International Mother Language Day
Image: pixabay.com
21 February 2022
The idea to celebrate International Mother Language Day was the initiative of Bangladesh. It was approved at the 1999 UNESCO General Conference and has been observed throughout the world since 2000.
UNESCO believes in the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity for sustainable societies. It is within its mandate for peace that it works to preserve the differences in cultures and languages that foster tolerance and respect for others.
Linguistic diversityis increasingly threatened as more and more languages disappear. Globally 40 per cent of the population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand. Nevertheless, progress is being made in mother tongue-based multilingual education with growing understanding of its importance, particularly in early schooling, and more commitment to its development in public life.
Multilingual and multicultural societies exist through their languages which transmit and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures in a sustainable way.
Message from Ms Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, on the occasion of International Mother Language Day
When he expresses his desire to reacquaint himself with his language, Hamet, the boy created by the writer Diadié Dembélé, is expressing a universal and fundamental need.
Indeed, every language has a certain rhythm, a certain way of approaching things, of thinking about them. Learning or forgetting a language is thus not merely about acquiring or losing a means of communication. It is about seeing an entire world either appear or fade away.
From the very first day of school, many schoolchildren have the ambivalent experience of discovering one language - and the world of ideas which comes with it - and forgetting another one: the language they have known since infancy. Worldwide, four out of ten students do not have access to education in the language they speak or understand best; as a result, the foundation for their learning is more fragile.
This distancing from the mother tongue affects us all, for linguistic diversity is a common good. And the protection of linguistic diversity is a duty.
Technology can provide new tools for protecting linguistic diversity. Such tools, for example, facilitating their spread and analysis, allow us to record and preserve languages which sometimes exist only in oral form. Put simply, they make local dialects a shared heritage.
However, because the Internet poses a risk of linguistic uniformization, we must also be aware that technological progress will serve plurilingualism only as long as we make the effort to ensure that it does. The designing of digital tools in several languages, the supporting of media development, and the supporting of access to connectivity: all this needs to be done so that people can discover different languages without giving up their respective mother tongues.
The International Decade of Indigenous Languages, which began this year, should, by channelling the efforts of researchers, broadcasters and speakers, give new momentum to the protection of these invaluable repositories of know-how and worldviews. As the lead agency for Decade-related work, UNESCO is fully committed to this cause.
On this international day, I thus call on everyone able to do so to defend linguistic and cultural diversity, which makes up the universal grammar of our shared humanity.
UNESCO