Bengali Language and Culture (Hardcover)

AFIA DIL Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and educated at Eden Girls High School and Eden Girls College at Dhaka, she earned her B.A. Honors and Master's degrees in English Literature from the University of Dhaka, Post-graduate diploma in education from the University of New Zealand, Master's degree in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Michigan, and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. Since 1975 she has taught graduate courses in Linguistics, Women Studies and Leadership Studies at United States International University, California. At present she is a Professor Emeritus at the Alliant (former U.S.) International University. Her publications in Bengali include, among others: New Zealander Patra (Letters from New Zealand); Bengali version of Caroline Pratt's I Learn from Children (1955); Je desh mone pare (1957) - her travelogue of the United States of America; and her Bengali translation of Helen Keller's My Teacher. The most notable among her translations from Bengali into English is Syed Waliullah's Taranga Bhanga, a play, published by the Bengali Academy under the title of The Breakers (1985). Among her linguistic publications in English, mention may be made of English Loanwords in Bengali" (1966); “Bengali Baby Talk" (1975); (with Charles A. Ferguson) “The Sociolinguistic Variable(s) in Bengali: A Sound Change in Progress?" (1978); "Diglossia in Bangla: A Study of Shifts in the Verbal Repertoire of the Educated Classes in Dhaka, Bangladesh" (1986): (with Anwar Dil) "Muhammad Shahidullah's Approach to Indo-Aryan Parent Speech and the Common Bases of Urdu-Hindi and Bengali" (1989). Her monograph Two Traditions of the Bengali Language (Cambridge, 1991; Islamabad, 1993) on the sociolinguistic study of the Hindu and Muslim dialects of Bengali has been hailed as "a valuable contribution to sociolinguistic research in a neglected field”. She is co-author (with Anwar Dil) of a 744-page book, Bengali Language Movement to Bangladesh (San Diego: Intercultural Forum, 2000), hailed as the most judicious research work on the creation of Bangladesh as a nation-state.