The text from your operator telling you your data pack is about to expire will soon arrive in Bangla. On Sunday, 20 February 2022, the day before International Mother Language Day, the Bangladesh Telecommunication Regulatory Commission formally launched a programme to move every operator SMS and notification into Bangla, and telecommunications minister Mustafa Jabbar told the four operators to finish the job by June.
Where the operators stand
BTRC director general Brigadier General Nasim Parvez presented the numbers at the commission's auditorium: Banglalink has converted 95 per cent of its messages, Grameenphone 92, Teletalk 89 and Robi 85. The regulator's own timetable said 91 per cent by 30 June and 100 per cent by December; the minister overruled it and set June for everything. "The back-end work was challenging but it has been done," he said. "There is no device on which Bangla cannot be written."
What will still be in English
The order is not absolute. BTRC listed the exceptions: dates, numbers and currency amounts; the location codes of BTS towers; brand and flagship names; the customer's second "YES/Y" consent for value-added services and the keywords that switch such services on and off; one-time passwords sent by international services such as Facebook and Google; and business-to-business and vendor-platform messages. In other words, the marketing and service texts go Bangla, while anything a machine has to parse stays Latin.
The cost question nobody mentioned
Bangla SMS uses Unicode (UCS-2) encoding, which fits 70 characters in a message where English fits 160. That is why a Bangla text you send yourself is often billed as two or three messages. It does not affect what you receive from the operator, but it is worth knowing before you switch your own phone's keyboard to Bangla for everything.
What to check
- If operator texts show as boxes or question marks, your phone's fonts are outdated; any Android from the last eight years and every iPhone renders Bangla natively.
- Bangla texts from the operator will still come from the same short codes (for example 121 for Grameenphone), so scam messages pretending to be an operator are no easier to spot; the language is not proof of the sender.
BTRC chairman Shyam Sunder Sikder and telecom secretary Md Khalilur Rahman urged the industry to keep extending Bangla across every digital channel, not only SMS. Grameenphone's Yasir Azman, Robi's acting chief Riaz Rashid and Banglalink's acting chief Taimur Rahman attended.
