Soas Sylheti Language Society

The SOAS Sylheti Language Society holds lessons. Get details of any forthcoming events, as well as learning material in the photos, where each album is a sort of lesson.

https://sylhetiproject. wordpress.com/

GOALS: To discuss the grammar of the *Sylheti language, developing lessons and teaching materials by practice teaching to other members of the society. Members are encouraged to each eventually teach (or co-teach) at least one lesson (but attendance to just learn and experience the Sylheti language is fine). This provides the opportunity to learn the Sylheti language and gain language teaching skills.

HISTORY: After an invitation from the director of the Surma Centre, Camden, during Endangered Languages Week presentations at SOAS in 2012, the SOAS Sylheti Project was created by Dr. Candide Simard. For the past five years, SOAS MA linguistics students have participated in this extracurricular project to document Sylheti spoken by users of the Surma Centre. The SOAS Fieldmethods course has also worked with a Sylheti speaker to document Sylheti grammar. Besides other sub-projects, the SOAS Sylheti Project has compiled a dictionary for an app, held an academic conference, and produced a storybook.

In order to involve Sylheti-speaking SOAS students (and Sylheti-speaking Londoners), the Sylheti Language Society was created. This Language Society is a collaborative teaching and learning experience to give a different analytic forum to Sylheti to be discussed as a language, not 'improper Bengali' (as it's called in most Bengali language courses where in London 6-8 out of 10 students are Sylheti origin). Teaching Sylheti is also an experience to put on a C. V. which may lead to translation /interpretation work here in the U. K. Lessons have been compiled into a booklet to learn Sylheti.

*Sylheti is an Indo-Aryan language with Tibeto-Burman influences, spoken by a minority in north-eastern Bangladesh and south Assam, India, where it is often considered to be a mere 'dialect' of Bengali, or 'slang'. However, it is a language, with 400, 000 speakers in the UK, who, for lack of documentation and teaching materials among other reasons, simply call it 'Bengali'.