Mother Language Day

Do you love your native language? Then you should celebrate it in the future! And always on February 21! That is International Mother Language Day. It has been celebrated every year since 2000. UNESCO established the day. UNESCO is a United Nations (UN) organization. They are concerned with topics in science, education, and culture. UNESCO strives to protect the cultural heritage of humanity. Languages are a cultural heritage too. Therefore, they must be protected, cultivated, and promoted. Linguistic diversity is commemorated on February 21. It is estimated that there are 6,000 to 7,000 languages worldwide. Half of those, however, are threatened by extinction. Every two weeks, a language is lost forever. Yet each language is an enormous wealth of knowledge. The knowledge of a nation's people is gathered in languages. The history of a nation is reflected in its language. Experiences and traditions are also passed on through language. For this reason, the native language is an element of every national identity. When a language dies out, more than just words are lost. And all of this is meant to be commemorated on February 21. People should understand what meaning languages have. And they should reflect upon what they can do to protect languages. So show your language that it's important to you! Perhaps you could bake it a cake? And put nice fondant writing on it. In your ‘mother language’, of course!

Guess the language!

______an is a South Slavic language. It is primarily spoken in ______a and Herzegovina. Groups of speakers can also be found in Serbia, Croatia, Macedonia, and Montenegro. ______an is the native language of approximately 2.5 million people. It is very similar to Croatian and Serbian. The vocabulary, orthography, and grammar of the 3 languages only differ slightly. A person who speaks ______an can also understand Serbian and Croatian very easily. Therefore, the status of the ______an language is discussed often.

Some linguists doubt that ______an is a language at all. They claim that it is just a dialect of the Serbo-Croatian language. The many foreign influences in ______an are interesting. Earlier the region belonged to the Orient and to the Occident on a rotating basis. Because of this, there are many Arabic, Turkish, and Persian terms in the vocabulary. That is actually very rare in Slavic languages. It makes ______an very unique though.