ABSTRACT
Based on the chapters presented in Language in Society in Bangladesh and Beyond: Voices of the Unheard in the Global South, the concluding chapter indicates the necessity of a deeper understanding of the multifaceted factors that influence the choices and practices of languages in Bangladesh. It also identifies the ‘domains’ that are relatively unexplored in the context of Bangladesh. In addition, the chapter provides suggestions about contemporary theoretical constructs and research designs that may be used for sociolinguistics research in Bangladesh, considering the mobility of people and fluidity of languages in the contemporary globalised world. Alongside this, the chapter shows the necessity and feasibility of exploring opportunities and scope for formulating more contextually aligned or endogenously required sociolinguistic theories that may interpret the indigenously pertinent phenomena. Thus, acknowledging the political, ideological, and hegemonic role of different languages and their demarcated role in the multilingual ecology, this chapter challenges the clear-cut one-dimensional polarised understanding and demarcated domain-specific allocations of languages. The chapter concludes with reflections on the directions and intellectual impact of sociolinguistics in Bangladesh and beyond in the future.
