Our Favorite Day of the Year!

Perhaps you’re excited for Sunday, February 21 this year because you’ve heard that it’s National Sticky Bun Day in the United States, and hey—we don’t blame you! Sticky buns are great! But there is another, much more significant day happening as well. A day on which we celebrate something so important that without it, sticky buns probably wouldn’t even exist…

That’s right, it’s International Mother Language Day, our favorite day of the year!

It’s not just us, though. People and organizations around the world are celebrating their own mother languages and the languages of others, because they understand that our languages are everything to us. They do everything. They are our culture—the beautiful carriers and shapers of our worlds.

In a time when a virus has done so much to keep us apart, our languages bring us together. So today is a day for celebrating what our languages do for us, and as part of our celebration, we are thrilled to share this video from SIL International.

Pause with us. Hold the moments of this video in your mind and heart. Think about your own language. Think about what it means to you, and what all of the over seven thousand languages spoken on this planet mean to the people who speak them. Think about all that those languages give to us. To grab a few insights from the video:

• LANGUAGES INFORM: The Coronavirus pandemic has brought home more than ever the importance of language in getting us the information we need, when we need it. Information has been as much a battleground as vaccines in the fight against this virus, and mother language medical messaging is a wall-smashing warrior, saving lives.

• LANGUAGES ENGAGE: The research is clear—children learn better in the language they best understand… their mother language. And when children learn better, they grow up better able to engage with the world around them. In our new UNICEF-funded project in the Philippines, we’ll be developing storybooks using Bloom for 9 minority languages in Zamboanga del Norte, Northern Samar, and Angeles City. And we’ve seen time and time again how this approach has brought children into greater engagement with the world around them.

• LANGUAGES ADVOCATE: To be allowed to speak in your mother language is to be given a voice, and a person with a voice can advocate for their own needs. This is a big part of why we do what we do, and why we work so hard to draw local communities into the process. For example, in our aforementioned project in the Philippines we’re not just helping to create mother language books, we’re also providing capacity building to ten schools and their communities for each of these nine languages, so that they can continue producing books in their language. And we’re developing a National Training Module based on the lessons learned through this project that will provide guidance so that other language communities in the Philippines can do the same. We share the tools we’ve developed, so that these communities can use them to grow and to advocate for the welfare of their communities.

• LANGUAGES RECONCILE and UNIFY: While it’s true that language can be divisive, it’s also the best path we have toward reconciliation. Just as the suppression of language has been used in the past to destroy cultures, so has the honoring of a language allowed it—and the people who speak it—to thrive. And rather than driving people apart, this mutual honoring has brought them together, time and time again.

The video ends with the words, “languages they treasure most,” and we think that is spot on, because languages are indeed a “treasure.”  We are grateful for the opportunity to engage with local, community-based organizations, doing our small part to enable them to use their languages to improve their quality of life. We’re also grateful to have a rich language of our own with which to do this, and privileged to interact with the treasures to be found in the mother languages of others.

Happy International Mother Language Day!