International Mother Language Day 2022

Team Udayavani, Feb 21, 2022, 11:35 AM IST

Every year on February 21, International Mother Language Day is observed around the world in order to preserve the diversity of cultures and languages.

The proposal for the day was adopted by the UNESCO General Conference in 1999, and it has been observed since 2000 all over the world. Linguistic diversity is under peril, according to the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), as more languages fade away.

Thousands of languages are spoken all over the world. Only a few hundred languages have been granted a true position in school and the public domain, and less than a hundred are utilised in the digital world. Around the world, 40% of the population lacks access to education in a language they speak or understand. Experts, on the other hand, believe that technology can help preserve language variation.

“Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities,” is this year’s theme.

Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO said, “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. Put simply, they make local dialects a shared heritage,” further adding, “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.”

People should be able to learn new languages without having to abandon their native tongues by using online tools in a variety of languages. According to the UN, learning or forgetting a language is about watching an entire world appear or fade away, not just acquiring or losing a means of communication.