WHY INTERNATIONAL MOTHER LANGUAGE DAY IS CELEBRATED?
(The Quiver) : Today the whole world is celebrating International Mother Language Day. In 1999 UNESCO declared February 21 as the International Mother Language Day .It is a special day for the promotion of multilingualism, and cultural and linguistic diversity
The day is dedicated to mother language which are transferred to generations after generations, making it easy for people to communicate. A young child is exposed to her mother language first, under care and supervision of grandmothers and mothers who help her to understand her primary language at first thus helping to communicate with others. So, the name Mother Tongue is coined to our first language as it is first introduced by mothers to their children.
Mother Tongue language plays a crucial role as it holds and transfer the culture system to future generations.
When renowned literary critic and activist Ganesh Narayan Devy conducted a linguistic survey in 2010, he found 780 Indian languages , shockingly he found that 600 of the languages were dying. He added close to 250 languages in India had already died over the past 60 years.
According to UNESCO, any language that is spoken by less than 10,000 people is potentially endangered. In India, after the 1971 census, the government decided that any language spoken by less than 10,000 people need not be included in the official list of languages.
What happens when a language dies?
When a language dies, its speakers decide to migrate. First, they migrate to another language and then they physically start migrating to another region. The second thing that happens is that their traditional livelihood patterns go down. They may have some special skills and that disappears. Thirdly, a unique way of looking at the world disappears. Every language is a unique worldview.
How do we conserve a dying language?
It is very simple. We need to create livelihood support for the speakers of the language. If they have livelihood available within their language, nobody would want to switch from their language to any other language.
