Resumen de Distractive language education policies and the endangerment of Indigenous languages in Bangladesh

Anwar Ahmed

• Focusing on language education policies in Bangladesh, this article shows how the policies have distracted people’s attention from the harms inflicted on the country’s Indigenous communities and their languages. I discuss two factors that have contributed to policy distractions in this context: a strong form of Bangla linguistic nationalism and a neoliberal approach to English language teaching. To address the problem of language education policy distractions, I put forward an argument for paying attention to what matters the most for protecting linguistic human rights and fostering linguistic diversity. Paying such transformative attention will require a mother-tongue-based multilingual approach to education and the creation of territorial niches for protecting and promoting endangered languages.