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Shobuz Bhai
Shobuz Bhai
21 February , International Mother Language Day
About this event: Global ICT Conference
Related to country: Bangladesh

Translations available in: English (original) | French | Spanish | Italian | German | Portuguese | Swedish | Russian | Dutch | Arabic

International Mother Language Day

21 February
International Mother Language Day
The world's nearly 6,000 languages will be celebrated on International Mother Language Day, an event aimed at promoting linguistic diversity and multilingual education.

Ensuring that these languages can continue in use alongside the major international languages of communication is a genuine challenge to countries worldwide.

Today, about half of the 6,000 or so languages spoken in the world are under threat

This year’s theme will be devoted to the topic of languages and cyberspace.



International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by UNESCO's General Conference in November 1999. The International Day has been observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage. All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.


Links to UN and UN System sites:

United Nations:

UN Works for Cultural Diversity - Language
African Local Languages (Economic Commission for Africa)
Activities for the World Summit on the Information Society (Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia)
Sociedad de la Información (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean)
ICSTD (Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific)
World Summit on the Information Society, Geneva 2003 - Tunis 2005
Unesco:

International Mother Language Day
B@bel Initiative
Cultural and Linguistic Diversity in Education
Intangible Heritage
MOST Clearing House Linguistics Rights
Multilingualism on the Internet
Red Book of Endangered Languages

History of that day
On that day of 21 February 1952, corresponding to 8 Falgun 1359 in the Bangla calendar, a number of students campaigning for the recognition of Bangla as one of the state languages of Pakistan were killed when police fired upon them. [2]

Mohammed Ali Jinnah(the Governor general of Pakistan) declared that the Urdu will be the only language for both west and east Pakistan at a public meeting on 1948, 21 March. The people of the East Pakistan (now Bangladesh, whose main language is Bengali) started to protest against this.

A student meeting on 21 February called for a province-wide strike. But the government invoked Section 144 on 20 February. The student community at a meeting on the morning of 21 February agreed to continue with their protest but not to break the law of Section 144. Even then the police opened fire and killed the students.


http://portal.unesco.org/culture/en/ev.php-URL_ID=34603&URL_DO=DO_TOPIC&URL_SECTION=201.html