Problems Of Hindi Native Speakers In Learning Bengali As A Second Language

Abstract

The thesis attempts to look at the problems encountered by the native speakers of Hindi (NSH) when they learn the Bengali language. The learning of Bengali as a second language in West Bengal is inevitable if one wants to reside in the province permanently or a long course of time. A type of academic survival and other communicative needs create such a compulsion. In our multilingual environment a linguistic group becomes minor in the outside of the province. Think rationally about learning Bengali and it will make sense. Such logic is relevant when they are learning Bengali outside the classroom. Even if a student is in the classroom, he/she faces different problems when he is learning the language. In spite of having the same language family i.e. Indo-Aryan, Bengali and Hindi develop their own linguistic uniqueness during their Middle Indo-Aryan period. As a result such features which are available to Hindi speaker as first language are absent or treated differently in Bengali. For example “there is no gender discrimination in pronouns in Bengali but there is clear cut discrimination in Hindi.” In Phonological, Morphological or Syntactic system these are frequent. At the same time vocabularies or grammatical notions have the similar pattern in the language. In case of a masculine gender- “Woh ladka ja raha hai” and in case of a feminine gender- “Woh ladki ja rahi hai”. Such agreement is totally absent in Bengali. During learning Bengali the errors committed by the NSH on L2.The present study will take care of some of the problems faced by NSH and what is their understanding about the problems of learning Bengali. It surveys a section of the school going students (mostly) whose native languages are different from Bengali and attitude towards the Bengali language. This paper studies the scenario in a locality, Howrah, West Bengal.