International Mother Language Day

Earth is our mother and the languages spoken are the mother tongue of someone according to their geographical habitat. The entitlement ‘mother tongue’ is basically a person’s native language that they have learned from their birth. In different countries, this term is also recognizable as first, dominant, home, or ethnic tongue. People speak approximately 7000 dialects all over the world. But as the days are passing several dialects are disappearing and getting extinct in thin air. Therefore, the safeguarding of the native tongue is like preserving the art, culture, and traditional values.

History of International Mother Language Day

After the India-Pakistan partition in 1947, Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan. Bangladesh was East-Pakistan and Pakistan was West-Pakistan. In the year 1948, the Government of Pakistan announced Urdu as their National Language. However, Bengali was the language that speaks the majority of the people.

This incident created an urge of angst among the people of East Pakistan. In the year 1952, the mass processed rallies and hold public meetings. This made the Government pass the petition to stop the chaos but the masses outlawed it. Unfortunately, on 21st February 1952, the police opened the fire which resulted in five deaths and hundreds of causalities.

In the year 1998, Rafiqul Islam and Abdus Salam wrote a letter to Kofi Anna (the seventh G.S of UN). They proposed to save the native languages from getting extinct. Later, in the year 1999 UNESCO announced 21st February as INTERNATIONAL MOTHER LANGUAGE DAY.

Significance of International Mother Language Day

It is universally knew that several countries are multilingual as well as bilingual even. It varies from intellectual country to country according to the geographical culture.

International Mother Language Day is a celebratory occasion to promote diversity, free education, and free expression of education on multilingualism. The day encourages everyone to raise awareness about different traditional and ecological values.

Unknown Facts about International Mother Language Day

In a study, it was found every two weeks one of the languages gets extinct with its culture and legacy.
There is no precise number of languages spoken but there are at approx. 5000-7000 languages.
On average 40% of the population speak or understand the language they know however they don’t have access to education.
Africa, India, South America, and Southeast Asia speak the majority of the world’s language.
Though, English is the majority speaking the official language in the world that makes it a threat to other linguistic diversity.
The countries like Indonesia, India, Mexico, Nigeria, and Papua New Guinea have more official recognition in languages.
40% of the most common languages spoken by the population are Arabic, Bengali, English, Hindi, Mandarin, Portuguese, Russia, and Spanish.

Final Words

The theme for 2021 is ‘Fostering Multilingualism for Inclusion in Education and Society’. The theme points toward acknowledging the fact that just embracing the different mother tongues will bring harmony between us. The multilingual atmosphere in society will not only bring wisdom to a different identity. But it will also bring empathy within us and make us a better person of our own kind.

Mother tongue plays a principal role and helps us in developing skills to understand our own languages efficiently. It is an important tool in human evolution & education that gets us close to different cultural values.