Bangladesh can justly claim to be a nation born of language, but its status as a cradle of linguistic diversity is under threat from nationalist pride and economic growth.
Of the more than 30 recognized languages spoken in Bangladesh, experts say 20 are now on the verge of extinction.
Many like the Laleng language spoken by the 2,000-strong Patra tribe in the country’s far northeast are inherently vulnerable, having no script and relying instead on a rich but fragile oral tradition of folk songs and story telling.
The current head of the tribe, Laxman Lal Patra, smiles as he talks of a Laleng lullaby his mother used to sing when he was a child but then frowns as he tries to recall the actual words, eventually managing just a single verse. “Our fairy-tales, poems and songs are gone as we don’t have a written script to preserve them. Even my daughter-in-law these days hums Bangla lullabies to my grandson,” the 70-year-old said.
Bangla, or Bengali, is the undisputed heavyweight in Bangladesh’s linguistic arena, spoken by 95 percent of the population and the sole passport to a decent education and career.
National pride in the Bangla language runs deep and is cemented with the blood of the “language martyrs” — students shot dead by police on Feb. 21, 1952, when Bangladesh was still East Pakistan. The students were protesting the Pakistani government’s Urdu-only policy and demanding that Bangla be recognized as an official language. The deaths triggered the start of a nationalist struggle that finally ended with the creation of Bangladesh after victory in the 1971 independence war with Pakistan. Feb. 21 is feted as a heroic national holiday in Bangladesh and is designated by UNESCO as International Mother Language Day to highlight the ethno-linguistic rights of people around the world.
But now Bangla’s dominance in schools, the workplace and cultural life in general is threatening those rights in Bangladesh itself.
“Most of us can still talk in Laleng. But we’re learning Bangla fast, replacing even the most essential Laleng words,” said Patra.
“Young boys pick up Bangla expressions from schools and Bengali neighbors and never forget.”
An expanding economy, which has brought roads, electricity and television sets to all but the remotest villages, has helped smother the life out of indigenous languages that were already struggling for survival.
Dhaka University Linguistics professor Shourav Sikder, whose 2011 book “Indigenous Languages of Bangladesh” highlights the seriousness of the situation, reels off a long list of languages that are now dead or dying.
“No one talks in Mahali, Malto, Razoar and Rajbangshi these days,” he said, laying the blame squarely on the overriding state patronage and promotion of Bangla.
According to Shikder, only two tribal languages can claim to be secure, largely thanks to the fact that they have written scripts.
Mesbah Kamal, whose Research and Development Collective charity works with indigenous people, believes the loss of tribal languages verges on “cultural genocide” given the loss of identity that inevitably follows. “And if the indigenous people lose their language, it’s not only their loss,” Kamal said. “We are also losing diversity and plurality in our cultural life, and that will create intolerance.
Bangladesh tribals fear linguistic genocide
Bangladesh tribals fear linguistic genocide
Judge declares 4 men wrongly accused of 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent
- The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families
- Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999
TEXAS, USA: A Texas judge on Thursday declared four men who were wrongfully accused of the 1991 Austin yogurt shop murders innocent, formally clearing their names in a courtroom for the first time since the killings of four teenage girls that haunted the city for decades.
“You are innocent,” state District Judge Dayna Blazey said during a hearing in a packed Austin courtroom.
The declaration was aimed at closing a dark chapter for the men and their families, and for a city that was shaken by the brutality of the crime and investigators’ inability to solve it for decades. Blazey called her order “an obligation to the rule of law and the obligation to the dignity of the individual.”
Cold case detectives announced last year that they had connected the killings to a suspect who died in a 1999 standoff with police in Missouri.
Two of the original four suspects, Michael Scott and Forrest Welborn, were in the packed courtroom with family members to hear prosecutors tell the judge that they are innocent. Robert Springsteen, who was initially convicted and spent several years on death row, did not attend. Maurice Pierce died in 2010.
“Over 25 years ago, the state prosecuted four innocent men ... (for) one of the worst crimes Austin has ever seen,” Travis County First Assistant District Attorney Trudy Strassburger said at the opening of the hearing. “We could not have been more wrong.”
A declaration of “actual innocence” would also be a key step for the men and their families to seek financial compensation for years they spent in jail or in prison.
“All four lived under the specter of the yogurt shop murders. These four never had the chance to live normal lives,” Strassburger said.
The murders shocked Austin and confounded investigators for years
Amy Ayers, 13; Eliza Thomas, 17; and sisters Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, ages 17 and 15, were bound, gagged and shot in the head at the “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt” store where two of them worked. The building was set on fire.
Investigators chased thousands of leads and several false confessions before the four men were arrested in late 1999.
Springsteen and Scott were convicted based largely on confessions they insisted were coerced by police. Both convictions were overturned in the mid-2000s.
Welborn was charged but never tried after two grand juries refused to indict him. Pierce spent three years in jail before the charges were dismissed and he was released.
Prosecutors wanted to try Springsteen and Scott again, but a judge ordered the charges dismissed in 2009 when new DNA tests that were unavailable in 1991 had revealed another male suspect.
“Let us not forgot that Robert Springsteen could be dead right now, executed at the hands of the state of Texas,” Springsteen attorney Amber Farrelly said at the hearing.
Connection to a new suspect revealed
The case effectively went cold until 2025. It got new public attention when an HBO documentary series explored the unsolved crime.
Investigators announced in September that new evidence and reviews of old evidence pointed to Robert Eugene Brashers as the killer.
Since 2018, authorities had used advanced DNA evidence to link Brashers to the strangulation death of a South Carolina woman in 1990, the 1997 rape of a 14-year-old girl in Tennessee and the shooting of a mother and daughter in Missouri in 1998.
The link to the Austin case came when a DNA sample taken from under Ayers’ fingernail came back as a match to Brashers from the 1990 murder in South Carolina.
Austin investigators also found that Brashers had been arrested at a border checkpoint near El Paso two days after the yogurt shop killings. In his stolen car was a pistol that matched the same caliber used to kill one of the girls in Austin.
Police also noted similarities in the yogurt shop case to Brashers’ other crimes: The victims were tied up with their own clothing, sexually assaulted and some crime scenes were set on fire.
Brashers died in 1999 when he shot himself during an hourslong standoff with police at a motel in Kennett, Missouri.
