It was around 2007-08. I wanted to interview some post-graduate Rajbanshi students from a reputed institution at North Bengal. After proposing my idea to their teacher, I was surprised to know that it will not be possible for me to directly ask the students in the classroom if they are Rajbanshi speakers. The question that immediately came to my mind was, if the notion of stereotype in language is so much present in an adult classroom, actually when did it start developing? At that point of time, I was trying to find out the Linguistic Human Rights questions among the Rajbanshi students. I wanted to interview the students for listening to their experiences of language problems when they were in schools. In fact, I was trying to enter the children’s house of linguistic experience through an adult’s door.
I started working with the Rajbanshi children at two schools located at Uttar Matiyali and Jalpaiguri town in 2005-07 for my M.Phil dissertation in Linguistics from University of Delhi. My primary aim for the dissertation was to get an idea regarding the different kind of language problems that Rajbanshi children experience in classroom as their home language and school language are different. It was primarily a non-participant classroom observation based study. Additional methodological tools were picture story writing, cloze testing and storytelling. For the writing task, children were specifically asked to write one story in ‘home language’ and another version of the same story in ‘school language’ within a gap of a few days. But for the storytelling task, the choice of language was absolutely the children’s decision. After analysing the results, it was found that the children’s performance in the school language, i.e. the regional standard is really poor. A number of children from standard 4th cannot read and comprehend a simple Bangla text. The result of the analysis was supported by the classroom observations. It was found that children in fact, talk very little in classrooms. It is only the teacher who talks in the class. In many instances, it is not clear whether the student has understood the teacher’s talk or not.
I had developed a couple of questions in my mind: Which part of the sentences is most difficult to understand for the children? To what extent the incomprehensibility takes place in classroom when the teacher speaks Bangla? These two questions were continuously revolving in my mind. So, I decided to enter a more remote area and talk to some more Rajbanshi children and higher level students regarding their learning difficulty issues related to language problems. Another important task was, invariably, to figure out the structural pattern of Rajbanshi as opposed to Bangla.
I was not interested to put Rajbanshi into a specific language family or relate it to traditional prescriptive Bangla grammar. Rather, I was interested in finding certain structural features of Rajbanshi spoken at a particular region of Jalpaiguri iii (I selected the area because of the remoteness) and understand language variation and language conflict in the children’s language use, which later became my Ph.D work (2009-2014).
The next task that I did was to work on the features of Rajbanshi. Typological features of Rajbanshi (with an emphasis on morphosyntactic features) were constructed on the basis of adult language data. In order to understand the language use of the children, it was really important for me to have an understanding of the adults’ languages. A major reason for this was to understand whether children choose to use Rajbanshi when they grow older, or whether they choose to shift their language in order to hide their identity in an outer world.
The world is seriously worried regarding language endangerment and language death, many languages are disappearing as the speakers are shifting to the dominant languages and stop using their forefather’s tongue. I was worried if Rajbanshi is walking the same path.
After having Focus Group Discussion with some teachers and analyzing the structural features it was found that the major area of difficulty for the Rajbanshi children is verbs. Bangla and Rajbanshi verbs have some major featural differences. It was also explored that each Rajbanshi child has access to three different variants. I emphasized the use of different variants that each child uses. For example, considering present progressive verbal constructions, children use three variants.
a. uyay moTorsaikel calatsE
he/she motorcycle ride-pres-prog-3p-sg
‘He/she is riding motorcycle’
b. ora cole jacche
They go-ppl go-pres-prog-3p
‘They are going’
c. biRalgulo dekhtese
cat-plu. watch-pres-prog-3p-plu.
‘The cats are watching’
The verbal inflection in a. is a Rajbanshi form, in b. It is a standard Bangla form. But in c. it is neither Rajbanshi, nor Bangla, it can be termed as a ‘new’ form. It was initially thought as a Bangladeshi dialect influenced form (as the area has a number of immigrant families). But later it was found that the children who are not in contact with the immigrant children are creating the form and using it widely. So, it was termed as a ‘new’ form.
Now the questions that became important were: can we predict when a child is supposed to use a particular variant? And why do they choose not to use the other two? It was important to understand the children’s language use pattern in different domains. Three different domains were chosen for getting an idea regarding the children’s language use. Firstly; a formal setting, secondly a semi-formal setting and finally an informal setting were explored. The children’s interaction with teachers in a teaching-learning environment has been regarded as a formal setting. When the children interacted with me with book-reading sessions, those were regarded as semi-formal setting. When the children played among themselves and talked, those were recorded as informal setting talk.
