Today i.e. 21st February is celebrated all over the world as ‘International Mother Language Day’. Promoting language and cultural diversity in the world is the main objective of celebrating this day, but how did the celebration of this day begin and with what theme International Mother Language Day is being celebrated this time, you will know about it in this article. about.
How did International Mother Language Day start?
This day is celebrated to commemorate the long struggle made by Bangladesh to protect its mother tongue. In the year 1952, students and social workers of Dhaka University started protesting for the survival of the Bengali mother tongue. Within no time this demonstration turned into a massacre. To stop this, the police of the then Pakistan government opened fire on the protesters, due to which many more people lost their lives. After the Government of Bangladesh came into existence, the Government of Bangladesh put forward a proposal to UNESCO. UNESCO had announced to celebrate International Mother Language Day for the first time in the year 1999, but it was celebrated for the first time in the year 2000.
Objective of International Mother Language Day
This day is celebrated to promote love, preservation and protection of languages among the people.
Theme of International Mother Language Day 2024
The theme of International Mother Language Day 2024 is “Multilingual education is a pillar of intergenerational education”. This theme emphasizes the importance of multilingual education in promoting intergenerational education.
Hindi is the most spoken mother tongue in India
There are more than 19 thousand mother tongues in India. According to the 2011 census report, 43.63 percent people in India consider Hindi as their mother tongue. Bengali is at second place and Marathi language is at third place. Talking about non-listed languages, Bhili spoken in Rajasthan comes first in this list while Gondi language comes second.
The Indian constitution recognizes 22 official languages. These are:
1. Bengali
2. Hindi
3. Maithili
4. Nepalese
5. Sanskrit
6. Tamil
7. Urdu
8. Assamese
9. Dogri
10. Kannada
11. Gujarati
12. Bodo
13. Manipur (also known as Meitei)
14. Odia
15. Marathi
16. Santali
17. Telugu
18. Punjabi
19. Sindhi
20. Malayalam
21. Konkani
22. Kashmiri
Other Interesting Indian Language Facts
- Hindi ranks as one of the most spoken languages in the world. Bengali is also one of the most spoken languages in the world.
- India has no national language. After independence, it became too hard to select one from the thousands spoken.
- English has many words of Indian origin including; dungarees, avatar, jungle, tank, shampoo, roti, dinghy, chutney and mongoose.
- Telugu is an Indian language which is known as the ‘Italian of the East’.
- Hindi got its name from the Persian word Hind, meaning ‘land of the Indus River’.
- Sanskrit, Urdu, Nepalese, Bengali and Gujarati all have some similarities with Hindi, either in spoken language or in the written script.
- Malayalam, the language spoken in the southern Indian state of Kerala, is the longest palindrome in the English language
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