Preservation of Endangered Languages of Bangladesh LAHRA

Name: Preservation of Endangered Languages of Bangladesh LAHRA
Author: তৌহিদ বিন মুজাফ্ফর

Preservation of Endangered Languages of Bangladesh LAHRA UNESCO states in its official website that out of the 6000 plus languages spoken today, about half will become extinct in about a hundred year. Keeping in view the approaching era of a drastic language loss around the globe, a multi-disciplinary research team comprising linguists, literary experts and ethnographers from The Independent University, Bangladesh have embarked on a significant and noteworthy longitudinal study from 2012, involving extensive field trips for data and song collection, case studies and interviews. The primary objective of the exploratory study is to preserve those languages which are endangered in Bangladesh. Our project entitled Preservation of Endangered Languages funded by Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) has three components namely, linguistic, literary and ethnographic. In response to the demand of the time, the research team of IUB worked on a project with a view to saving Lahra-a marginalized ethnic community’s own language and successfully furnishing a tremendous documentation of an endangered language. The challenging task of the documentation of the language required remarkable attention, systematic and scientific endeavor in general, while the gathering of unwritten and previously unrecorded language of Lahra ethnic community was unspeakably difficult, in particular. This language documentation would, hopefully, save an endangered language of Bangladesh and would save the Lahra culture from the threat of extinction.

তৌহিদ বিন মুজাফ্ফর

Towhid Bin Muzaffar, born in Dhaka on 21 February 1968, did his BA and MA in English Literature and Linguistics from Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. He worked for several years as a Research Assistant at the Department of Linguistics of the same university. He has been teaching English at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB) from June 1998. His areas of interest include Historical Linguistics with special emphasis on Algonquian and Indo-European languages; endangered languages; computational linguistics, particularly phonological reconstructions of proto- forms, simulating reflexes and so on.

তালিম হোসেন

Talim Hossain, PhD, born in Gazipur on September 16, 1967 is a practicing ethnographer and an academic, with around 23 years of research career including collaborative researches with anthropologists from universities in Europe. His Ph.D. dissertation titled Potential for Increasing Crop Production and Agricultural Development in Bangladesh: An Anthropological Study was from the University of Bern, Switzerland. Besides teaching Anthropology at the Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB), he has been a Director and teaching faculty in the J-term academic program for the US students on Community and Development in Bangladesh under the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA), USA and IUB since 2002.

হারুনুজ্জামান

Haroonuzzaman, a translator, novelist, poet and essayist, was born in Dhaka on January 13, 1951. He has been into teaching at home and abroad (Libya, Qatar) for about 27 years. For the past 12 years, he has been teaching English at Independent University, Bangladesh (IUB). Besides, he had been a feature writer of Depthnews, Manila and into English language journalism at The Independent and UNB and into broadcast journalism in Radio Pakistan, Dacca and Bangladesh Betar, Dhaka for about six years. He was the only Asian who worked as an English news broadcaster under Qatar Broadcasting Service in 1992.