This year on 21st February, we celebrated International Mother Language Day. In November 1999, UNESCO declared February 21 as International Mother Language Day in response to the declining state of many languages all over the world. The theme chosen for this year, “Multilingual education – a necessity to transform education,” indicates the value of multiple languages in our education system. Each person born in this world learns the language in his or her mother’s lap.
That is the reason we call the language which we learned to speak in our childhood as our mother tongue. India is a cradle of hundreds of languages and multiple dialects. Some languages have their own scripts, some have common scripts and some dialects have no script at all.
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For example, the Latin script also known as Roman script is an alphabetic writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae, in southern Italy. Today at least 100 languages use the Roman alphabet. These languages include all of the languages in Western Europe such as English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Irish, Dutch, etc. The phenomenon of several languages embracing a common script is better known in India. The Devanagari script for instance is employed for Sanskrit, Hindi, Marathi, Nepali, Bhojpuri and Maithili and now increasingly for adivasi languages across India. Languages such as Konknni, Khasi in Meghalaya and Nagamese in Nagaland use Roman script.
Language which is the integral part of our lives, culture and heritage gives us identity. We, Goans express our inner feelings, emotions and excitements in our mother tongue Konknni better than in any other Indian or foreign language which we speak. Our mother language Konknni is our identity. It is a multi-script language written in five scripts namely Roman, Devanagari, Kannada, Malayalam and Persian- Arabic. It is the only language in India written in five scripts and a landmark in the history of World’s Languages. Konknni is spoken by about two and a half million people hailing from the west coast of India and spread across the states of Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka and Kerala. About 40% of them are from Goa where Konknni is the state language. A majority of them, to the extent they employ Konknni as the language of communication, use the Devanagari script, although significant minority uses the Roman script. About 45% of the Konknni speakers are from Karnataka who write in Kannada script. The Navayat Muslims in Karnataka use Persian-Arabic script for Konknni. In Kerala, the Konknni speakers write in Malayalam script and in Maharashtra in Devanagari script. Interestingly this has been done for ages and is an important marker of their identity.
Nowadays there is a craze for foreign languages, especially English. Mahatma Gandhi foresaw how the foreign medium has made our children practically foreigners in their own land. We need English because it is a link language and essential to prosper in the business world. But we should not forget our mother language with which we are identified, through which we project our culture and in which we express our values, ideals and literary endeavours.
