It is very funny that in all my trips to Sylhet, Bangladesh since 1971, l have never seen Sylheti Nagari script. There are plenty of signs in Bangla and English but never in the Sylheti Nagari script. And yet the first time, that l had seen it was in London at the front entrance of Channel S studios in Walthamstow. 

First of course, we have to acknowledge that Syloti is a separate language in itself and not a dialect of Bangla, as it often thought. It is an Eastern Indo-Aryan language spoken mainly in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh, and the neighbouring Barak Valley in the Indian state of Assam. 

It has 33 characters ( 5 vowels and 28 consonants) when compared to 51 of Bangla, and uses very few conjuncts characters. 

So it is clear Sylheti is linguistically independent with its own sound system including tones absent in Bangla and a grammar and morphology diverging from standard Bangla. Quite simply dialects don’t evolve their own scripts but languages do. 

It is thought that the Nagri language came with the companions of Shah Jalal who invaded Sylhet in 1303 AD and the language emerged a couple of centuries afterwards. The language is closely related to Bangla and most speakers are bilingual in Sylhoti and Bangla. 

Finally a trip to the studios of Channel S, is worth it just to see the Syloti script and the history of the region. All credit goes to them for putting all this history up on panels in their reception area. It beats going to a dusty further education library to see it all.