Once again, as we are learning ASL, for the purposes of this discussion I will be focusing on my native language of Bengali. “Bengali” also known as “Bangla” belongs to the Indo-Aryan language family and the “lingua franca” or “bridge language” of the Bengal region on the Indian subcontinent. Although Bengali is an Indo-European language, it has been influenced by other South Asian language families such as Dravidian, Austroasiatic, and Tibeto-Burman. Examination of early 20th century dictionaries attribute slightly more than 50% of Bengali vocabulary to be native words, 45% to unmodified Sanskrit words, and the rest to foreign languages particularly, Persian, Arabic, and Farsi in nature. Examples of foreign influenced Bengali words include Sky: (Asman) আসমান from (Asmān) ٱسمان. Some of these newfound insights, particularly the influence of Persian culture in Bangladesh, gives me a greater appreciation for the language as a whole because of the diversity of influences that ultimately resulted in this beautiful end product that I know and hold dear to my identity. Furthermore, due to these foreign influences, I now know that Bengali shares a lot of similar sounds and root words not just with other languages on the Indian sub-continent but also further into the Middle East, Northern Africa, and even parts of Europe. The history and evolution of the Bengali language is one I find very fascinating, after all, how many countries had to fight for the right to speak their mother tongue? Over time, languages change in response to the needs and demographics of their people. New products, technologies, experiences require different/ new ways of communicating leading to the adaptation of languages. With today’s politicized and globalized world, many foreign words are borrowed and integrated into other languages. The rise of memes and meme culture in my opinion represents a significant shift in the way we communicate and assign meaning to things. Linguists today can utilize complex computer algorithms to analyze people’s used words and phrases to track changes in a given language. For example, using Google’s “N-Gram” viewer, researchers at the University of Texas, Austin were able to show that following 9/11, Americans used more communal language however, since then there has been a shift towards more individualistic language over time, partly due to increasing socioeconomic status of these individuals according to one hypothesis.
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