue’ and ‘national language’ in these contexts is ideologically infused, layered, value-laden, relational, and paradoxical at the microlevel – as these languages are practiced and nurtured by the linguistically minoritized subjects themselves. They negotiate their relationship with these languages, strictly keeping in consideration the existence of other languages and their social, cultural, economic significance in the multilingual ecology. It is via the paradoxical role of these languages in contexts that the paper aims to identify the socio-psychological reasons behind language loss in Bangladesh.

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                (View ORCID Profile)
                Journal
                Ethnicities
                Ethnicities
                SAGE Publications
                1468-7968
                1741-2706
                October 2023
                June 18 2021
                October 2023
                : 23
                : 5
                : 680-705
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Department of English language, Institute of Modern Languages, University of Dhaka, Bangladesh
                Article
                10.1177/14687968211021520
                7c223b38-b794-42e4-b42c-0ebdf17e8f8d
                © 2023

                http://journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license

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