One of my mum’s favourite anecdotes about my childhood is the time we went back to the village in rural Bangladesh where my family comes from. I was 10 years old, and at that point could barely communicate with anyone in standard Bangla, let alone Barisaliya - the dialect that is used in the village. For the first few days, I sat silent and wide-eyed. Mum thought I was just shy and was adjusting to rural life. But to her surprise, a few days later, I began to speak fluently in the dialect. She still laughs thinking about my 10-year-old self yelling at my cousins in fluent Barisaliya, authentic villager-style.
Of course, when I came back to Australia I managed to forget it all and still can’t pick it up to this day - somewhat out of fear of being laughed at for getting it wrong. In the meantime, however, my standard Bangla improved a lot.
At university, I started learning Bangla properly after doing an assignment on its decline in this new generation of children of immigrants. There isn’t a lot of official research into this phenomenon, but as a child of immigrants myself, it’s a topic that spoke to me. I felt the distance growing between my parents and I, and the lack of cultural knowledge being transferred is something I began to feel keenly.
At university, I started learning Bangla properly after doing an assignment on its decline in this new generation of children of immigrants.
I realised that if I didn’t learn Bangla properly, then my own future children or the next generation would not have access to it in their immediate vicinity. I didn’t want the language to die out in my family after only 60 years of re-gaining the right to speak it as a country.
Language is very central to the cultural fabric of Bangladesh. Bangladesh’s Language Movement Day, 21 February 1952, was also declared International Mother Language Day by UNESCO in order to celebrate the Bangladeshi victory against the then Pakistani Government (which Bangladesh was formerly a part of) to speak Bangla instead of Urdu. The day is now celebrated widely in Bangladesh and internationally, and is considered a point of pride in Bangladesh’s national history.
When I went to Bangladesh in late 2019, everyone was amazed at the fact that I could speak Bangla so fluently. They saw it as a sign of becoming cultured and assimilating to their way of thinking, that I was really a Bangladeshi girl at heart. I felt my heart swell with their validation, I’ll admit. I was finally being accepted by a group of people who had, for my entire life, called me a foreigner.
"When I went to Bangladesh in late 2019, everyone was amazed at the fact that I could speak Bangla so fluently." Source: Supplied
But when my younger sister spoke in broken Bangla, they expressed disappointment and even cast her aside, and I would once again be reminded of the way I’d been treated. This judgement is often subtle or unspoken. Whether it be asking about you through someone more fluent in the language, not engaging with you because they fear it would be too difficult to carry conversation, or making “light” fun of the way you took some time to process what they said – they all add up and can feel alienating.
But when my younger sister spoke in broken Bangla, they expressed disappointment and even cast her aside, and I would once again be reminded of the way I’d been treated.
I felt a twang of guilt as I realised that I contributed to giving my sister a hard time, not quite from a place of criticism, but because her mistakes were cute to me. I also know that I made fun of her pronunciation occasionally in order to bond with her in about our shared identity of being Bengali-Australian, having had the same struggles with speaking Bangla with a “white-washed” accent. I wanted to show her that it was not as serious as everyone makes it out to be, but instead I made her feel insecure.
Although I will miss making fun of her (as all siblings do), I’ve decided to make it a point to help her with pronunciations every time she struggles and get my parents to do the same. I want to create as much of a positive experience as possible when she thinks of Bangla so that she might one day want to take up the language more seriously.
The only way we can overcome the fear of returning to our mother tongue is if we operate with no judgement, from either side. It helps when the older generation begins to understand that our family history is as much as a part of us as is our lives in a Western country. They may have come here to give us a better future, and thus tend to look forward. But if we have a better understanding of where we come from, we may have a better chance of figuring out where we’re going.
The younger generation has to begin to understand that their complex feelings towards learning their mother tongue has roots in racism and discrimination, and that we were made to reject this part of ourselves. We also need to realise that it doesn’t need to be that way, that we must give ourselves permission to explore our hybrid identities - and that includes the right to reclaim our ancestor’s language.
