The history of the holiday has a tragic beginning. Date of Feb. 21 is chosen because it was on this day in 1952, killing five students who participated in a demonstration for the provision of their native Bengali language an official status in the then Pakistan, part of which later became the independent state of Bangladesh.The decision to celebrate International Mother Language Day was adopted at the 30 th session of the General Conference of UNESCO at the initiative of Bangladesh National Commission for UNESCO. International Mother Language Day marked the fourth consecutive year. Today around the world people speak 6 thousand languages, about half of them in one way or another is threatened with extinction. Over the past three centuries, the pace of extinction or disappearance of languages is clearly increased, especially true for the Americas and Australia. Such data is expanded edition of the Atlas of languages threatened with extinction.
Presentation of the Atlas was held on 21 February 2002 at UNESCO headquarters in Paris at the International Mother Language Day. An English edition, which contains 14 color maps and 24 pages of comments, makes it possible to see "hot spots" where linguistic diversity is under threat. The latest comments highlighted in separate chapters, in particular, Siberia and the Caucasus. According to experts, the native language is endangered, if in a given community, it ceases to study more than 30 percent of children.
No comments:
Post a Comment