Social Standing of People Based on Communication Ability in English in Bangladesh: An Expanded Systematic Review

Abstract

In Bangladesh, proficiency in English continues to function as one of the most consequential, and most unevenly distributed, forms of cultural capital available to students and professionals. This expanded review synthesizes historical, sociolinguistic, economic, and pedagogical literature to examine how English communication ability shapes social standing, employability, educational access, and self-perception across the country. Building on the colonial and post-independence trajectory of English-medium instruction, the review develops a conceptual framework linking three upstream determinants — educational infrastructure and teacher quality, socioeconomic background and urban–rural access, and cultural attitudes toward linguistic identity — to downstream outcomes in employment, higher education, and social prestige, with stratification effects that feed back into the very determinants that produced them. The review situates Bangladesh within a comparative South Asian frame, contrasting its trajectory with India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Nepal, and draws on theories of linguistic capital (Bourdieu 1991) and linguistic imperialism (Phillipson 1992) to interrogate why English retains such disproportionate symbolic weight in a predominantly Bangla-speaking society. It also surveys emerging interventions — communicative and task-based pedagogy, teacher professional development, community-based English-speaking environments, and AI-assisted language-learning tools — and evaluates their documented and plausible effects on closing proficiency gaps. The review closes with differentiated recommendations for policymakers, institutional leaders, teacher-training bodies, and learners, and identifies priority areas for future empirical research, including longitudinal wage-premium studies and rural intervention trials. Illustrative figures and summary tables are provided to aid interpretation; readers preparing this review for submission should replace the illustrative figures with verified primary statistics from sources such as the Bangladesh Bureau of Educational Information and Statistics (BANBEIS), the Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education (DSHE), and the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS).

Keywords: English proficiency; social status; linguistic capital; Bangladesh; English medium instruction; educational inequality; South Asia; sociolinguistics

DOI: 10.7176/JLLL/112-04

Publication date: October 30^th 2026