Alexx Sanchez
asanch16@uwyo.edu
During the Friday international coffee hour, Bangladesh Students’ Association at UW (BSA-UW), an RSO, presented an event called International Mother Language Day (IMLD).
Sayantan Sarkar, public relations liaison for BSA-UW and graduate assistant in the department of plant sciences, explained the history of IMLD.
“It was started in Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, on Feb. 21 in 1952 to commemorate the students and intellectuals who died to save their language ‘Bangla’,” Sakar said. “Basically, it was the Pakistani government who, after partition of India, declared Urdu as the official language of the whole country and no other language was allowed to be spoken.”
He continued by saying how the Bengalis in the East Pakistan province protested to have ‘Bangla’ as the second language and the police fired at the protesting masses. However, due to widespread protests, ‘Bangla’ was given an official language status in 1952.
In 1999, the IMLD had international status declared by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural organization, otherwise known as UNESCO. Since then this event is celebrated on the same day in different countries such as India, China and Canada.
“Due to the sacrifices of the people of Bangladesh the language ‘Bangla’ was saved from an obvious extinction and it is today the seventh most spoken language in the world,” Sakar said.
Before the event on Friday, BSA-UW tabled in the breezeway of the Union with a poster to educate students and faculty who are unfamiliar with IMLD. Sakar said handouts were also passed out to spread information regarding the threat of extinction that many different languages face today due to globalization and people focusing on a common language around the globe.
“Extinction of a language also means extinction of the culture of a section of people. The U.S. tops the list among countries with highest threat of language extinction followed by Australia,” Sakar said.
Along with the poster and handouts, BSA-UW had a white-board for people to express themselves in their native language.
“We got a huge response from a wide language background of people,” Sakar said.
At the international coffee hour, Md. Arif Khan, president of BSA-UW, gave a talk about the history and importance of the event. The message of the event was that language is the only mode of communication between people and how it unites people of a region or many different regions.
Sarkar said it is important to spread awareness of the extinction of languages to prevent losing more in the future.
