INTERNATIONAL MOTHER LANGUAGE DAY

Our language month is coming to greet us as a remembrance of our national heroes who shed blood for the State Language, Bengali on February 21st, 1952. Shakespeare once asked, “What is in a
name?” Here, I took the opportunity to ask, what is in a language? Language has evolved as a means of communication. Mankind has invented language for this purpose. But before organized  language evolved or was invented humans started to develop whistles, some sounds like animals, which still exist in some tribes today. The difference between humans and other animals is humans specifically homo sapiens live in a community or larger group. Author Noah Hariri pointed out in his Sapiens that political consciousness made homo sapiens social and come together in millions whereas animals can’t live together more than ten in a group.

Human being developed spoken gene Foxp2 from Homo Erectus. The compartmental brain of human beings developed from the Erectus. The fossil record of European Erectus or Neanderthal  hows   hat they had developed the left hemisphere of the frontal lobe of the brain, also known as Broca’s area, after Physician Dr. Broca! Our anatomical development of the pharynx has also evolved  to produce speech by vibrating air through the long pharynx. Charles Darwin said in his Origin of Species, humankind had sacrificed the danger of choking to speech for their better survival. This is  hat we possess  anatomically in our body. Yes, the capacity to speak. But unlike Chomsky who theorized universal grammar, logic here argues that mankind needed to listen or hear first to produce  any speech. No one  can produce speech without listening to sounds as a deaf ear cannot speak. This argument leads to the origin of language acquisition. It needs hearing (for speech) and seeing (for sign language). Without these sensory organs, our brain or voice box cannot process language.

And now, how do we acquire sounds? By imitating nature, the calls of animals, and insects, and the natural sounds of thunder, storms, rains, etc. So human beings acquire sounds bit by bit with the  help of teeth, tongue, etc. As children learn the language, first come only words and then gradually sentences. There are several stages of grammar or syntax of sentence-making in language  development. A simple sentence also makes sense. For example, “You dive. You drink. You go jail. It’s a simple sentencestructure. A complex sentence would be, “If you drive and you drink then you   ill go to jail”. So, we see how grammar developed through evolution and the context of complexity in expressing languages.Now let’s see how language is created. Language is
as old as consciousness, said Karl Marx. Language is the only product invented by humankind and shaped through ages and generations. It started with the need to transmit and transfer knowledge
within the group and also to the next generation for survival. The cave paintings in France show that they draw figures of star constellations.

Horoscope was developed far earlier by humankind and transmitted through their drawings. It is also found that our bodily sign languages (for also monkeys) and our speech faculty are located in the same area of our brain. This shows sign languages are the earlier versions of our means of expression (like dance and hand movement; we inadvertently move our hands while speaking). The sheer variety of languages in different countries and nations shows the uniqueness of language in terms of invention. Language has evolved and challenged our survival needs. Mainly through trade, language is developed and shared by mankind. If we turn to writing we can see how it evolved from picto-graphy to cuneiform to alphabet-like consonants and vowels. The separation of vowels from  phonetical consonants is a later development.

In Bengal, many languages influenced the Bengali language, such as Sanskrit or Indo-Iranian, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Chinese, Portuguese, French, English etc. Hindi and Urdu are two great examples of evolved local tongues in India, an amalgamation of Sanskrit and Persian.

Even during the British conquest of India, Farsi was the court language of the Mughals. To add Farsi and Arabic have the same alphabet (Arabic doesn’t have vowels in writing originally). Arabic, the   anguage of The Holy Quran, is not spoken by all Arabs in Middle Eastern countries. Ibne Battuta the Moroccan traveler, an Arabic speaker, faced difficulties traveling the Middle East and other Muslim countries and finding men with the Quranic Arabic language knowledge). The writing was invented to preserve the words that we are speaking. To make it comprehensible to a group of  population or community or village or a nation writing is gradually uniformed and standardized. (It should be mentioned that British citizen William Kerry played a pioneering role in forming  Bengali grammar). It doesn’t mean that Bengali literature was not there but many times we see Bengali written in Farsi script, (as we write Bangla in Greek later Roman, and now English alphabets  while chatting). Greeks were famous for their cultural transmission wherever they went especially after Byzantine fell to Ottoman. However, Greek in Bengal did not contribute to the Bengali language as Bangla evolved from Sanskrit and Farsi was predominant in Bengal before the British rule.

Nowadays, Bengali stands proud as the language of almost 300 million people around the world, predominantly in Bangladesh and West Bengal in India. With the Bengali population, the world now commemorates the 21st of February as International Mother Language Day. Like species languages are also going extinct throughout the ages. The declaration of February 21 as International Mother Language Day by the United Nations on November 17, 1999, is an unprecedented event not only for the Bangla language but also in the history of all mother languages of the world. The then and  current Prime Minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina laid the foundation of the International Mother Language Institute (IMLI) in Dhaka, Bangladesh on March 15, 2001. The then Secretary General  of the United Nations Kofi A. Annan was present on that occasion.

The world celebrates Mother Language Day to commemorate the lost languages, and their recovery, and to preserve the existing ones. Across the world, approximately 180 countries have an official language and more than 100 have multiple official languages. Countries adopt official languages to establish a universal means of communication in their governance, making it easier to outline and define things like laws, rights, etc. It can also be used as a tool to foster national unity and preserve cultural identity. However, when the US came to fruition during the 18th century, it had other  ideas at the forefront of its mind, namely the ideals of individual liberty and equality.

While English was establishing itself as the most dominant language in the American colonies throughout the 1700s, there were still significant portions of the population who spoke their mother tongue from their homeland: German, Dutch, Flemish, French, Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Gaelic, Portuguese, Italian, and more. As a multicultural country of migrants who spoke an array  of different languages, it was deemed  unfair to pick one language over any other. In 1780, John Adams proposed that English should be made the official language of the US to the Continental Congress, but it was deemed “undemocratic and a threat to individual liberty.”

And to this policy, Bengali has gained ground in the US as one of the widely spoken languages. Over half a million people in the US at present speak Bengali. People from all spoken languages will  celebrate this year. Every year International Mother Language Day is celebrated across the USA. Along with other nationals, Bengalis residing in the US will commemorate the heroes of the language  movement on this auspicious day by laying wreaths at the Saheed Minar and performing cultural activities. As Bengali culture is as old as its language.

In contemporary Bangladesh, despite the nation’s rich linguistic and cultural heritage, the Bengali language finds itself contending with the pervasive  influence of foreign languages and cultures.  The increasing globalization and the widespread use of English, coupled with the global prevalence of media, have led to the infiltration of foreign linguistic elements and cultural nuances. English, in particular, often takes precedence in various domains, including education, business, and technology, contributing to a gradual erosion of the linguistic dominance of Bengali. Furthermore, the omnipresence of international media has introduced diverse cultural perspectives such as Hindi that, at times, challenge traditional Bengali norms. This ongoing dynamic between indigenous  language and external influences reflects the complexities of cultural assimilation and underscores the need for intentional efforts to preserve and promote the unique linguistic identity of  Bangladesh.