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A Close Look

Cocktail language is getting better of mother tongue

Nilratan Halder | February 22, 2025 00:00:00


A commercial, "food bole ssss7up" flashing on the TV screen in this month of language movement represents the supreme example of cocktail language. Here the Bangla word 'bole' in its original letters is interpolated between the two other English words. Hybrid advertisements are not uncommon in many other languages. It is, however, a trend used as a gimmick to surprise or draw attention of the adventurous young generations everywhere. In some way, the attempt is to make the matter somewhat humorous or play a prank. So the target people can never be the elderly people.

Quite evidently, soft drinks, energy drinks, if not other hard beverages, chocolate and lollypop are the best candidate for promotion in line with hybrid ads. Listen to the sentence a woman, most likely her mother, uses to inquire if a girl child with her doll on a garden swing for kids wouldn't share it with others. She says, "Eka, eka khabe, share korbena? (will you eat alone, won't you share?)". There are numerous such ads that may give a sense that Bangla lexicon runs short of the appropriate words for the occasion.

In reality, this is not the case. How many people can use five sentences without interpolating English words? In West Bengal, they go one step ahead because they use both English and Hindi randomly in their conversations at times the mother language getting sardined in between. In the land of language movement, which saw for the first time for the rest of the world to adopt the Bangalees' matchless achievement as the International Mother Language Day, Bangla still lacks terminologies to convey some of the simplest ideas or things. There are no creative minds like Rabindranath who can deftly create baganbilas for bougainvillaea.

Even people who are highly educated often use randomly English words quite often in their conversation unwittingly when there are appropriate Bangla words for those. Interestingly, people who are hardly educated or even the illiterate inject English words without fully knowing the meaning of the terminologies. It is because they have been listening to those words in their communication with people belonging to upper echelon of society. Rickshaw-pullers, vendors, shopkeepers and similar other people use such words. Slow, speed etc., have most appropriate Bangla terminologies but they would not use those. Similarly, the traders would be at ease to use 'free' instead of 'mukto' and 'organic' without knowing the meaning of the latter. Even if such words are tolerable, words like 'qualityful' invented by a segment of half-educated Bangalees sound really toxic.

It is the social influence that has created this trend of cocktail language. There is nothing wrong in incorporating foreign words into one's own vocabulary but when those have their appropriate alternatives in the mother tongue, why go for those foreign ones? If the process goes on, it weakens the vocabulary of the native tongue and over a period of time, the terminologies of the land lose their relevance leaving space for the alien words.

In fact, language imperialism is also a strong tool to control brain and mind of smaller nations. The multinational companies are doing so in a subtle way and the copy writes in the local ads agencies are helping the influencing process unwittingly. Understandably, backwardness in research works and technological developments is responsible for a glaring lack of Bangla terminologies in these specific areas. But at least this could be different in the daily life of people here. Again, reading books has now become a forgotten affair for an overwhelming majority of the people here. Their love affair with social sites is so passionate and addictive that they would write what unfortunately is known as 'posts' using Bangla sentence in English letters or in laughably wrong English.

The bottom line is that the majority of the educated people deceive themselves when they profess their unwavering love for the language. Had people been sincere, they would not have dissociate themselves with the habit of reading Bangla classics. There is no use crying hoarse, though, that language is falling behind. When official recognition of the language is superficial and use of English more preferred, it surely has its adverse impacts on the use of language at all levels of life.


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