The Chakma language is classified as an Indo-Aryan language, with almost 400,000 speakers. Chakma speakers primarily live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of eastern Bangladesh and in the Mizoram, Tripura, and Arunachal Pradesh regions of India. The language is officially recognized by the Government of Tripura in India and by the Bangladeshi government; however, it does not have any radio stations or television shows in the language. In 2015, the first Chakma language film (Mor Thengari, ‘My Bicycle’) was produced, but subsequently banned by the Bangladesh Film Censor Board, potentially due to army representation within the film.
Bivuti Chakma is a language revivalist based in Bangladesh who learned his native language from his grandfather. Bivuti currently works as a language consultant on social media, helping to promote and preserve the use of the Chakma language. He teaches the language to other members of his community while concurrently creating Unicode fonts and keyboards and publishing various books in the Chakma language. During his work to keep the language alive, he has documented approximately 1500 hours of conversations with an estimated 150 people.
Bivuti and his team are establishing an online Chakma language school where young people can learn the Chakma language through online tools and apps. For those in the Rangamati City area, they will also provide in-person classes. Bivuti’s ultimate goal is to motivate the Chakma community to recognize the importance of their language: as he says, “it is [his] mother tongue, [and] it is very important to preserve, revive, promote and digitize the language so that it is available all over the world.”