Every year, we in Bangladesh, observe Feb. 21 as “Shahid Dibash” or the “Day of Martyrs” with deep respect. We remember the martyrs who sacrificed their lives on this day in 1952 to establish our right to speak in Bangla, our mother language.
Government of the then Pakistan decided that Urdu would be the only state language of Pakistan. Bengalis, the majority population of Pakistan whose mother tongue is Bangla, protested and demanded that both Urdu and Bangla be the official languages. Students came out in protest in Dhaka on Feb. 21, 1952 and many were killed on the street by police firing.
Eventually Bangla did become the official language of Pakistan, but the sad event flared Bengali nationalism. And with time, under the leadership of our Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh emerged independent through a nine-month long liberation war. As we celebrate the birth centenary of the Father of the Nation and the Golden Jubilee of Bangladesh’s independence this year, Feb. 21 holds more significance in 2021 because it was on this day we realized that the very essence of our culture and identity was at stake.
Bangladesh, which means “the country where Bangla is spoken,” perhaps is the only country in the world known by its language. This reflects our passionate love for our mother tongue that represents our cultural heritage of thousands of years.
For every people, mother tongue is crucial to their identity. Language is not only a means through which we communicate, it is also a medium that carries our age-old heritage to us from our ancestors. It connects people, time and generations. A child learns mother tongue from her mother, family and society, and therefore it shapes a child into what kind of a person one day he or she would be. It is one of the first tools of the child for emotional and cognitive development that builds his/her personal universe, and connects him/her to the wider world, to the actions of understanding, of being understood and, most importantly, of creativity.
These learnings never really fade away, notwithstanding however tiny community speaks the child’s mother tongue. Like a river, language also has its own course: it adapts, adopts and morphs. It too thrives or dies. In this world, every year, many languages become extinct. And with them die the knowledge and the wisdom that they carry: the myths, the legends, the folklores, the emotions, the sounds, the symbols – the entire evolution.
Therefore, we must remember that with the death of every language, we also lose part of who we are, and what we could offer to the world. That is, indeed, an enormous loss.
In March 1998, a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic group, residing in Canada, known as “Language Lover of the World”, wrote to the UN Secretary General highlighting that many small ethnic groups are forced to use other languages and eventually are deprived of their mother tongue, forcing those to be near-extinct. They suggested to observe one day globally every year as “Mother Language Day” and proposed Feb. 21 for the same, due to the immense sacrifices that were made on this day for the rights of speaking in one’s mother tongue in Bangladesh. The group included ten people: two of them spoke Bangla (Rafiqul Alam and Abdus Salam), two English, two Tagalog (Albert Vinzon and Carmen Cristobal), one Urdu, one German, one Cantonese and one Hindi.
Bangladesh, as a state, soon adopted and pursued the idea within the framework of UNESCO. Finally, to celebrate the diversity of languages and the concomitant heritage values that they carry, on Nov. 17 in 1999, the General Conference of UNESCO declared Feb. 21 as “International Mother Language Day (IMLD).” The day that we Bangladeshis observe as the “Day of Commitment to our Language” thus became a global occasion to celebrate the linguistic diversity and heritages of the world.
According to one estimate, over 6,000 languages are spoken around the world. Every language has its own organic growth. Some are written, some are not. Many also accompany expressions, gestures or reflections. All of these carry certain traits of history and culture of the people speaking in the language. Not to mention that each one is endowed with a vast ocean of creative omnibus.
On International Mother Language Day, we celebrate all the languages of the world. All 6,000 of them, and more. We pay our homage to all our mother tongues, equally. We value each one of them with its own traditions, creative wealth, wisdom, sounds, symbols and emotions. They are our common irreplaceable heritage. We do not want them to be extinct. We commit ourselves to spare no efforts to save them as they reflect diversity of our humanity, our plurality and our common inheritance in them.
SDG of the 2030 Agenda visions quality education for all, enabling everyone to explore and establish his/her potentials. UNESCO’s Education 2030 Framework for Action, a road map to implement Goal 4, commits complete efforts and attention in the use of mother tongue in learning, teaching and the promotion and protection of global linguistic diversity, including multilingualism.
Today, as we pay our deepest respect to our language martyrs who sacrificed their lives in 1952 for our rights to speak in Bangla, we also join the global efforts to save and flourish all the languages around the world. Let us all cherish our mother tongue. And in doing so, let us remind ourselves once again, that however diverse we may look, in essence we are all one.
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Asad Alam Siam is ambassador of Bangladesh to the Philippines.