Bangladesh court outlaws use of "Banglish" on TV, radio

PanARMENIAN.Net - A Bangladesh court has outlawed the use of English slang known as "Banglish" on television and radio stations, a move welcomed by experts who worry about a foreign invasion of their language.

According to AFP, the High Court issued the order on Thursday, Feb 16, "to uphold the sanctity of our mother tongue" and stop the "rape" of Bengali and its 1,000-year past, a state prosecutor said.

The history of Bengali, which is spoken by at least 250 million people on the subcontinent, is wrapped up with the creation of Bangladesh as a country in 1971.

The deeply impoverished nation was previously part of Pakistan and its independence movement was fuelled partly by the attempt by Pakistani administrators to impose Urdu as the state language.

The head of the Bangla Academy, a state-run institution that publishes books and conducts research on Bengali, said the verdict was "long overdue".

"These FM radios and televisions were creating a strange language and almost destroyed the dynamics of our beautiful mother tongue," Shamsuzzaman Khan said.

"It is a timely order. It will save our language from destruction. We have already seen how the Filipino language lost its glory due to the imposition of American English," he said.

The court order comes just days before the country celebrates the 60-year anniversary of the Language Movement, a protest in which half a dozen students were shot dead as they protested Pakistan's move to impose Urdu.

Dozens of private television stations and radio stations that feature music and talk-shows directed at teenagers and people in their twenties have sprouted in Bangladesh over the last five or six years.

Use of "Banglish" in which Bengali and English words are mixed seamlessly together is widespread, as is "Hinglish" in India - a combination of Hindi and English.

"The court has ordered them not to use words which are foreign to our language," deputy attorney general Altaf Hossain said. "It asked them not to broadcast or anchor programs using distorted Bengali language or pronounce Bengali words in a distorted form," he said.

The court said this distortion of the language was tantamount to "rape", Hossain said, adding it had also ordered a committee to be set up to oversee how the language should be used by broadcasters.