Our mother tongue is what connects us to our culture and we should always be proud of it. Multilingual and multicultural societies exist through their languages, which transmit and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures.
Learning multiple languages exposes people to millions of opportunities and offers chances to travel, explore, or talk to people across the globe. Language allows anyone willing to learn it the chance to thrive in the richness of various cultures. In countless ways, language allows for self- expression.
There are plenty of quotes that support multilingualism and language learning. But in reality, the essence of being multilingual is difficult to fit into a pithy quote. So, on this International Mother Language Day, we asked on social media why maintaining home, family, heritage languages are so important.
Rustam School, a supplementary school for Persian language and culture, got every ounce out of Twitter character limitations, tweeting: “To pass on your language means ... connection, identity, pride, understanding, community, togetherness, love, soul, opportunity, choice, double not half, options, grounding, giving, respect, recognition, family … a gift.”
There is so much to unpack in this tweet. As well as facilitating emotional connections to a community and a culture, facilitating the heritage language presents opportunity, choice, and options, not just at a pragmatic level in the form of career choices, but also in terms of identity.
Children weighed in on the action, too, commenting that being multilingual gives us another way of communicating, another skill, an ability to have deeper conversation, help others in our mainstream by speaking with them or translating, help communicate with new people, provide access to a different community, form more friendships, and share a language when travelling or studying abroad .
I was struck by these children's views on how being multilingual was not just important right here and now, but that it plays an important social role within the community.
The theme for International Mother Language Day is “Fostering multilingualism for inclusion in education and society.” During the past years, there have been varying accounts from multilingual families -- in some, lockdown and increased time at home has meant that heritage languages saw more use, while in others, additional responsibilities for education have meant that there has been more English in the home, with heritage languages taking a back seat.
What the last year has shown us is how amazingly dedicated, resourceful, and hardworking both teachers and parents are when it comes to keeping education going, and there have been fantastic examples of parent-school collaborations.
Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris is trying to add a tiny bit to these collaborations, providing activities that facilitate multilingualism, and is suitable both in classroom and home learning settings so that the benefits to multilingual people can continue to thrive.
The International Mother Language monument is a heritage for all communities, no matter what languages they speak. The monument symbolizes respect and tolerance for all cultures, especially the validity and equality of all mother languages of the world. In a world of globalization, the monument can act as a beacon providing the message of the need to protect and promote linguistic diversity and multilingual education.
It is International Mother Language Day, today, on February 21. It's an important day to celebrate because the imperial monopolies of language (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French) have erased so many indigenous forms of communication and languages.
Only this month, the Mexican government recognized 68 indigenous languages as national languages alongside Spanish. This took over 500 years to return an official status to languages that existed at the time of Spanish Conquest.
In East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, language was one of the key issues in the bloody war between Pakistan (then West Pakistan) and Bangladesh in 1971 -- 52 years ago. In Canada, French and English have battled for official language status with separatists resorting to desperate measures in Quebec, to protect their French language from what they see as English encroachment.
Canada's invocation of martial law, the War Measures Act, was applied against French language separatists, the FLQ, in the 1970s. Meanwhile, the country committed atrocities against children through the Residential Schools designed to eradicate the speaking of native languages among indigenous peoples and churn out domestic labour for settler colonialists.
Sri Lanka saw a brutal conflict dispossessing thousands and terrorizing the island for many years, over Sinhala and Tamil identities and languages, among other issues.
It's also important to celebrate that language is a living thing, one we all construct and participate in daily. It's essential to also celebrate languages that have been assigned inferior status or “dialect” status because of colonial and politico-economic imperatives. Hence, it is apt to pay tribute to Jamaican patois, though I prefer the term “nation language” coined by Barbadian academic and writer, Edward Kamau Braithwaite.
Finally, while New Zealand is far from being a land of equality for the Maori people, the adoption of Maori language classes and the popularity of the Haka, demonstrate that mother tongues and artistic creations are important components in the struggle for language, which often also imply struggles for equality and social or economic justice.
There are thousands of languages left out here, and this is by no means an exhaustive list. According to the UN, of the 7,000 languages spoken today in the world, at least half will be lost by the end of this century. But we can all still reflect on the importance of mother tongues in an increasingly globalized world.
Language is the road map of a culture. Celebrating International Mother Language Day raises awareness about the importance of preserving indigenous and local languages. The worldwide celebration encourages us all to be proud of our mother languages, and to be unashamed of using them in our society.
Happy International Mother Language Day.
Anwar A Khan is an independent political analyst who writes on politics, political and human-centred figures, current and international affairs.