Re-educating Educated Ones: A Case Study on Chakma Language Revitalization in Chittagong Hill Tracts

2026-01-18

AI Summary

This study addresses the critical endangerment of the Chakma Indigenous language in Bangladesh, which faces assimilation pressures from dominant Bengali linguistic and cultural hegemony alongside a lack of effective community-driven revitalization mechanisms. Through six months of qualitative fieldwork—including in-depth interviews and focus groups—the research systematically examines the socioeconomic barriers confronting intergenerational language transmission within Chakma communities and documents their resilience strategies. The work proposes an innovative, community-centered framework for ICT-enabled language revitalization that integrates historical-cultural identity, community needs, and digital participation. By foregrounding the synergistic interplay between cultural rootedness and technological empowerment, this approach offers a transferable model for Indigenous language preservation in the Global South.

Technology Category

• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval
• Natural Language Processing: Language Grounding & Multi-modal NLP
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Social Networks and Social Media: Generative AI / large language models and their impact on social systems
• Responsible Web: Social and technical mechanisms of refusal for web technologies and applications
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Large Language Models (LLM) for user modeling and recommendation

Abstract

Indigenous languages face significant cultural oppression from official state languages, particularly in the Global South. We investigate the Bangladeshi Chakma language revitalization movement, a community grappling with language liquidity and amalgamation into the dominant Bengali language. Our six-month-long qualitative study involving interviews and focus group discussions with Chakma language learning stakeholders uncovered existing community socio-economic challenges and resilience strategies. We noted the need for culturally grounded digital tools and resources. We propose an ICT-mediated community-centric framework for Indigenous language revitalization in the Global South, emphasizing the integration of historical identity elements, stakeholder-defined requirements, and effective digital engagement strategies to empower communities in preserving their linguistic and cultural heritage.

Problem

• Indigenous language revitalization
• language oppression
• Chakma language
• cultural heritage preservation
• Global South

Innovation

• ICT-mediated framework
• community-centric design
• Indigenous language revitalization
• culturally grounded digital tools
• stakeholder-defined requirements