Today, February 21, marks the 14th anniversary of International Mother Language Day, which was instituted in 1999 by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Unesco).This date was specially chosen in commemoration of the killing of four students 62 years ago by the police in Dhaka, during a peaceful language-promotion demonstration, to gain the same official recognition as Urdu for their mother language, Bengali, in the then Pakistan. After this tragic incident, Bengalis continued to fight for the right to use their mother language and four years later, on February 29, 1956, Bengali became an official language in Pakistan.
Today, the struggle for equal status with other languages persists, particularly in many bilingual and multilingual post-colonial societies, where the majority of the world's mother languages are still not given official recognition by governments. Consequently, many of them are under serious threat of endangerment or extinction and their speakers continue to experience restrictions on the use of their languages as well as exclusion from full participation in state institutions, through an official language.Since its inception, International Mother Language Day has played a critical role in advancing global awareness of the importance of mother languages in preserving and promoting linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism, particularly in education.
The theme for this year's celebration is local languages for global citizenship: spotlight on science. It aims at raising awareness about "how local languages ensure access to knowledge, its transmission and its plurality", and to discourage misguided assumptions about the capability of these languages to express and transmit knowledge in science and technology.This year's theme is particularly apt to the Caribbean context where, despite their wide currency, local creole languages in particular, are generally regarded as wholly incapable of expressing abstract ideas and concepts in science and technology. However, despite longstanding prevalent beliefs, there is nothing inherent in these languages which prevents them from expressing and transmitting modern scientific knowledge and "a great deal of overlooked traditional scientific knowledge to enrich our overall knowledge base" (Director General, Unesco).
International Mother Language Day serves as a renewed opportunity for people all around the world to (re) examine and (re) evaluate misinformed views and attitudes towards their local languages. It is a day for us to encourage one another to embrace, appreciate and celebrate our local languages, and to resolve to focus our attention on what we could do with them, rather than on what they cannot do.
Dr Sandra Evans,
Dept of Modern Languages and Linguistics,
UWI