At first sight, the language feels foreign. Latin letters, oddly accented, arranged into something that certainly does not look like a Bangladeshi language.
"E bosórur HSC forikkér rezál ayiđđe 25-29 oktubor diŧ fare buli hōiyí bangladeş anŧoşíkké būrd komitir şobáfoŧi," the Facebook post read.
My first instinct was that I had stumbled onto foreign coverage of a Bangladeshi exam result. It made little sense. Why would a foreign outlet care about HSC result dates? And why was this post, seemingly a stray piece of international news, attracting thousands of reactions from Bangladeshi accounts?
Upon closer look, I realised the language was not foreign. It was distinctly Bangladeshi, written in a system that people outside Chattogram might struggle to decipher.
Here is what the sentence above translates to: The chairman of the Bangladesh inter-education board committee said this year's Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC) results may be published between 25 and 29 October.
It was written in Chittagonian or Chatgaiya, spoken by millions in and around Chattogram and written in Euro Latin, a Latin-based system developed specifically to represent the language.
The post came from Deyang, one of a small cluster of Facebook pages that have begun publishing news in Euro Latin over the past two years. The pages' growing visibility raises two questions: What distinguishes Chittagonian from Bangla, and why are some of its speakers seeking a separate writing system?
A language or a dialect?
The debate over Chittagonian often centres on whether it is a language in its own right or a dialect of Bangla. The two share Eastern Indo-Aryan roots but developed along separate paths. Chittagonian has distinct sounds, grammar and vocabulary, and many Bangla speakers cannot readily understand it.
"In formal platforms and polite society, Chittagonian is seen as a corrupted, impure language. Chittagonian parents do not even want to teach this language to their own children. As a result, many words of the language are now on the verge of disappearing."
Mohammed Raihan, co-founder, Chittagonian Language Academy
In The Indo-Aryan Languages, linguist Colin Masica described Chittagonian as different enough to be considered a separate language. Historical linguist Suniti Kumar Chatterji also placed Chittagonian among eastern varieties associated with Magadhi Prakrit, suggesting that its development cannot simply be traced to literary Bangla.
But linguistic differences alone do not settle the question.
Taslima Begum, chairman of the Department of Bangla at the University of Chittagong, said more research was needed before Chittagonian could be definitively classified as a separate language.
"It is not easy to say in a sentence whether it is a separate language or not. There are similarities between Chittagonian and the Arakanese language, and there are similarities with some Hindi words too. To declare Chittagonian a separate language, there needs to be more research on this topic. It is not easy to give a verdict on this already," she said.
The classification debate and the question of how to write Chittagonian are related, but they are not the same. A speech variety can be written using different scripts, and creating a new writing system does not, by itself, establish its status as a separate language.
How the script was built
The script these pages use was developed by the Chittagonian Language Academy. It began in June 2021 as a Facebook group opened by four or five people who had met through online discussions about the language.
It aimed to discuss Chittagonian, slow the loss of its vocabulary, and argue that it is a language in its own right rather than a "corrupted" form of Bangla. It also set out to collect Chittagonian culture, literature and songs.
"In formal platforms and polite society, Chittagonian is seen as a corrupted, impure language. Chittagonian parents do not even want to teach this language to their own children. As a result, many words of the language are now on the verge of disappearing," said Mohammed Raihan, co-founder of the academy.
That sense of inferiority, he says, created the urge to give the language a separate identity. Being treated as a sub-language, in his view, felt wrong.
The group now has about 29,000 members and its page has about 58,000 followers. A website is under construction.
Over the years, the group grew. Its adoption of Euro Latin letters inspired some journalists who ran Facebook-based news pages of their own. Four pages currently publish in it: the academy's own page and three news pages, Cheragi, Deyang and The Chittagonist.
Why Latin instead of Bangla?
The main reason for the switch is tone. Chittagonian has high, low and normal tones, and the Bangla alphabet has no way to mark them.
For example, the words for "beggar" and "pond", written in the academy's system as Fóir and Foír, differ only in where the high tone falls. A longer set, the words for ginger, half, tobacco leaf and blind, become Ađa, Ađá, Áđa and Añđá.
Tone is marked on the vowel. An acute accent (á, ó, í) marks a high tone, and moving it changes the word: Fóir has its high tone on the second letter, Foír on the third.
Raihan also says Chittagonian has none of Bangla's aspirated consonants, so the system has no letters for them.
But Latin was not the group's first pick. After failing to adapt the language using the Bangla alphabet, it tried Perso-Arabic letters and an entirely new alphabet, dropping both as impractical.
It settled on Latin, using Rohingyalish, the Latin-based alphabet for Rohingya, as a model. It rendered Chittagonian more accurately than Bangla letters and carried tone marks, but because it was built for another language, the group kept modifying it.
Giving local news a local voice
The news pages using Euro Latin share a common purpose: publishing Chattogram-focused news in Chittagonian.
"For us, the goal is not to create a new script simply for the sake of having one. The goal is to represent Chittagonian as accurately as possible while keeping it accessible and practical for people to use," said Muhammad Mubinul Haque Chowdhury, founder of Deyang.
The name Deyang comes from a hill in the Anwara–Karnaphuli area that has been disappearing amid industrial and housing development. The page's name is intended to preserve a part of local history.
"There are currently six regional accents in Chattogram, of which Deyang has published in only one — the native accent of Anwara–Banshkhali. Now that the team has grown, writing in more accents will come in the future. But Deyang will never standardise any particular accent, because we believe linguistic diversity is the real beauty of the Chittagonian language," added Mubinul.
Deyang has been growing on social media, particularly among educated young people. The idea of writing in a system designed around their mother tongue has resonated with readers, including some who speak Bangla.
But the response has not been uniformly positive. Raihan says the academy and its supporters sometimes face abuse when they publish in Chittagonian.
"Whenever we write or post anything in our language on our page, we get abused in various ways. We are called agents of India, RAW agents, separatists, and so on," Raihan said.
"Bangla speakers struggled and gave blood for their language in 1952. It is very unfortunate if they themselves tag and abuse us this way, like the Pakistanis once did."
Will it take root?
Whether ordinary readers can pick up the system is a separate question. Marking tone is unfamiliar to most Bangla writers, including educated young readers, and the system has so far been used only by a few online pages. Whether most Chittagonian speakers will adopt it is still untested.
Euro Latin remains a developing project. Whether it can move beyond its early adopters will depend on whether speakers find it practical, recognise their own speech in it and choose to use it themselves.
For now, the academy's effort offers one answer to a long-standing problem: a language spoken by millions can still struggle to find a place in writing. Euro Latin is an attempt to give Chittagonian that place. And whether it becomes the writing system its creators envision will be decided not by the people who designed it, but by the people who speak the language.