In 1952 police gunned down students during a protest in Dhaka, Bangladesh. At the time Bangladesh was a part of Pakistan and the disproportionately powerful minority of Urdu speakers declared their own language to be the national language, greatly angering Bengali-speakers.
The students who died did so protesting for their right to speak in their native tongue.
In 1999 the United Nations began to recognize the date of the event, February 21, as International Mother Language Day. The day serves to honor the dead and to highlight both the diversity of languages spoken throughout the world and the need to preserve endangered dialects.
At UW the International Student Association (ISA) and the Bangladeshi Students Club commemorated the day at this week’s international coffee hour.
“One of the ultimate goals of this is to celebrate all the languages and all the different people we have in the world and on our campus,” Gabriella Gualano, president of the ISA, said.
Rajib Shaha, president of the Bangladeshi Students Club, reflected on the passion Bangladeshis felt, and still feel, for the Bengali language.
“It must sound silly, but can you imagine someone telling you that you cannot speak in your own language?” he said. “Your family, your parents, your grandparents—they speak in this language. And now somebody is telling you that you cannot do that. How ridiculous is that?”
International Mother Language Day is not just about Bengali and the events that occurred in Bangladesh half a century ago. World languages continue to go extinct, even today, in a world with technology to record everything.
There are vulnerable and endangered languages all over the globe, from Native American languages only spoken by specific, small tribes to Australian languages with just a few hundred speakers. Africa and the Indian subcontinent have dozens of endangered languages and even within the borders of present-day Bangladesh; there are five languages with fewer than 7,000 speakers.
“Maybe a hundred years down the road, nobody will even remember there was a language like that,” Shaha said. “I mean that is sad. There are people who used to have fun in that language, who used to curse in that language, and nobody in this world will even remember that.”
