IN 1948, the Government of the Dominion of Pakistan ordained Urdu as the sole national language, sparking extensive protests among the Bengali-speaking majority of East Bengal (now Bangladesh).
Facing rising sectarian tensions and mass discontent with the new law, the government outlawed public meetings and rallies.
The students of the University of Dhaka and other political activists defied the law and organised a protest on February 21 1952.
The movement reached its climax when police killed student demonstrators on that day.
The deaths provoked widespread civil unrest.
After years of conflict, the central government relented and granted official status to the Bengali language in 1956.
In 1999, UNESCO declared February 21 as the International Mother Language Day, in tribute to the language movement and the ethno-linguistic rights of people around the world.
These students who are now described as the ‘language martyrs’ are honoured for their encouragement of multiculturalism and the promotion of protective measures for endangered cultural diversity and multilingualism.
The celebration comes at a time when linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened not only in Zimbabwe, but worldwide.
Language is fundamental to communication of all kinds and it is communication that makes change and development possible in human society. Using — or not using — certain languages today can open a door, or close it, for large segments of society in many parts of the world.
In an interview, Primary and Secondary Education Minister Lazarus Dokora said his Ministry was concerned about Early Childhood Development (ECD) because education lays the foundation in the values of the child.
“Early Childhood Education develops and percolates through the contours of the mother language even though some of the people may have a very low opinion of the mother language and may deliberately seek to replace the mother language with a foreign language they do not realise the damage that they are doing to the toddler to the infant,” he said.
Minister Dokora said while UNESCO had conferred a special status on the day, it was up to Zimbabweans to underscore the significance of their fundamental values.
He said his Ministry took a radical approach by having a curriculum overhaul by deepening the foundation through the inclusion of social and cultural tenets that bind Zimbabweans.
“We have started by training the teachers in some of the languages that are now acknowledged in our constitution,” he said.
“Indeed His Excellency (President Mugabe) is a model because he is competent in an indigenous language and a foreign language; you will probably find that he is a good example.
“And it puts to shame many of those who spent many of those that spent 15 months in the United Kingdom and America and came back with some accent when they speak their own mother language.
“It’s a shame and I don’t think we should be celebrating those that do that kind of thing.”
Psycholinguists, said Dokora, say the contours that the child develops or acquires in their mother language are the same contours that they will rely on when they are about to learn another language.
“In other words, there is no such thing as a primitive language which blocks a child from learning a second language or a foreign language.
“Every language prepares a child once they have learnt their mother language it actually puts them in the best condition to learn any other language.
“Mutilating them and imposing a foreign language culturally blocks some of the avenues to their authentic development as human beings.
“There is no such thing as a superior language, one to the next any language any language can be developed to deal with modernity and to deal with the complexity of globalising world we just have to pay attention to the details of how a language develops and then to tool that process through development of experts in the area or developing new vocabulary to capture the nuances of a developing socio economic circumstance.”
Author, Memory Chirere said there was need for forms of interactive engagements among people so as to develop an array of wisdoms, proverbs and riddles.
He said the marginalisation of languages causes a natural death, but there should be ways to foster and promote the use of indigenous languages in many aspects of modern day.
“When languages like Shona, Ndebele, and Zulu among others are marginalised, it is the accumulated wisdoms of these people’s wisdoms about politics, about philosophy, about ideology, about living on the planet earth that die,” Chirere said.
“We must therefore promote songs, plays, novels in our own languages in order to survive.”
University of Zimbabwe Chairperson of the Department of African Languages, Professor Itai Muhwati said the department had rolled out a three-week seminar in order to commemorate the day.
“We have out in place seminars which will conscientise and raise awareness on the importance of the mother tongue in the education sector and which is also in line with this year’s theme of the day, ‘Inclusion in and through education: Language counts,’” said Prof Muhwati.
Languages, with their complex implications for identity, communication, social integration, education and development, are of strategic importance for people and planet.
Yet, due to globalisation processes, they are increasingly under threat, or disappearing altogether.
When languages fade, so does the world’s rich tapestry of cultural diversity.
Opportunities, traditions, memory, unique modes of thinking and expression — valuable resources for ensuring a better future — are also lost.
More than 50 percent of the approximately 7 000 languages spoken in the world are likely to die out within a few generations, and 96 percent of these languages are spoken by a mere four percent of the world’s population.
Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given pride of place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.
Cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue, the promotion of education for all and the development of knowledge societies are central to UNESCO’s work. But they are not possible without broad and international commitment to promoting multilingualism and linguistic diversity, including the preservation of endangered languages.
International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by UNESCO’s General Conference in November 1999.
The International Day has been commemorated every year since February 2000.