Ben OsborneToday (21 February) is International Mother Language Day, and was originally set up by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) in November 1999, as a way “to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by peoples of the world.”
21 February was chosen as it represents the day in 1952 when students were gunned down by police in Dhaka for demonstrating for recognition of their language, Bangla, as one of the two national languages of the then Pakistan. In 1948 Urdu was chosen to be the only official language for both east and west Pakistan, but with the majority of people living in eastern Pakistan being Bangla-speaking and many protested against this declaration. The protests ended when five students were shot. The students then became martyrs for their cause, which turned out to be the beginning of Bangladesh’s struggle for independence.
The International Symposium on Translation and Cultural Mediation will meet to discuss the preservation of languages, and the development of the awareness of the importance to hanging onto the traditions of native languages.
The promotion of linguistic and cultural diversity, as well as multilingualism, is to be celebrated, but it is easy to forget the advantages when it seems like the whole world speaks English. English speakers often allow ourselves to become lazy when it comes to learning other languages but the benefits are many.
As the world becomes ever smaller languages are at great risk of becoming homogenised, and with the scary statistic that every 14 days a language dies, learning more about languages and the heritage that goes with them may enable us to save some of these before they are lost, with all the knowledge, history, and culture associated with them. By 2100, more than half of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth, many of them not even recorded, may disappear.
So why learn a language? Well, there is the obvious benefit for travel and employment, and there is the satisfaction (and here I have to admit to knowing about ten words in French, so I am guessing) that comes with learning a foreign tongue. But if like me your school lessons weren’t very inspiring, there is still hope and still many great ways to learn.
If the world’s population totaled 1,000 people, the distribution would be as follows: 564 Asian. 210 European, 86 African, 80 South American, 60 North American, meaning the United States, Canada and Mexico. More than 320 million people speak English, but with 266 million speaking Spanish, 189 million Bengal, 182 million Hindi and 885 million Mandarin Chinese, English by no means has the monopoly, and so why not broaden your mind and have a go at learning another language this year?
