Notes

  1. Gesture community: the term ‘gesture community’ stands for a group of people who, irrespective of their linguistic identity, share the identical tradition to produce and interpret gestures. More specifically, if a group of people make a specific gesture with identical body movements as well as extract similar meanings for this gesture, they belong to one gesture community even if they do not belong to one speech community. For example, if a Bengali speaker and a Chakma speaker share the same tradition in producing gestures as well as extracting the meanings, they belong to one gesture community.
  2. Informants: This paper is a part of PhD research project entitled “Bengali everyday emblematic (BEE) hand gestures as communication acts: A pragmatic approach” which was completed in 2011 at University Technology, Berlin (TU, Berlin), Germany by the author of this paper. So, here the term ‘informants’ indicates a group of Bengali speaking people belonging to same gesture community take part in the enquiry method of this study to extract the meaning of BEE hand gestures. 
  3. Street child: Children who have lost any sort of shelter (home and parents mainly due to various natural calamities like flood, river erosion, tornado etc) and spend their daily life on the city-streets in Bangladesh.
  4. Pardā: Literally the term Pardā stands for seclusion or veiling. Due to the restricted laws of Islam women members in the Bengali Muslim community are to cover their body with overgarment with veil like burqā which is regarded as Pardā. But Gardner (1998) states transcending this literal meaning the term Pardā also symbolizes a kind of spirituality of modesty to God. As she says, “Pardā is an internal state of modesty and respect toward God, and often is presented in explicitly religious terms […]” (p-209).
  5. Americanization: It is a process of cultural imperialism by which the US culture as a dominating one affects the life-styles (i.e. language, education, music, cloths) of the people in many developing countries.
  6. Englishnization: In the era of globalization Englishnization is a process by which people of developing countries are covertly enforced to accept English as the language of education, administration and business instead of their mother tongue.

 

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