International Mother Language Day on Tuesday:

Mother tongue - an impetus to education

By Pramod DE SILVA

How do we differ from animals? There are a lot of factors, but one factor nearly always comes on top. We can speak!

The power of speech is unique to humans, even though some advanced mammals do have a rudimentary communications system. And humans speak nearly 6,700 languages all over the world.

Every human has a native language, also called the mother tongue. The mother tongue is the language that we learn to recognise and speak from the very early days. We may learn three or four languages later, but we are truly at home only when expressing ourselves in the mother tongue. We are proud of our mother tongue, no matter where in the world we live in.

For most Sri Lankans, the mother tongue would be either Sinhala or Tamil.

If you are a native of the US, it could be English or Spanish. Born in France? Then you would be speaking French. If you are from Japan, you would be fluent in Japanese. And the list goes on.

Our linguistic diversity is worthy of celebration. This is the aim of the International Mother Language Day (IMLD), which will be observed on Tuesday (February 21) for the 13th time around the world. The day was established in 1999 by UNESCO. The IMLD seeks to promote linguistic and cultural diversity, as well as multilingualism.

The genesis of the IMLD was in former East Pakistan (present day Bangladesh), where four Bengali language activists were killed while protesting against the suppression of their native tongue (Bengali) on February 21, 1952. The Shaheed Minar (martyr's monument) in Dhaka pays respect to the four protesters. In fact, it was Bangladesh that proposed the very idea of having a Mother Language Day to the UN.

The IMLD theme for this year is 'Mother tongue instruction and inclusive education'. An international photography contest is also being arranged as a part of the activities of International Mother Language Day 2012. The Linguapax Institute, in Barcelona, Spain, which aspires to protect and encourage linguistic assortment worldwide, awards the Linguapax Prize on International Mother Language Day every year. The award is for those who have made exceptional work in linguistic diversity or multilingual learning.

Right to education

The UNESCO wants Member States to highlight the importance of the mother tongue from the angle of the right to education and encourage each Member State to promote instruction and education in their mother tongue. It has been proven that children learn best when they are instructed in their mother language during their first years at school, according to UNESCO. This is an apt theme that tallies with UNESCO’s goal of universal education for children at least until 14-15 years. Providing education in the mother tongue widens access, enabling more children to attend school.

That is how languages are preserved and perpetuated. With each generation that learns a language, its survival is assured. This process is called ‘intergenerational transmission’. However, thousands of languages across the globe face the problem of having fewer speakers every passing year. Yes, as some tribes face extinction, so do their languages.

According to UNSECO “half of the 6,700 languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing before the century ends, a process that can be slowed only if urgent action is taken by governments and speaker communities.” The death of a language is the loss of a unique cultural trait – it is a very sad event indeed.

Today, linguists are working with speakers of endangered native languages to preserve them for posterity through the use of modern technology.

However, this is compounded by the fact that many languages do not have a written script. Some ancient civilisations can still ‘speak’ to us because they left written inscriptions, but the future looks bleak for languages that are purely oral.

Once the last speaker dies, his or her language usually dies. There are at least 10 languages which are each spoken by less than 10 people. The loss of a language is a black mark on the collective human conscience. A language represents a particular culture, a way of life and the very soul of a particular community of people.

UNESCO has taken a commendable step by publishing an 'Atlas of the World’s Languages' which lists languages in danger. It is intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the public, and to be a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level.

Endangered languages

The latest edition of the Atlas lists about 2,500 languages (among which 230 languages have been extinct since 1950), approaching the generally-accepted estimate of some 3,000 endangered languages worldwide. For each language, the Atlas provides its name, degree of endangerment and the country or countries where it is spoken.

On the other hand, a few dominant languages are spoken by the vast majority of people. Chinese (Mandarin), Spanish, English, French, Hindi, Urdu, Arabic, Bengali, Portuguese, Russian and Japanese are among the top languages in terms of the number of native speakers. Most of these languages are also popular as second and foreign languages. English is fast becoming ‘the’ language of the world – it is already the top language for international diplomacy, trade and business, literature, science and the World Wide Web. It is also the language that most people learn as a second language.

Learning another language is one’s passport to another world. When you learn a new language, you enter a world that was previously out of bounds.

Today, millions of people around the world are learning another language or two. Language classes and self-study courses are a big business. You may never reach native fluency, but it is generally accepted that one can ‘get by’ in a foreign language with around 3,000 words and the knowledge to combine them into simple sentences.

Not knowing each other’s language can lead to a lot of problems in multi-ethnic, multi-cultural societies. We have experienced this problem in our island. Sri Lanka would have been a much more peaceful country if all Sinhalese knew Tamil and vice versa. The Government has declared 2012 as the Year of Trilingual Sri Lanka and launched an ambitious program to make every Sri Lankan fluent in the three main languages spoken in the country – Sinhala, Tamil and English under a 10-year plan. This is a laudable initiative that will augment the country’s reconciliation process.

Thanks to migration, languages such as Sinhala and Tamil are now spoken in many cities around the world. Go to a city such as New York, and you can hear hundreds of languages being spoken in the streets, restaurants and taxis.

Languages enrich cultures around the world.

No language can exist in isolation in today’s globalised world. Languages evolve over time and absorb words from other languages. Sinhala is a good example – it has a large number of words derived from Portuguese, Dutch and English - the languages of the former colonial powers.

New words

Languages get new words all the time – dictionary compilers have a tough time keeping track of them all. Just a few years ago, if someone told you that he stored documents ‘in the cloud’ you would have considered sending him to the psychiatric ward. Now everyone knows what it means. This is just one example of how new words and terms form and how old words acquire new meanings.

If you have a very good knowledge of English, you could be unwittingly using around 5,000 French and Latin words. And one can find strikingly similar words in many languages. One example is the number ‘Three’ in English, which translates to ‘thuna’ in Sinhala, treis (Greek), tres (Portuguese), trios (French) and tri (Russian).

This is also compelling evidence that many languages have been derived from a common source. Sinhala, for example, is classified in the broader sense as an Indo-European language along with English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, French, Italian, Marathi, Punjabi and Urdu. This makes learning another language similar to your own mother tongue somewhat easier. A language that may seem totally strange at first may appear familiar once you learn a few words.

Languages that we ‘inherit’ or learn in this manner can bridge cultural and ethnic divides. Go anywhere in the world and just speak a word or two in the mother tongue of a native – you will instantly know the difference it makes.

Languages bring communities – and the world together. In celebrating languages, we are celebrating the very essence of humanity. The IMLD is an ideal opportunity to reflect on the importance of our native languages and the efforts being made to protect all languages for posterity.