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HOW meaningful is justice when the very people who suffered cannot fully understand the words spoken in its name? This question captured the nation’s conscience on November 17, 2025, when Bangladesh witnessed the historic verdict against the ousted former prime minister Sheikh Hasina for the inhuman crimes committed during the July–August 2024 uprising, also known as the Student-People’s uprising. More than 1,400 students and citizens were killed, and thousands more were left maimed, blinded, or permanently scarred after being targeted simply for demanding dignity and democracy. For their bereaved families, mostly from working-class and lower-middle-class communities, the verdict was not merely a legal pronouncement; it was an emotional culmination of grief, longing and struggle. They gathered in the courtroom and before television screens across the country, hoping to finally hear truth and accountability articulated in a language they could grasp and feel. Yet, as the more than 400-page judgment began to be read aloud, a painful irony emerged: the entire verdict was delivered in English, a language far removed from the lived linguistic reality of those whose lives were shattered. What should have been a moment of collective closure instead exposed a profound linguistic divide, raising urgent questions about whose language — and whose suffering — matters in the administration of justice in Bangladesh.

The courtroom scenes streamed live were heartbreaking and symbolically powerful. In the midst of the live telecast, I saw several victim families silently shedding tears, those who could understand parts of the English reading felt overwhelmed by the recognition the state was finally giving to their suffering. However, these tears could have multiplied many times over had the verdict been articulated in Bangla, the language they live, feel and grieve in. Meanwhile, many attendees, unable to follow the English text, appeared fatigued or disengaged; some dozed off, others stared blankly at the judge, unable to make sense of the words. These reactions were not signs of disrespect but clear symptoms of linguistic exclusion. Soon after, social media mocked them, asking why ‘they had not slept the previous night’ or criticising the judge’s reading style, noting that his delivery was ‘full of pauses’ and ‘lacking a natural flow.’ Yet such comments entirely missed the core issue: the audience was not physically tired, they were linguistically excluded. Their disengagement was not a matter of behaviour but a direct consequence of linguistic alienation. The language of justice did not match the language of the people.

From a sociolinguistic and multimodal perspective, this outcome is unsurprising. Listening comprehension is shaped not just by vocabulary, but by tone, rhythm, pacing, body language and the deeper, embodied familiarity of one’s mother tongue. A dense legal document written in formal English — laden with abstract terminology, long syntactic structures and legalised phrasing — becomes extremely difficult to process when read aloud without the natural intonational and prosodic patterns of Bangla. The judge’s pauses, monotone delivery and procedural pacing intensified this cognitive overload. What appeared as boredom or disrespect was, in reality, a collapse of meaningful connection between the spoken text and the listeners. The courtroom, instead of becoming a shared space of collective recognition, became a linguistic void accessible only to a small elite.

This linguistic gap becomes even more troubling when considered alongside Bangladesh’s historical struggle for linguistic rights. Ours is perhaps the only nation in the world founded explicitly on the right to language. The Language Movement of 1952 was not merely symbolic; it was an assertion of epistemic justice; the right to access knowledge, power and public life through one’s mother tongue. The martyrs of 1952 did not sacrifice their lives so that Bangla could remain confined to emotion or culture while relinquishing institutional domains to English. Their struggle fed directly into the Liberation War of 1971 and was later enshrined in the Bangla Language Act of 1987. Yet on one of the most significant judicial occasions in the country’s contemporary history, this hard-won linguistic heritage was sidelined. A verdict concerning the nation’s deepest pain was articulated in a language foreign to most citizens.

A comparative global perspective reinforces this principle. France delivers all verdicts in French; Japan conducts trials in Japanese; Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and much of Latin America use their national languages in court. China, despite its linguistic diversity, ensures verdicts are delivered in Mandarin with translations available for minority groups. India, despite its colonial legal legacy, issues regional-language versions of significant public-interest judgments in states like West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, and Uttar Pradesh. Across the world, the principle remains clear: justice must be linguistically accessible. Bangladesh, despite possessing one of the strongest linguistic nationalist histories globally, remains caught between colonial legal inheritance and its own ideological commitment to Bangla. This tension demands immediate introspection.

This contradiction raises important theoretical questions about linguistic justice, language rights, and language ecology. In language ecology, sustainability depends not only on how widely a language is spoken, but on whether it maintains institutional authority in high-prestige domains such as the judiciary, administration, and education. When Bangla is excluded from the judicial process, even in cases of profound national emotion, its ecological strength is weakened. Symbolic dominance is insufficient if institutional roles remain occupied by another language. Crucially, linguistic justice insists that people must understand the decisions that govern their lives. A verdict that is legally correct but linguistically inaccessible undermines democratic participation. When a mother cannot comprehend the verdict concerning her son’s death, justice is not fully realised. The majority of those killed during the uprising came from non-elite social backgrounds; their only linguistic resource is Bangla. To exclude them from the linguistic landscape of justice is to deepen structural inequality.

None of these arguments question the fairness of the verdict itself. Rather, they highlight the gap between justice delivered and justice experienced. Bangladesh must confront this linguistic discrepancy. A bilingual judicial system is both feasible and necessary. English may remain part of legal drafting for technical and archival purposes, but major verdicts must also be issued and publicly read in Bangla. Establishing an institutional translation unit within the higher judiciary would align Bangladesh with global norms and honour its own linguistic commitments.

At this critical moment in the nation’s history, we must reflect on what it means for justice to ‘speak’ to its people. Bangla is not only a symbol of identity; it is the emotional, cultural and epistemic lifeblood of the nation. If justice is to resonate with those who have suffered the most, it must be articulated in the language they live, think, and dream in. Ensuring this is not merely a constitutional obligation, it is a moral imperative that honours the martyrs of 1952 and 1971, as well as the young lives so brutally taken in 2024.

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Md Rabiul Alam is a PhD researcher in the School of Education at the University of Queensland, Australia.