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Languages, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development are of great importance for people and planet. Yet due to globaliation, they are increasingly under threat. When languages fade, so does the world's rich tapestry of cultural diversity. Opportunities, traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking and expression, valuable resources, become lost.
Languages,like people are subsequently in a constant battle for survival. It is believed there are about 6000 languages that are spoken in the world of which 3000 are listed as endangered by UNESCO with 10 languages becoming extinct every year. 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.
Consequently International Mother Language is held every year on February 21 since the year 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism/. The day to celebrate this bond was originally chosen by the United Nations in 1999 to celebrate four students who were shot and killed in 1952 by Pakistani police for protesting the right to use their own language, Bengali.
This bond between individuals and their languages, one that if broken is forgotten for generations the UN recognises as a human right. Also with the rise of populist nationalism the threat of walls andsuspcion of integration , we should also worry what this means for migrant and Indigenous languages. After all language is a salient index of culture, and so any assault on cultural diversity is also an an assault on linguistic diversity.
Languages serves as powerful instrument of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. So all moves to promote the dissemation of mother tonques will serve not only to encourage linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world, but alse serves to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialgue.
International Mother Language Day is also a good opportunity to remind ourselves that children of migrants and Indigenous people have an international right to speak, grow up with, and celebrate their own heritage languages, wherever they reside. Languages enriches society, economic mobility and at end of the day is what makes us human.
For further information visit the UNESCO website http://www.unesco.org/new/en/international-mother-language-day/ or visit the UN's International Mother Language Day web pages.http://www.un.org/en/events/motherlanguageday/
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