International Mother Language Day

What the day is

International Mother Language Day is observed on February 21. It is a UNESCO observance with a specific and serious origin, and the date is not arbitrary.

Origin and background

When Pakistan was created in 1947 it had two widely separated wings, and the government declared Urdu the sole national language. The majority of the country's population lived in the eastern wing and spoke Bengali. The decision meant that education, administration and advancement would run in a language most citizens did not use.

The protest movement that followed culminated on 21 February 1952, when students demonstrating in Dhaka were fired on by police and several were killed. The deaths transformed the campaign, Bengali was eventually granted official status, and the language movement became a founding element of the identity that led to Bangladeshi independence in 1971. UNESCO adopted the date as an international observance in 1999 at Bangladesh's proposal.

The wider issue it now marks is language loss. Linguists estimate that something in the region of half the world's roughly seven thousand languages are likely to cease being spoken within this century, and a language dies when the last generation to learn it as children stops passing it on rather than when its final speaker dies.

What goes with it is not only vocabulary. Much of what is known about local ecology, medicine, navigation and history exists only in oral transmission within those languages, and the evidence on education is fairly clear that children taught initially in a language they already speak learn to read faster and stay in school longer, including when they later switch to a national language.

How to take part

• Speak your own first language today, deliberately, particularly if it is not the language around you.
• Find out which languages are indigenous to where you live, and whether they are still spoken.
• Ask an older relative for words that have dropped out of family use.
• Support mother-tongue early education, which the evidence backs strongly.
• Read what happened in Dhaka in 1952, which this day exists to remember.