Mother Language Day marked to preserve linguistic diversity

ISLAMABAD—`International Mother Language Day’ was observed Thursday for recognising the significance of the mother tongue over foreign languages.
Languages lie at the heart of all social, economic and cultural life. Mother language is what a child communicates in for the first time with his mother and father. It is a language, a person never forgets, wherever that person lives.
The mother language is a prism that determines first notions of the world to a child. The umbilical cord between mother tongue and thought is inseparable. The day aims at promoting awareness regarding preservation of mother language when a lot of people speaking English language forget the importance of mother tongue due to its predominance and they take their language for granted.
According to the language experts, each year a bunch of languages become extinct. Today number of languages spoken in the world are under threat as foreign languages are learnt to meet the professional demands.
Efforts to promote the dissemination of mother tongues not only encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also develop awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world.
Akram, Lecturer of Linguistics at Foundation University while talking said that the disappearance of mother languages would be a severe blow to linguistic diversity, cognitive science and cultural studies. He suggested that we must try to preserve our mother tongue otherwise they would slowly become extinct.
Mother tongue represents the thought, culture and heritage of an individual. For preserving a language, one has to ensure that their mother language are better covered by technology, he added.—Agencies