Mother tongue merits wholehearted acceptance

MJ Warsi
Linguist and author

THE United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages. International Mother Tongue Day is celebrated every year on February 21 since 1990, following the UN declaration to recognise the sacrifices of people who died for the sake of their mother tongue in Bangladesh. The mother language is one of the most precious gifts we have. Every language spoken throughout the globe represents a unique and distinct cultural heritage, enabling people to express their feelings and emotions without any hesitation.

A good proportion of the world’s population speaks more than one language, but the idea that people would regularly have to be taught in a language that isn’t native to them is a relatively recent phenomenon. “Fifty per cent of the world’s out-of-school children live in communities where the language of schooling is rarely, if ever, used at home,” says Susan E. Malone, a senior scholar in the field of language education.

This is perhaps one of the most astounding figures about second-language education. Schools have tried to tackle the problem by going to the families of these children for help in having students be comfortable with a second language for their own learning. They ask the parents of students to use the second language at home so that they find it easier to use it in school. This does more harm than good for reasons other than a second language being much harder to learn, regardless of copious levels of effort put in to learn it. In the types of developing areas where this is a large problem, there aren’t frequently the resources to prepare students at this level, so their efforts are futile in that sense. They also cause a rift within families. 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 school systems are essentially destroying our diverse culture and background.

“I never made significant strides towards becoming fluent in another language,” said one of my former students at Washington University in St Louis (US). “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.”

According to Leanne Hinton, a professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley (US), “More broadly, the loss of language is part of the loss of whole cultures and knowledge systems, including philosophical systems, oral, literary and music 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 try to resolve the issues themselves, they will frequently point to a lack of resources to be able to do this. Nevertheless, a greater effort must be made by the educators to acquire sympathy for the mother tongue of their students, if different from their own. The beauty of academic education is that a majority of it comes from books that can more easily be produced in areas with greater resources. The onus is on many of the educators in these parts of the world who are multilingual to produce orthographical and instructional material for use in the developing areas. Given the resource crisis in the developing world, this is likely to be one of the most practical solutions. Children in developing regions have the thirst for knowledge; we must do what we can to satiate it.

A breakthrough takes place when students leave an environment of a classroom where the objective is to learn a particular language to an environment where they are fully capable of including everyone in it. By speaking their mother tongue on the campus, either by choice or subconsciously, they are including everyone else on the premises into their conversation and essentially into their friend circle. This approach of speaking their mother tongue when they have the choice to speak in the universal language may be beneficial not only from the teaching standpoint, but also from a social and cultural point of view. Language is the essence and identity of culture, and is a major tool for communication. It is an ideal medium for exchanging ideas, emotions and feelings. To know your language is the key to preserving 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’s clear that we must strive to reform the systems that educate the youth to further the quality of learning of a language, not target families who speak a different language at home. Destroying culture, diversity and family comfort, while supplying a dangerously low level of education for the sole benefit of the systems that are ‘educating’ children, is passed off as acceptable because they ignore the merits of mother tongue education. 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.