Before I went to Bangladesh last year, I purchased the Lonely Planet Bengali phrasebook to advance my puny Bangla skills. The idea of these phrasebooks is pretty good – they’re nice and portable, they have sensible categories of phrases you might need (under headings like ‘Greetings & Civilities’, ‘Getting Around’, ‘Accommodation’, and so on), and they write each phrase in English equivalent, an English transliteration, and the native script, so even if you can’t get your tongue around the words, you can just point to the script and you should be able to get your point across.

The phrasebook helped me memorise certain conversational phrases I would need in Bangladesh. However, when the time came to actually use many of these phrases, I found that I was met not with understanding, but with confusion and non-comprehension. For example, some of the children at the orphanage took me for a walk around the campus and we visited the ladies in the girls’ kitchen – to be polite, I greeted the staff by saying Nomoskar (hello) and asking kemon achen? (how are you?). Perhaps this made it look like I was a fluent speaker, because one of the ladies began to chat to me in rapid-fire Bangla – to put a stop to it, I waited for an appropriate pause and said, ami dukkhito, ami bangla jani na...er, ami ektu adhu bangla jani (I’m sorry, I don’t know Bangla…I know a little bit of Bangla). This made the kitchen lady laugh a bit, and made me mortally embarrassed, so I thanked the ladies for talking to me and beat a hasty retreat with the boys in tow.

It is only now, nearly ten months after that conversation, I realise that I actually have Lonely Planet to blame!

As I’ve previously mentioned, Bangla has two distinct forms: cholti bhasha, the common speech, and shadhu bhasha, the literary form. The latter of these two is the style of language used in literature, and is rarely spoken, as it is unintelligible to the uneducated and uses many, many different words to cholti bhasha. In the Introduction section of the Lonely Planet phrasebook, it says:

In this book, we have used [cholti bhasha] which is universally understood throughout Bengali-speaking communities. It is also the language of media and of education.

If the phrases I tried were cholti bhasha, then theoretically, I shouldn’t have had a problem. But, consultation with a Bangladeshi who goes to my church reveals that my dog-eared, formerly-trusty phrasebook is actually littered with many phrases from shadhu bhasha, including the phrase ami ektu adhu bangla jani. Using these in everyday conversation with the kitchen ladies and the children, who were largely uneducated, would have been like using Ye Aulde Englishe today. I can’t say whether the problem lies exclusively in the phrasebook or if it’s also due to the region we stayed in, but given we had similar problems in a rural area about four hours’ drive from Dhaka, it seems likely that Lonely Planet have some revisions to make.

On their web site, I see that Lonely Planet have issued a new version of their Bengali phrasebook, combining it with their Hindi/Urdu phrasebook. Hopefully, the phrases and words used in this new version will supercede the old one.