Maintaining and retaining the languages of ethnic and cultural groups is critical for the preservation of cultural heritage and identity. Using one’s mother tongue at home is part of this exercise
To promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and bolster social and multilingual identity, the International Mother Tongue Day is celebrated every year on this day (February 21).
Mother tongue refers to a person’s native language, that is, a language learned from birth. The first International Mother Tongue Day was observed in 1990 after the declaration by the United Nations (UN) to recognise the sacrifices of people who lost their lives for the sake of their mother tongue in Bangladesh.
Language is one of the most precious gifts that we have and each tongue represents a unique and distinct cultural heritage. Language is a means of communicating values, beliefs and customs and has an important social function as it fosters feelings of group identity and solidarity. It is the means by which culture, traditions and shared values may be conveyed and preserved.
About 50 per cent of the world’s out-of-school children live in communities where the medium of instruction is different from the language used at home. This is perhaps one of the most astounding facts about second language education. Schools have tried to tackle the problem by going to the families of these children for assistance in helping students gain confidence in the use of the second language. They ask the parents to use the second language at home so that the students become more comfortable with it and are able to cope with it in school. This does more harm than good for reasons other than that of a second language being much harder to learn regardless of copious levels of effort put in to achieve fluency.
In developing areas, usually there aren’t resources enough to prepare students at this level, so the efforts made by the parents and the students are futile in that sense.
This second language education also causes a rift between families and their native languages in a wholly unnecessary way. Families feel alienated from their mother tongue simply because the school gives the impression that they should feel this way. By propagating this attitude, these education systems are essentially destroying diverse cultures and backgrounds that make our species so great.
The different languages and dialects spoken throughout the globe reflect how history and culture have shaped the way in which people speak, think and reflect. Our mother tongue helps to link new generations to the past, which is part of our cultural and plurilingual heritage. It is a well-known fact that everyone had a language that they grew up speaking and a good proportion of the world spoke more than one tongue. However, the idea that someone would regularly have to be taught in a language that wasn’t native to them had never occurred previously. “This was, undoubtedly, exacerbated by the fact that I never made significant strides towards becoming fluent in another language. The closest I had ever come was a working proficiency in Spanish during my junior year of high school. When I think back on my perspective on this subject in the context of my parents, their accents never bothered me because I had just always been so used to them”, says a 21-year-old former student Tej, who is pursuing higher studies at Washington University in St Louis, USA.
Leanne Hinton, a Professor of linguistics at the University of California in Berkeley, says in Mother Tongue-Based Multilingual Education, “More broadly, the loss of language is part of the loss of whole cultures and knowledge systems, including philosophical systems, oral literary and musical traditions, environmental knowledge systems, medical knowledge and important cultural practices and artistic skills. The world stands to lose an important part of the sum of human knowledge whenever a language stops being used. Just as the human species is putting itself in danger through the destruction of species diversity, so might we be in danger from the destruction of the diversity of knowledge systems”.
These problems are hard to fix. If one were to approach educators and tell them to fix the issue, they would undoubtedly point to a lack of resources. Nevertheless, an effort must be made by educators to have respect for the mother tongue of their students, even if it is different from their own.
The beauty of academic education is that the majority of it comes from books that can be more easily produced in areas with greater resources. It is for the educators in these parts of the world — who are multilingual — to produce orthographical and instructional materials for use in developing areas. Given the resource crisis in the developing world, this is likely to be one of the most practical solutions. Children in developing areas have the thirst for knowledge, we must do what we can to satiate it.
Language is the essence and identity of culture and is a major tool of communication and for exchange of ideas and emotions. To know your language is the simplest and most important way to keep and preserve your culture. In recent times, the idea of linguistic and cultural awareness has increased; thus allowing the mother tongue to be more culturally accepted.
It is clear, that we must strive to reform the systems that educate the youth, in order to further the quality of learning in the first language or mother tongue and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.
Maintaining and retaining the languages of ethnic and cultural groups is critical for the preservation of cultural heritage and identity. Using one’s mother tongue at home will make it easier for speakers to be more comfortable with their own linguistic and cultural identity.
(The writer is Chairperson, Department of Linguistics, AMU)
