New Delhi: The International Mother Language Day is observed on February 21 every year, acknowledging the “importance of cultural and linguistic diversity for sustainable societies”, as described by UNESCO.
Started on the initiative of Bangladesh, which observed the day to remember its martyrs who sacrificed their lives to save their mother tongue Bangla when the country was East Pakistan after Partition, the international observance of the day was approved at the UNESCO General Conference in 1999. The world started observing the day from 2000.
UNESCO says it is within its “mandate for peace that it works to preserve the differences in cultures and languages that foster tolerance and respect for others”.
The UN body allots a theme to the day every year. The theme for the International Mother Language Day 2022 is “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities”.
"Technology can provide new tools for protecting linguistic diversity. Such tools, for example, facilitating their spread and analysis, allow us to record and preserve languages which sometimes exist only in oral form,” UNESCO Director-General Audrey Azoulay said in her message for the day.
Put simply, she added, these tools make local dialects a shared heritage. “However, because the Internet poses a risk of linguistic uniformization, we must also be aware that technological progress will serve plurilingualism only as long as we make the effort to ensure that it does," Azoulay said.
International Mother Language Day 2022 Theme
According to UNESCO, the theme of the 2022 International Mother Language Day, “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities” will discuss the role technology can play for advancement of multilingual education, and to support the development of quality teaching and learning for all.
There are around 7,000 languages that are spoken across the world. However, UNESCO says, linguistic diversity is “increasingly threatened” because more and more languages are disappearing.
“Globally 40 per cent of the population does not have access to an education in a language they speak or understand,” it says, but adds that progress is being made towards implementing mother tongue-based multilingual education, particularly in early schooling.
UNESCO believes multilingual and multicultural societies exist through languages that “transmit and preserve traditional knowledge and cultures in a sustainable way”.
It is organising a webinar from Paris on Monday to mark the International Mother Language Day 2022, exploring two main themes — “enhancing the role of teachers in the promotion of quality multilingual teaching and learning” and “reflecting on technologies and its potential to support multilingual teaching and learning”.
In a statement, the UN body said: “Technology has the potential to address some of the greatest challenges in education today. It can accelerate efforts towards ensuring equitable and inclusive lifelong learning opportunities for all if it is guided by the core principles of inclusion and equity. Multilingual education based on mother tongue is a key component of inclusion in education.”
UNESCO acknowledged how many countries around the world, during school closures due to Covid-19, employed technology-based solutions to maintain the continuity of learning.
A recent survey by UNESCO, UNICEF, World Bank and OECD in 143 countries on national education responses to school closures due to the pandemic showed that 96 per cent of high-income countries provided remote learning through online platforms for at least one education level. In contrast, 58 per cent of low-income countries could do this, and a majority of these countries reported using broadcast media such as television (83%) and radio (85%) to wnsure continuity of learning.
UNESCO also said in the statement that distance teaching and learning tools, programmes and content are “not always able to reflect language diversity”.
The International Mother Language Day 2022 webinar can be watched live on UNESCO’s YouTube channel.