February 21 is International Mother Language Day. It was begun by UNESCO in 1999. UNESCO is the agency of the United Nations working toward worldwide cooperation in culture, art, and science. The day was adopted by the wider United Nations community in 2002. It’s not the kind of holiday where you receive greeting cards, and in the US, at least, there are no traditions or observances, as far as I could find (there are in other places). But I think I can make a case for it being a very important holiday.
Let’s start out with a little history, because International Mother Language Day has an origin story that might surprise you. It all started back in 1947 with the dissolution of the British Raj, which was the end of the British government ruling the Indian subcontinent. The Indian Independence Act 1947 created two self-governing Dominions: India and Pakistan, at midnight on April 15 of that year. The two Dominions were created basically along religious lines. Pakistan was primarily Muslim, while India was primarily Hindu. There were, of course, Muslim people whose homes ended up in India, and Hindu people in Pakistan. Worse, nobody had thought to ask most of those people about the process, which led to a great deal of dissatisfaction, unrest, and huge violence. As many as two million people may have died as a result of the unrest. Along with the violence, the partitioning created an enormous refugee problem, as people were, overnight, no longer welcome in the area where they had probably lived for their whole lives. Great masses of people from what had suddenly become “India” resettled to Pakistan, and vice versa. On the whole, it’s hard to imagine how the whole affair could have been handled any worse.
But in order to follow the trail of International Mother Language Day we have to focus on Pakistan. Another problem with the creation of “Pakistan” was that it was divided into East Pakistan and West Pakistan. These were not next to one another — West Pakistan was to the west of India, where Pakistan is today. But East Pakistan was entirely on the other side of India, which today is Bangladesh. These two Pakistans were hundreds of miles apart. One was mountainous where the other was lowlands, river deltas, and jungle. From the start, East and West Pakistan did not get along.
One thing the Independence Act failed to take into account was that the people partitioned into these (somewhat arbitrary) new countries might share religion, but they differed in other ways. In East Pakistan, the Bengali language predominated. But in West Pakistan, people spoke Urdu. West Pakistan was bigger and more populous, and that’s where the government sat. In 1948, they declared the Urdu was the national language of Pakistan — both West and East. And that specific declaration is the event we can trace International Mother Language Day to. The declaration led to even more protests, unrest, and demonstrations. It was February 21, 1952 — there was a student demonstration protesting the choice of national language. And police killed several student demonstrators. That event was the catalyst for even more unrest, until the Bengali language was also declared an official language in 1956.
The February 21 event continued to be memorialized, though, and sparked further movements, urging independence for East Pakistan. Those were eventually successful as well, and led to the creation of Bangladesh, where Ekushey February (21 February) is still observed as the national holiday Language Movement Day. It was that holiday in Bangladesh, and the story behind it, that led to UNESCO’s 1999 declaration of International Mother Language Day.
I said I was going to make a case for this being an important holiday for everyone, not just in Bangladesh. The first factor I think matters is that it memorializes the five people killed that day: Abdus Salam, Abul Barkat, Rafiq Uddin Ahmed, Abdul Jabbar and Shafiur Rahman. There are people killed for causes throughout the world, and across history. But these five died for a unique reason: their language.
That’s important because language is important. In fact, it might be the most important thing about being human. For one thing, human languages are unlike any other form of communication; they can be used to discuss things that aren’t here. In fact, they can be used to discuss things that aren’t anywhere; they’re just ideas, or dreams, or even jokes. Technically that’s called “displacement,” but never mind. But there’s even more to language. We speak it, but most languages can also be written. Think about the weirdness of that for a moment. Humans can agree amongst themselves about making sounds that represent things that might not even be present. Then they can agree on a set of marks, or carvings, or some sort of visual representation, that that represents the sounds, and the sounds represent the ideas, which we can’t see, touch, or point to.
The real world is unfathomably complex. Just take the color blue as an example. There are a lot of things I can point to and call blue — the sky, a bird, a flower, some water, a shirt — and unless I’m being deliberately obtuse, people will agree with me. But none of those things will be the same color. “Blue” is a sort of category. A simplification to make it easier to deal with the world on a daily basis. We simplify things all the time. And here’s me making a case again: I think that’s one of the things language is for. It’s a way for us to simplify an enormously complex reality and communicate meaningfully about it to each other.
But whenever there’s simplification, and people, there’s the potential for oversimplification. It happens all the time. Language enables us to categories things, people, and events, but it also enables us to characterize them by using only a single category. “That guy is a crook.” “Italian cars are unreliable.” “World War I started because the arms manufacturers wanted to make more profits.” Characterization on the basis of a single category, or term, or pejorative is a way of oversimplifying, and it’s never helpful.
But here’s another astonishing thing about language: there are over 5,000 of them. Not only that, but as humans, we have the mind-bending ability to learn more than one. Languages aren’t just different words for the same things; they can be fantastically different in the way they work. And here’s me making a case again: I think learning another language can be a way (not the only one) of keeping yourself out of the oversimplification trap. I shouldn’t talk; although I’ve learned to communicate to some extent in some languages besides English, I’ve forgotten most of it through lack of practice. Nevertheless, I think learning languages is a thing valuable in and of itself because it stimulates parts of your mind that don’t necessarily get exercised on a daily basis. And exercising your mind is a good thing. Just like learning about a new holiday, and maybe celebrating it by choosing a language to learn. Bengali might be an unusual choice, but it would certainly be fitting.
