Dr. Afia Dil has put together an extraordinarily rich collection of nursery rhymes in this book. While the focus of her study is on Bengali nursery rhymes within the larger context of nursery rhymes from around the world available in English, the materials extend beyond young child audiences. Everything is translated for an English-speaking audience. …
This book updates her earlier study of Bengali nursery rhymes aimed at understanding how Bengali society shapes a child’s mind. It is based on her comprehensive collection and three decade study of oral and written nursery rhymes for children in Bengal. She reviews an extensive literature on nursery rhymes in English and the kinds of defining approaches and analysis that have been used on them and classifies them according to topics. She analyzes her data with a rich analytic apparatus allowing comparison between corpora of such rhymes in many languages. Dr. Afia Dil’s book brings together such a rich and wide range of nursery rhymes, both from Bangladesh and other sources, that scholars will be able to use them for analysis for a long time, parents will find materials they can recite to children, and lovers of poetry will find much that is new and delightful to them. This is a treasure-trove for those who love poetry for the young.
– Dr. Susan Ervin-Tripp, Professor Emeritus,
University of California, Berkeley
It was a matter of great pride for me to find during my research that Bengali nursery rhymes, both traditional and modern, rank very high as part of the world treasury of nursery rhymes. Bengali rhymes, both in quantity and quality, compare very favorably with rhymes surveyed in other languages around the globe. …
I would like to make a proposal that, in continuation of the international leadership role in the field by Bangladesh, the 2017 International Mother Language Day (65th anniversary of Ekushe) be celebrated as the International Nursery Rhymes Year. The theme deserves to be highlighted internationally because a great part of the oral treasury of knowledge and wisdom has already been lost because it was not recorded in hundreds, if not thousands, of languages and cultures that have become extinct.
– Dr. Afia Dil, Professor Emeritus,
Alliant International University, San Diego
Cover designed by Anwar Dil: Cover titles of
Bande Ali Mia’s Age Pori (1975), Ekhlasuddin Ahmad’s Katum Kutum (1977), Hosne Ara Kamal’s Chharaae
Paraa (2000), Husne Jahan’s Amader Bhasha (2002).

Afia Dil Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, and educated at Eden Girls High School and Eden Girls College at Dhaka, she earned her B.A. Honors and Master’s degrees in English Literature from the University of Dhaka, Post-graduate diploma in education from the University of New Zealand, Master’s degree in English and Applied Linguistics from the University of Michigan, and Ph.D. in Linguistics from Stanford University. She was Professor and Chair of the Department of English at Eden Girls College, Dhaka (1954-61), Professor and Language Specialist at the East Pakistan Education Extension Centre, Dhaka (1961-62) and at the West Pakistan Education Extension Centre, Lahore (1962-65). Since 1975 she has taught graduate courses in Linguistics, Women Studies and Leadership Studies at United States International University, San Diego, California. At present she is a Professor Emeritus at the Alliant (former U.S.) International University. Her publications in Bengali include, among others: New Zealander Patra (Letters from New Zealand) – a series of thirty weekly articles published in The Begum Weekly, Dhaka, 1953; Bengali version of Caroline Pratt’s I Learn from Children (1955); Je desh mone pare (1957) – her travelogue of the United States of America on the Leadership Exchange Program; and her Bengali translation of Helen Keller’s My Teacher, published serially in The Begum, in 1959. The most notable among her translations from Bengali into English is Syed Waliullah’s Taranga Bhanga, a play in three acts, published by the Bengali Academy under the title of The Breakers (1985). Among her linguistic publications in English, mention may be made of “English Loanwords in Bengali” (1966); “Bengali Baby Talk” (1975); (with Charles A. Ferguson) “The Sociolinguistic Variable(s) in Bengali: A Sound Change in Progress?” (1978); “Diglossia in Bangla: A Study of Shifts in the Verbal Repertoire of the Educated Classes in Dhaka, Bangladesh” (1986); (with Anwar Dil) “Muhammad Shahidullah’s Approach to Indo-Aryan Parent Speech and the Common Bases of Urdu-Hindi and Bengali” (1989). Her monograph Two Traditions of the Bengali Language (Cambridge, 1991; Islamabad, 1993) on the sociolinguistic study of the Hindu and Muslim dialects of Bengali has been hailed as “a valuable contribution to sociolinguistic research in a neglected field.” She is co-author (with Anwar Dil) of a 744-page book, Bengali Language Movement to Bangladesh (San Diego: Intercultural Forum, 2000), hailed as the most judicious research work on the creation of Bangladesh as a nation-state.