By: Dr. Ratan Bhattacharjee
Oliver Wendell Holmes once said, “Language is the blood of the soul into which thought run and out of which they grow”. International Mother Language Day is celebrated each year on February 21 and UNESCO this year encourages and promotes multilingual education based on mother tongue. Multilingualism contributes to the development of inclusive societies that allow multiple cultures, worldviews and knowledge systems to coexist and cross-fertilize. The other great thing is the promotion of the mother tongue for people speaking different languages. Tagore long ago described mother tongue as ‘Mother’s milk’. Like mother’s milk, mother tongue is also a nourisher, it nourishes the health of our culture. At least 40% of the more than 6,700 languages spoken around the world are threatened with extinction in the long term, due to a lack of speakers. 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.
Every two weeks a language disappears taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. When languages fade, so does the world’s rich tapestry of cultural diversity. UNESCO is taking a great mission by reminding the world of the need for safeguarding indigenous languages. On the one hand this approach encourages the principle of inclusion which is required in India a land of diversity and on the other it is a type of education that begins in the language that the learner masters most and then gradually introduces other languages. The learners whose mother tongue is different from the language of instruction are taught how to bridge the gap between home and school, to discover the school environment in a familiar language. Multilingual education is a necessity to transform education in the true sense our global contexts are fast changing and it is needed to revitalize languages that are disappearing or are threatened with extinction.
Related Posts:
The theme of the 2022 International Mother Language Day was “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities”, said UNESCO. 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. 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. More than 19,500 languages or dialects are spoken in India as mother tongue, according to census data. There are 121 languages which are spoken by 10,000 or more people in India. The 121 languages are presented in two parts – languages included in the Eighth Schedule of the Indian Constitution, comprising 22 languages and languages not included in the Eighth Schedule, comprising of 99 languages. Of these languages, 14 were initially included in the Constitution. Sindhi language was added in 1967. Thereafter three more languages viz., Konkani, Manipuri and Nepali were included in 1992. Bodo, Dogri, Maithili and Santhali were added in 2004. This diversity of languages is true of many other countries. The UN reports that globally 40 percent of the population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand.
On 21 February 1952, police opened fire on rallies. Abdus Salam, Abul Barkat, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed, Abdul Jabbar and Shafiur Rahman died, with hundreds of others injured. This was a rare incident in history, where people sacrificed their lives for their mother tongue. International Mother Language Day is a national holiday in Bangladesh. It was the initiative of Bangladesh to set up the International Mother Language Day, which was approved at the 1999 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) General Conference and has been celebrated ever since annually. The resolution was suggested by Rafiqul Islam and Abdus Salam, Bengalis living in Vancouver, Canada. They wrote a letter to Kofi Annan on 9 January 1998 asking him to take a step for saving the world’s languages from extinction by declaring an International Mother Language Day. Rafiq proposed the date as 21 February to commemorate the 1952 killings in Dhaka during the Language Movement. The Language Movement had a major cultural impact on Bengali society. It has inspired the development and celebration of the Bengali language, literature and culture.
21 February, celebrated as Language Movement Day or Shohid Divas (Martyr’s Day) is a major national holiday in Bangladesh. The first International Mother Language Day was observed throughout the world in 2000. Promotion of native languages and efforts to preserve them are a need of our times. With a growing understanding of its importance, particularly in early schooling, and more commitment to its development in public life, progress is being made in mother tongue-based multilingual education. It is unfortunate that people all over the world neglect their mother language giving excuse of career and global communication. Quite naturally, linguistic diversity is increasingly coming under threat as more and more languages disappear. Since the events of February 1952, poems, songs, novels, plays, films, cartoons, and paintings were created to capture the movement from the varied point of views. Notable artistic depictions include the poems Bornomala, Amar Dukhini Bornomala and February 1969 by Shamsur Rahman, the film Jibon Theke Neoa by Zahir Raihan, the stage play Kobor by Munier Chowdhury and the novels Ekushey February by Raihan and Artonaad by Shawakat Osman. The states of West Bengal and Tripura in India celebrate 21 February as Language Movement Day.
In Assam people fought long for the preservation of their mother language and this had a historical significance in the development of Assamese culture and heritage. In the South of India there was fierce movement against the imposition of Hindi and people protested against such efforts. What is needed is the promotion of multilingualism which is now discouraged in the name of promoting one nation one language one culture theory proposed by some politically motivated people. Such parochial efforts will defeat the aim of making India a vibrant nation. Nelson Mandela correctly said, “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” In India the need for celebration of the International Mother Language Day is very much felt as divisive policies of the some political parties are coming as a big menace to the Constitutional principle of inclusion. For Indian English or one mainstream language can never exude that magic of emotions which our varied mother languages can. The rhythm of our body is the same as our mother tongue because through this mother language we can go back to our mother. A child educated in the rudiments of his or mother language can easily proceed to higher branches of learning. When any language is lost it means the pedigree of a nation is somehow lost. Samuel Taylor Coleridge found in the mother language “the trophies of its past and weapons of its future conquests.” (The author an International Visiting Faculty USA and a trilingual poet may be reached at profratanbhattacharjee@gmail.com)
