From Rezwan…
Our mother tongue is more than a language, it is the soul that lives inside us. It is an armory of the human mind; an archive of history. We invent our world through language and bring it to life.
Mrunalini speaks of her mother tongue Telugu:
“How sweet our languages are, how proud they make us. How much we miss talking in our mother tongue. Especially, when we are away from it.”
Ripon Kumar Biswas of the Bangladesh Watchdog says:
“Our mother tongue is the language of nature, which is intimately related to the individual because it is structured and upheld by local laws of nature, which structure the physiology of the individual.”
But it is even more than that. “One does not inhabit a country; one inhabits a language. That is our country, our fatherland –and no other;” said E. M. Cioran, the Rumanian-born French Philosopher.
That is why some times we see nationalism sparking in the world based on languages and language matters!
Thousands of local languages from around the world used as the daily means of expression are absent from education systems, the media, publishing and the public domain in general because of state policies.
We learn better in our mother tongue when it is taught in school (Mother tongue Dilemma –UNESCO News letter). But this is not the case of all minority languages. 476 million of world’s illiterate people speak minority languages and live in countries where children are mostly not taught in their mother language.
From Southern Azerbaijan under Iranian rule, BayBak, Voice of a Nation says:
“It’s been more than 80 years since the Iranian authority banned other languages, such as Turkish (the majority in Iran), Arabic, Baluchs, Turkmens and Kurdish dialects. Every year, on the 21st of February, all nationalities celebrate International Mother Language Day; a date chosen by UNESCO. On the day of the celebration, Iranian police will arrest many.”
Several thousand years old, the Ainu language spoken in northern Japan was dying out due to political pressure from the central government. At the end of the 20th century, this trend was reversed. While Ainu’s future is still not guaranteed because it isn’t taught in schools, the resurgence of interest is undeniable.
Sid writes in Picked Politics:
“International Mother Language Day deserves celebration in Zambia. The country has worked hard to establish and maintain political unity over the years. But as other societies are learning too late, it would be a tragedy if this hard-fought unity should be maintained at the expense of the variety of languages and dialects that have long called these lands home.”
About 27 percent of the world’s languages (about 6000) are threatened with extinction. The Foundation for Endangered Languages says 83 percent of the world’s languages are restricted to single countries, making them more vulnerable to the policies of a single government.
Abhinaba Basu at Geek Gyan says:
“A lot of people speaking English natively forget the importance of mother language due to its predominance. They take their language for granted. However, each year a bunch of languages become extinct, the latest being Eyak, which reached extinction with the death of Marie Smith Jones – the last native Eyak speaking person.
I believe that if we don’t actively try to preserve our mother language, extinction will always be a possibility. One of the most important things to do to preserve a language is to ensure that they are better covered by technology.”
Citizen media is a great tool to promote languages. According to Technorati, there are more than 100 million blogs out there. A previous year’s report show about 37% blogs are in Japanese, followed by 36% in English, then Chinese (8%), Spanish(3%), Italian (3%), Portuguese (2%), and French(2%) among others.
There are ICT based advocacy sites like Bisharat which promote research, advocacy, and networking relating to use of African languages in software and web content.
Global Voices Online also supports and promotes the diversity of languages. Its Lingua project translates the contents of its main English page in a dozen languages. This is one example many international online media may want to follow to secure meaningful transfer of information to global readers.
First posted in Global Voices Online
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