Language in education policy in Bangladesh

Abstract

Bangladesh as a polity is underrepresented in international scholarship on language or education policy. However, the past couple of decades have seen a small number of journal articles and book chapters being dedicated to language education policy and practice in this South Asian nation of over 160 million people (e.g. Chowdhury & Kabir, 2014; Hamid, 2011, 2016; Hamid & Erling, 2016; Hossain & Tollefson, 2007; Imam, 2005; Rahman, 2010; Rahman, 2015; Sultana, 2014a). In this chapter we draw on these and other relevant sources to provide an overview of language policy in the Bangladeshi education system from the early days of independence in 1971 to the present decade. We argue that the changes in language policy in general and English language policy in particular during this period can be read as a neoliberal narrative in a globalized world, i.e. how a nation with a strong sense of linguistic nationalism at birth has gradually opened itself to English and has given space to supra-national and sub-national entities that have promoted English. This neoliberal transformation of language policy in education can be related to the continuous weakening of the state and state sovereignty (Blommaert, 2006; Wright, 2012). Although the state’s control over social, political and cultural domains has reached an extreme height in recent years in the absence of true democratic norms and tolerance of dissenting voices (see e.g. Sohail, 2016), its grip on language and linguistic nationalism appears to have loosened.