Every year February 21, the world celebrates International Mother Language Day. The theme chosen for this year’s celebration is ‘Using technology for multilingual learning.’ This gives an opportunity to take stock of the experience of the past two years of the CoVID-19 pandemic and chalk out a programme to promote online education through mother tongue. A major problem in this area is the fact that many regional languages are not present on the internet. English makes up nearly 80 per cent of all online content. Only a handful of languages still dominate. These include English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, German, French, Russian, and Korean. Among Indian languages, Odia is still out of the ambit and is not recognised by Google. In a country with 22 official languages and countless mother tongues and dialects, an important software like Google Classroom has included Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu and Urdu only in the Indic languages list. This probably also reflects the commercial viability that a company like Google finds attractive enough in any language to invest in.
The importance of education through the mother tongue cannot be overrated. Research shows education in the mother tongue is a key factor for inclusion and quality learning. It also ensures better learning outcomes and academic performance. This is particularly valid in primary school and it helps avoid knowledge gaps and increases the speed of learning and comprehension. All this above is true but in today’s internet universe, it is impossible to expect charity or goodwill from corporates.
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In India, we clutter our children’s learning by introducing too many languages from the beginning. The child should first be rooted in her or his mother language and one international language, preferably English, should be given priority. The forcible introduction of any third language could lead to jumbling of the faculties. It is also known that children can learn multiple languages much easier than grownups. However, before that stage comes when a child is exposed to multiple languages, it is vital to give the supple mind a thorough grounding in the mother language. When a child has control and dexterity in the mother language, there is a change in characteristics too. Here, the poser about ancestors and descendants can be considered. A child unfamiliar with the mother language gets isolated from history and literature of that language. Writings of the past become irrelevant to the current generation and if they don’t write in the mother language, literature of future is doomed. Literature is not only stories and poetry but it is the lens which shows the social ethos of a particular time. The disappearance of a language does not simply mean the world is one language less. When a language disappears, it takes with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.
Celebrating the mother language day is not merely an occasion for promoting mother tongues. The importance of mother tongue is, more often than not, little understood. It not only fosters mutual understanding and respect for one another, but also helps preserve the wealth of cultural and traditional heritage that is embedded in every language around the world. Linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened as more and more languages disappear at an alarming rate.
Against this backdrop, CoVID-19 has come as a great threat to education in mother language. According to UN estimates, 500 million students from pre-primary to upper-secondary school could not access any remote learning opportunities during the pandemic. School closures during this period have only widened education inequalities that existed before the pandemic. The closures ranged from a global average of 20 weeks to above 70 in some cases, more than a full school year. Expectedly, it has hit the vulnerable and marginalised students the hardest. This is because in many countries distance teaching and learning tools, programmes and content did not mostly reflect linguistic diversity. They were largely provided in dominant national or international languages. When remote learning content is not available in students’ mother language, it increases the risk of learning loss, dropouts and exclusion.
Nelson Mandela once said: “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.” With over 40 per cent of global languages endangered and less than 100 languages used in the digital world, the International Mother Language Day should act as a reminder that everyone should have the opportunity to use their mother language to keep memories, traditions and ways of thought that their language represents.
