As students in the Department of Linguistics, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University know, each 21 February is celebrated by the United Nations (UN) as International Mother Language Day (IMLD).
IMLD is a worldwide annual observance held to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and promote multilingualism.
Its goal is to preserve and protect all languages used by peoples of the world, as stated in the UN General Assembly resolution 61/266 in 2007.
The Thammasat University Library owns a number of books about mother languages.
A first language, native language or mother/father/parent tongue, also known as arterial language, is a language that a person has been exposed to from birth. In some countries, the term native language or mother tongue refers to the language of one’s ethnic group rather than one’s first language.
Sometimes, the term mother tongue or mother language is used for the language that a person learned as a child, usually from their parents. Children growing up in bilingual homes can, according to this definition, have more than one mother tongue or native language.
As part of Oxford Global Languages (OGL), an initiative to enable people across the globe to find answers online to everyday language questions in 100 of the world’s languages, some Oxford University Press employees were asked about the importance of their mother languages. OGL will provide lexical information for these languages online to speakers and learners. Among the commenters was one from the Phillippines:
It has been many years since I left the Philippines and English replaced Filipino as my main medium of communication, but this has only made my native language even more meaningful to me. Whereas before I used to take it for granted, now I relish every opportunity of using it. Its words lend greater significance to every utterance: jokes are funnier, songs more beautiful, stories more engaging, when expressed in my mother tongue. I love the diversity and openness of Filipino—an Austronesian language with a largely Malay word stock enriched by foreign influences as varied as Spanish, English, Sanskrit, and Chinese. I love how it can invest so much meaning just with the addition or repetition of a syllable or two: ‘Anong sinasabi mo?’ and ‘Anong pinagsasabi mo?’ can both be translated to ‘What are you saying?’ but a Filipino speaker knows there is a world of difference between one phrase and the other. In Filipino, ‘Bababa ba?’ is a perfectly grammatical, understandable, everyday sentence. Some people see this as a sign of the crudeness of the language, but I disagree. A language with so much history, that can convey so much with so little, can only be described as fascinating, and will be a very interesting addition to Oxford Global Languages.
–Danica Salazar, Oxford English Dictionary General Editing, OUP
Asian initiatives
In June 2016, as part of the Digital India initiative, digitized content will be made available in the country’s 22 scheduled languages and extended to India’s other 234 recognized languages. Digitization began in June 2016 through the Bharatavani Project at the Central Institute of Indian Languages (CIIL) in Mysore, and by February 2017 content in 60 Indian languages had been made available free of charge.
As its website indicates, The CIIL’s aims and objectives include:
- advising and assisting central as well as state governments in matters of language.
- contributing to the development of all Indian languages by creating content and corpus.
- protecting and documenting minor, minority and tribal languages.
- promoting linguistic harmony by teaching 15 Indian languages to non-native learners.
As the UN reports:
For The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), every mother tongue deserves to be known, recognized and given greater prominence in all spheres of public life. This is not always the case. Mother tongues do not necessarily have national-language status, official-language status, or status as the language of instruction. This situation can lead to the devaluation of a mother tongue and to its ultimate disappearance in the long term. On this twentieth anniversary of International Mother Language Day, we must remember that all mother tongues count and that they are all essential to building peace and supporting sustainable development. A mother tongue is vital to literacy because it facilitates the acquisition of basic reading and writing skills, as well as basic numeracy, during the first years of schooling. These skills provide the foundation for personal development. A mother tongue is also a unique expression of creative diversity and identity, and is a source of knowledge and innovation. Much remains to be done. Learners’ mother tongues are rarely the language of instruction during the first years of schooling. According to UNESCO, nearly 40 per cent of the world’s population lack access to education in a language which they speak or understand. This situation persists despite studies showing that the command of a mother tongue facilitates general learning and learning of other languages. Indigenous peoples have always expressed their desire for education in their own languages…Indigenous peoples number some 370 million and their languages account for the majority of the approximately 7,000 living languages on Earth. Many indigenous peoples continue to suffer from marginalization, discrimination and extreme poverty, and are the victims of human-rights violations. In the light of Sustainable Development Goal 4 and of the objective to leave no one behind, it is essential that indigenous peoples have access to education in their own languages.
Part of the problem is that without active preservation efforts, many languages tend to disappear from everyday use:
Languages, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development, are of strategic importance for people and planet. Yet, due to globalization processes, they are increasingly under threat, or disappearing altogether. When languages fade, so does the world’s rich tapestry of cultural diversity. Opportunities, traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking and expression — valuable resources for ensuring a better future — are also lost.
At least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.
International Mother Language Day has been observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.
Every two weeks a language disappears taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.
Linguistic diversity is 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.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)