Bengali Language and Culture

Afia Dil, born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and educated at Eden Girls High School and Eden Girls College at Dhaka, 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. She was Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Eden Girls College, Dhaka (1954-61), Professor and Language Specialist at the East Pakistan Education Extension Centre, Dhaka (1961-62) and at the West Pakistan Education Extension Centre, Lahore (1962-65). Since 1975 she has taught graduate courses in Linguistics, Women Studies and Leadership Studies at United States International University, San Diego, California. At present she is a Professor Emeritus at the Alliant (former US) International University. Her publications in Bengali include, among others: New Zealander Patra (Letters from New Zealand) – a series of thirty weekly articles published in The Begum Weekly, Dhaka, 1953; Bengali version of Caroline Pratt’s I Learn from Children (1955); Je desh mone pare (1957) – her travelogue of the United States of America on the Leadership Exchange Program; and her Bengali translation of Helen Keller’s My Teacher, published serially in The Begum, in 1959. The most notable among her translations from Bengali into English are Syed Waliullah’s Taranga Bhanga, a play in three acts, published as The Breakers (Bengali Academy, Dhaka, 1985) and his novel Chander Amabasya published as Night of No Moon (writers ink, Dhaka: 2006).Among her linguistic publications in English, mention may be made of her monograph Two Traditions of the Bengali Language (Cambridge, 1991; Islamabad, 1993) on the sociolinguistic study of the Hindu and Muslim dialects of Bengali that 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 Creation of Bangladesh (Adorn Publication, Dhaka, 2011), hailed as the most judicious research work on the creation of Bangladesh as a nation-state. Her Bengali Nursery Rhymes: An International Perspective (Adorn Publication, Dhaka, 2010) has been hailed as a major contribution to intercultural literature: “It is a treasure trove for all who love poetry.”