ABSTRACT
Little is known how madrasa-educated speakers experience English in relation to the wider society, particularly analysed through the lens of Unequal Englishes (UE). This chapter addresses this gap by doing a critical appraisal of madrasa discourses through which the inequality of Englishes - in fact, structural inequalities between madrasa and non-madrasa speakers - can be conceived. Data were collected through linguistic ethnography at two madrasas in rural Bangladesh. The findings show that the participants, predominantly those based in a traditional madrasa, consider that English has an unwarranted hegemony in Bangladeshi society which unsettles the local sociolinguistic equilibrium. Moreover, many people stereotype and stigmatise abilities and use of English among madrasa-educated speakers as ‘deficient’. Overall, the chapter surfaces the nuances of the operationalisation of unequal Englishes in the rural periphery arguing that their mobilisation is complexly entangled with the dominant socio-political and educational ideologies reproducing deprivation and marginalisation which need to be understood through locally sensitive methodology.
