By Farzeen Anis
"Pura tashki”, “Ajaira Pechaal”, “Jotil Mood”, “Kothin Bhaab”…I no longer have an incredulous look on my face as these phrases shout at me from various billboards around Dhaka city. Neither do my parents any longer bombard me with questions as to what these phrases could possibly mean.
It's been a long time since the Djuice language revolution hit the streets of Bangladesh. Their aim may have been to attract the teenagers of today using, what they believed to be, current slang used by these teenagers. But as I look back, I could swear that the use of this jargon, and the habit of writing Bangla in English, has become more common after they were advertised. Frankly, while I knew what the words meant amongst us teenagers before, they really weren't in much use then. The billboards seemed to become an official permit to explore this jargon as much as possible.
Not only us teenagers, but the uneducated and many kids also began to use these phrases right and left. Pretty soon, parents learnt not to treat this vernacular as a different language altogether. But as days go by and more people continue to grow immune to such distortion of our language, the question that still bothers me is: where have our language ethics gone?
In present times, not only mobile phone service companies, but rather, any firm aiming at the teenage population of the country, tend to bribe them by encouraging the use of such slang. And we being the innocent (or should I say, ignorant) people we are, we gobble it all up. The advertisements and billboards make it quite easy for us to figure out when and where the phrases will come most handy.
But while Bengali slang is being explored in these sectors, competing mobile phone operators give the language patriots a ray of hope. They now offer the customers the option to send SMS in Bangla, in the hopes that, most of our population being uneducated in English, they will bring about a revolution of using Bangla in this technology-ridden country. However, I feel this is false hope.
The people who can afford to buy a mobile phone and have the means to use it to send SMS as well as speak on the phone, usually know English well enough to not want to waste time typing in Bangla. The only people who would bother to do so are the people living in villages and basically having no idea about English…the only problem is that these people only buy mobile phones out of necessity to talk to relatives, and would not be spending time and money on any kind of SMS.
These telecom companies have influenced our lives so deeply that anyone with a limited knowledge of English prefers to write Bangla words in English, as it is so much easier. Unknowingly, even those with a good grasp of the Bangla language are being affected. I can only feel embarrassed, and question the acts of those martyrs who gave their lives to preserve the beauty of our mother tongue. Was it really of any use? Is it really fair to those sons of the land who gave their lives for our language, that we allow such heinous crimes to be committed against Bangla? Can we not speak up against this “revolution for the worse'? Why don't you also take a step forward and make a pledge to fight for the unaffected, undistorted beauty of Bangla?
