Murad Takla


In Bangladeshi humour and popular culture, Murad Takla refers to someone who writes Bengali words using the Latin script in a bizarre or unorthodox fashion, inadvertently producing a distorted meaning. The phrase originated in the 2010s.

History

The term Murad Takla originated from a Facebook comment posted on 14 July 2012. In the thread, one user advised another to speak logically, asked why they had a "lame" profile picture, and told them to learn before speaking. A screenshot of the comment went viral on Facebook due to its unintentional humour: the commenter wrote Murad Takla, but the pronunciation resembled "a bald person named Murad". The phrase became popular and synonymous with writing distorted Bengali using the Latin script.
Following the incident, a Facebook page named Murad Takla was created on 18 November 2012. The page, dedicated to sharing humorous posts written in Bengali using Latin letters, gained popularity and raised awareness of the potential difficulties in transliteration.
The term was also applied to Bangladeshi politician Murad Hasan following a controversy involving a leaked phone call. Discussions surrounding Hasan caused some confusion regarding the term's origin.

Dictionary

In 2020, Simu Nasser and Pian Mughdha Nabi published the Murad Takla Dictionary to assist in interpreting sentences written in the "Takla language".

Examples