Top Six Multilingual Education Facts For International Mother Language Day

It is sad to know that most of you are not aware of International Mother Language Day. It is celebrated very year on 21^st February. In the year 1999, UNESCO declared this day to be a holiday, but it is something way before that. As per some of the resourceful sources, it was in the year 1952 when first International Mother Language Day first came into being and it started in Bangladesh, as known today. During that time, it was still a part of Pakistan. Most people used to call this place as East Pakistan and the residents over there used to speak Bangla. In 1948, Urdu was declared the official language for entire country, which was primarily language of West Pakistan.

A Bit Of History

Around 1952, February 21^st, the students of Dhaka Medical College and Dhaka University protested against this decision of making Urdu the official language of Pakistan. Police was also involved, resulting in killing of students. From that time, Bangladesh or East Pakistan celebrated “Language Movement Day” on this date. It was in 1999, when UNESCO first made it the official holiday worldwide for celebrating the diverse linguistic cultures.

This holiday is mostly celebrated with some of the local celebrations in most of the communities and mostly at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. The last them of 2018 was sustainable futures associated with multilingual education. In this regard, just come to learn more about the top six multilingual educational facts. At this current globalization age, multilingual education is often termed to be vital for the sustainable growth. There are some reasons on why this multilingual education is so important for establishing success of the communities around world.

1. Promoting Linguistic Diversity

You will come across around 6000 languages, which are spoken globally. It solely depends on ways in which you choose to classify language and the dialects. However, around 43% of these languages are endangered. In schools globally, around 100 languages are taught, making people unaware of so many languages around.

The schools are only using the cripple forms of local languages for this purpose. Therefore, it is mandatory to promote multilingual languages. It helps students and people to learn more about the linguistic diversity which they are part of. It will also help you to know more about the culture.

2. Helping Children Learn

You will be amazed to know that multilingual education will work best to help children learn mostly when they are associated with the linguistic minorities. Even research has proven that younger children are known to perform better at school, and during the time when they are learning ways to read and write their mother languages first. After that, they are going to transfer skills to official languages of country they reside in.

● In a report from UNESCO, it has been stated that the reason behind minority children to perform poorly in school is because they are often taught in language they can never understand. 221 million children roughly speak different language at home from what they are taught in school, which limits their ability to develop foundations for some later learning.

● Children get to understand more when they are learning in a language they can understand. It might seem to be an obvious answer but 40% of children do not even have that access to education in language they can often understand.

Multilingual education is known to make things quite easier for parents as that might help improve academic achievements, mentioned for children around here.

3. Help To Reduce Poverty

Education always forms a major stepping stone to improve your life out of poverty. But, children without access of education in their mother tongue seem to drop out of school poorly. Children from some of the non-dominant language areas cover around 40 to 60% of community and they drop out of educational institutions. So, multilingual education is rather important in this regard.

4. Help Students Learn Official Language Instructions

People generally think that students should be taught in official language to grasp well in society. But, research shows it otherwise. As per UNESCO, students in far areas of Mali and Guatemala end up with higher scores in official language if educated in home language.

5. Mental Health Benefits

Children taught in mother tongue and in official languages are often termed as bilingual, and they can switch between languages easily. It will help them to sharpen their executive functional skills along with emotional and social growth.

6. Respect Towards Local Culture And Language

Learning multilingual languages will help you grow respect for local cultures and languages. It helps in transmitting traditional knowledge and cultural values. Respecting language means respecting cultures.

These are the top 6 reasons for people to actually head for the multilingual education. It is what mostly enacted in International Mother Language Day for the world to know.

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