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32 Dhaka Univ. L.J. 119 (2021)
The Law of Language and the Language of the Law: A Socio-Legal Appraisal of Colonial Legal Language in Bangladesh

handle is hein.journals/dkauvylw32 and id is 413 raw text is: © Dhaka University Law Journal, 2021, 32(2), 119-134 doi: https://doi.org/10.3329/dulj.v32i2.57961 The Law of Language and the Language of the Law: A Socio- legal Appraisal of Colonial Legal Language in Bangladesh Arpeeta Shams Mizan* 1. Introduction Generally, the language of the law, i.e. how the law is written, results from historical events and the nature of the legal system of any country.'This article deals with the legal language, and critically probes into the colonial linguistic style of legal language in Bangladesh which has considerable impact on not only the legislations, but also their application, their social implications, and the overall public knowledge of the law. As a result, we the people of Bangladesh get laws that we do not understand easily upon reading. This pushes us away from knowing or even talking about laws except superficially. In this context, I will explore what specific factors led to this poor condition of the legal language so that Bangladesh can move towards making laws 'for the people'. The term 'legal language' connotes the language used for legal writing. There are different kinds (genres) of legal writing: for example, (a) academic legal writing as in law journals, (b) juridical legal writing as in court judgments, and (c) legislative legal writing as in, laws, regulations, contracts, and treaties. 2 In this paper, I use the word legal language very consciously: for purposes of this article, legal language (7rt4 -t-M) is the language used for lawmaking and other legal procedures. It does not mean lawful or permissible language (Zr4 ZM) and it is not equivalent to language of the law (m d -z-T) which more often refers to a particular piece of law or legislation. 1.1 Legal Language: What Is It? The use of language is crucial to any legal system because if the law is written in a language that is incomprehensible or obscure and inaccessible to the people for whom it is made, the law becomes detached from the people. People tend to not know the law, and this ignorance of law breeds an unconscious, indifferent body of citizens. Assistant Professor, Department of Law, University of Dhaka, and doctoral researcher, University of Bristol Law School (UK). C reative Commons lon Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the i?.Iwr-w~ terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 License (htps://crearivecomrmons.org/iicenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of'the work withou1 Jirther permission provided the original work is properly cited. Maja Stanojevid, 'Legal English - Changing Perspective' (2017) 9 (1) Facta Universitatis 67. 2 See, Vijay K.Bhatia, Analyzing Genre: Language in Professional Settings (Routledge 1993) 101.

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