A pattern of the use of three different variants in three domains was found after conducting a detailed ethnographic analysis of some Rajbanshi children. It was found that in formal domains only older children use the new forms. No teacher has been found to use the new form, so it can be conjectured that it is a new generation development. In semi-formal domain, younger children primarily used Rajbanshi. And in informal domain, all the children used Rajbanshi.
Apart from the ethnographic analysis of different domains, a detailed analysis of 30 children’s speech was done based on picture story description (oral) and worksheet-based grammatical judgment tests. Children in many cases could not determine which verbal inflection is correct and which is wrong; this indeterminacy can be regarded as a result of incomplete acquisition (Montrul, 2008). Incomplete acquisition occurs with sequential bilingual children which often lead to language loss. There came the worry.
It needs a special mention at this point that, when the older children constantly negotiate with the language use and tend to avoid the use of their native language, L1 becomes a weaker language, and it leads to language attrition (Winford, 2003: 256).
The caregivers play a major role in the maintenance and shift of languages, which is also applicable for the Rajbanshi children. Children who have enough exposure of Rajbanshi at home, and who are not scolded for speaking Rajbanshi acquire the language quite well. On the other hand, when parents scold children for speaking Rajbanshi (as the parents are concerned about the stereotype associated with Rajbanshi in a bigger society, where Bengalis term them as ‘inferior’ language), language loss starts happening gradually. Children also show a gradual change in grammaticality judgment. Younger children mark Rajbanshi sentences as ‘correct’ sentences; while older children mark Bangla sentences as ‘correct’ and mark the Rajbanshi sentences as ‘incorrect’.
On one hand, denying the correctness of mother tongue is a subtle hint of language shift, which can gradually move towards language loss. On the other hand, a quantitative study of the use of three variants by children of three age groups clearly showed that children are gradually moving from a Rajbanshi-dominant position to a new form dominant position. It is clearly an indication of language change.
It is indeed an interesting case because Rajbanshi is a language which is being retrieved through a number of initiatives by many speakers. There are books, journals, dictionary-making initiatives. An academy has also been established for codification and production of materials in Rajbanshi. So, the situation is that when a language is being revived with lot of initiatives, a variety of the same language is going through a process of change in a remote area.
Keeping in mind the future of the Rajbanshi speaking children, I decided to go back to the children and start a classroom-based research afresh (2014-present). Sensitizing teachers regarding the issue of using Rajbanshi and Bangla both in a classroom, not scolding a child for speaking Rajbanshi in classroom, finding linguistic error patterns among the children and using the conflict points between Bangla and Rajbanshi as a classroom resource are the primary issues of this current research. iv
Documentation of an endangered language (either by linguistic description or by collecting narratives) can help us to create an archive. But it is more important to think about using the archival material in different ways to prevent language shift, language loss or language death. I am still trying to find out new ways of preventing the loss, by encouraging the use of Rajbanshi in classroom. The archived documents of Rajbanshi can be used in classroom, which is a possible way of keeping the language alive. That is how the continuity of my field journey can remain alive too.
Bibliography:
Ecert, P. 2009. ‘Ethnography and the Study of Variation’ in Coupland, N. And Jaworski, A. (eds.) The New Sociolinguistics Reader. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Montrul, S. 2008. Incomplete Acquisition in Bilingualism: Re-examining the Age Factor. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Piplai, D. 2008. Linguistic Problems of the Rajbanshi School Children of North Bengal. M.Phil Dissertation, University of Delhi.
Piplai, D. 2014. Language Conflict and Syntactic Variation: Verbal Forms of the Rajbanshi School Children. Ph.D Thesis, University of Delhi.
Tsimpli, I. M. 2007. ‘First language attrition from a minimalist perspective, interface vulnerability and processing effects’ in KoĢpke B. Et al. (eds.) Language Attrition: Theoretical Perspective. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co.
Winford, D. 2003. An Introduction to Contact Linguistics. Malden: Blackwell.
i The study of Linguistic Human Rights of the Rajbanshi children was done as a National Child Rights Research Fellowship of CRY (Child Rights and You).
ii Cloze test is a fill in the gap test where every nth word (usually 5th, 7th or
9th) words of a text are omitted, irrespective of the grammatical category. It is a very useful test to understand a learner’s competence in a language.
iii Rajbanshi has a wide spectrum. Rajbanshi speakers are found in Malda, Uttar and Dakshin Dinajpur, Darjeeling, Jalpaiguri and Coochbihar district of West Bengal. Also in lower Assam, Bihar, Nepal and Bangladesh. Rajbanshi has a number of linguistic varieties. I decided to concentrate on the variety spoken between Mainaguri and Ramshai area, focusing Chapgar village near Amguri.
iv The research is a fellowship project from Wipro applying Thought in Schools (WATIS).