Language differences between the children who are brought up by mothers and those by caretakers in Dhaka City

Abstract

Language development is considered as a useful indicator of a child‘s overall development. It is the medium of a communication which helps to express the needs, thoughts and ideas of human being. Language is a communicating system consisting of sounds, morphemes, words and rules of sentences. Every child follows a natural progression for mastering the skills of language. But an enrich environment with sounds, sights and consistent exposure to the language of others can help to develop the best language skill. This research was done to find out whether there was any language difference between children who were brought up by mothers and those by caretakers in Dhaka city. The research was divided in five chapters. Each chapter discussed different section of the research. In the beginning the dissertation started with introduction about the research and discussed about the problem of the statement, purpose, significance, limitation of the study and also gave a light on operational definition. Various theories have arisen that attempt to account for how children acquire language. The second part of the research highlighted about those theories that related to child‘s language acquisition. To get the data, 17 mothers were interviewed and observation was done on 14 children of 6-7 years old. Among 17 mothers 10 mothers were housewife mothers and 7 were working mothers. The dissertation included two open-ended questionnaires for housewife mothers and working mothers for interview. Housewife mothers questionnaire were prepared to find what kind of language mothers usually use when communicated with their children. On the other hand, the questionnaires for the working mothers were prepared to found what kind of differences they find in their children language as their children spent most of the time with the caretakers. The observation was done children in the

playground. As the paper was done on the language differences therefore the children were observed in natural setting to get their daily use of language during communication. The dissertation also discussed about the analysis and findings of the survey. After analysing all the data and findings, it was found that there was a language difference between the children who were brought up by mothers and those by caretakers. Children who were brought up by mothers, their way of speaking, expression, ideas and used of working words in standard Bangla langugae were quite different than the children who were brought up by caretakers. Children who were brought up by caretakers they spoke in dialect, using slang words, spoke in harsh way. Through the discussion of the central research questionnaires the dissertation came to conclusion that there was language difference between the children in Dhaka city, who were brought up by mothers and who were by caretakers.