21st of February - International Mother Language Day

International Mother Language Day is celebrated every year on 21st February. The main purpose of celebrating this day is to promote the awareness of language and cultural diversity all across the world. It was first announced by UNESCO on November 17, 1999. Since then it is being celebrated every year. The date represents the day 21st February 1952 when four young students were killed in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, because of Bengali and Urdu language controversy. Languages are the most powerful way to preserve and develop culture and to promote it all across the world. Because of this unfortunate incident, International Mother Language Day is celebrated in all over the world, while it is a public holiday in Bangladesh.
The theme of the 2016 International Mother Language Day is “Quality education, language(s) of instruction and learning outcomes.”


This underlines the importance of mother languages for quality education and linguistic diversity, to take forward the new 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

 "Mother languages in a multilingual approach are essential components of quality education, which is itself the foundation for empowering women and men and their societies. "
Irina Bokova, UNESCO Director General

"Mother language" is the calque of a term used in several Romance languages: lengua materna (Spanish), lingua madre (Italian) and langue maternelle (French). A more literal English translation would be "mother tongue", although "native language" is the most comprehensible term in English. In linguistics, "mother language" refers to an ancestral (or proto-language) of a language family.

International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by the General Conference of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in November 1999 (30C/62). On 16 May 2009 the United Nations General Assembly, in its resolution A/RES/61/266, called on its member states "to promote the preservation and protection of all languages used by people of the world".[5] In the resolution, the General Assembly proclaimed 2008 as the International Year of Languages to promote unity in diversity and international understanding through multilingualism and multiculturalism. The resolution was suggested by Rafiqul Islam,a Bengali living in Vancouver, Canada. He wrote a letter to Mr. Kofi Anan on 9 January 1998 asking him to take a step for saving all the languages of the world from the possibility of extinction and to declare an International Mother Language Day. Rafiq proposed the date as 21 February on the pretext of 1952 killing in Dhaka on the occasion of Language Movement.

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.

— from the United Nations International Mother Language Day microsite