International Mother Language Day – 21st February
Alaa Babiker
Happy Mother Language Day to everyone. Today, the 21st February happens to be the international day for Mother Language celebrated worldwide by many organizations and institutions especially those dedicated to education, with the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) being the main organizer for the event that will be held at the UN headquarters this year. The day was proclaimed by the UNESCO in November 1999 and celebrated yearly on every 21st day of February.
The main theme of this year is the (Multilingual education – a necessity to transform education). As according to the UN (every two weeks a language disappears taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. At least 43% of the estimated 6,000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world). So, education comes to be the primary reason for international communications that serve not only the individuals but also helps in the growth of all countries’ economics.
In Sudan – which is officially known as the Republic of the Sudan, and is the third-largest country on Africa (after Algeria and Democratic Republic of the Congo) with an area of 1,886,068 km2 (728,215 Square miles), and the fifteenth-largest in the world – there are over 100 spoken languages with few languages extinct due to many reasons including; the nonuse of these languages by other tribes or groups, due to the movement of these tribes to other areas and the mixture with other tribes, and due to the openness of the country to the world. According to Aljazeera (there are more than 400 tribes in Sudan having completely different cultures, with more than 500 local dialects found. The manager of the Institute of African and Asian Studies at the University of Khartoum, Professor Muhammad Al-Amin Abu Manga, told Al-Jazeera that the number of local languages in Sudan after the secession of South Sudan reaches more than 70 languages).
Relating the above paragraph to the aim of the International Mother Language Day in preserving the mother languages and the efforts made to include them in primary education when at the same time introducing new widely distributed and used languages in the educational system helps promoting the linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
A final recommendation I send to the experts of linguistics in Sudan, let’s celebrate the International Mother Language Day by making more efforts documenting the different languages and dialects we have in Sudan before they completely vanish!