Afia Dil

Dr. Afia Dil, a front-raking Bengali linguist with her Ph.D. degree in Linguistics from Stanford University and a number of important research papers and books published in English, has selected a dozen of her outstanding writings scattered in different national and international publications and put them together to make them readily available to scholars in the field. The most notable of these essays of linguistic importance that deserve to be mentioned here include: English Loanwords in Bengali (1966); Bengali Baby Talk (1975); The Sociolinguistic Variable (s) in Bengali: A Sound Change in Progress? (1979); Diglossia in Bangla: A Study of Shifts in the Verbal Repertoire of the Educated Classes in Dhaka, Bangladesh (1986); Muhammad Shahidullah's Approach to Indo-Aryan Parent Speech and the Common Bases of Urdu-Hindi and Bengali (1991); Arabic Impact on Bengali Language and Culture (2013); Some Contributions to Bengali Linguistics in Bangladesh (2013). For teachers of Applied Linguistics and languages her papers on teaching Urdu to Bengali speakers and teaching Bengali to Urdu speakers should serve as a model for teaching a second language. Her translations of twenty-four Bengali poems and songs into English deserve the attention of all who aspire to introduce Bengali literature to international readers. It is a book worth reading by all educators not only in Bangladesh but also in other countries. - Professor Sirajul Islam, President Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, Dhaka