Today the 21th February, is International Mother Language Day.
International Mother Language Day was created in Bangladesh. It is support by UNESCO and was started in 1999. Around 1947 when Pakistan was created it had two different parts, East Pakistan (today Bangladesh) and West Pakistan (today Pakistan).
In 1948 the government of Pakistan decided that Urdu is the sole national language. But Bangla and Bengali were spoken in both countries.
The people from East Pakistan protested because the majority of the population had Bangla as their Mother tongue. They protested for another national language beside Urdu. In 1952 there were riots and people were killed by police.
Since their Bangladesh celebrates National Mother Language Day. 40 Years later UNESCO agreed to make it an International Day.
Learning languages has many advantages- you can travel around the World to hear other language and when you are in another country you could learn the national language to speak with the people in that country.
It is fun to learn a new language and to impress a friend in that country.
Around the world there are 6500 different languages but just 43% are active spoken languages.
English is the most popular world language with 1.5 billion people speaking it- 20% of the World’s population.
Other popular World languages include Mandarin, French, German, Spanish, Hindi and Russian.
Enjoy International Mother Language Day!
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