mother tongue (13. 200)

Established by UNESCO in 1999 in honour of the 1952 movement of East Bengal to have their language recognised as official rather than provincial and leading to the creation of the independent state of Bangladesh from the Pakistani territories, the United Nations annual observance of International Mother Language Day is established to promote worldwide linguistic and cultural diversity as well as polyglotism. Al Jazeera presents and overview of the spoken languages of the world, writing systems and the status of many minority languages, including diglossia between officialdom and convention and endangered ones—forty percent of the estimated seven-thousand extant ones. Defined as when parents-users begin to pass on a more dominant parlance to their children, threatening proficiency and identity, most are in Oceania, Asia and Africa, including some on their way to a come-back owing to community-led revitalisation programmes like Yugambeh of Australia (the exonym meaning “no means no” and preferring the endonym Mibanah for “the sound of eagles”), the Ainu language of Japan’s indigenous peoples (an isolate considered to be functionally extinct) and the moribund Kernowek language of Cornwall. In the spirit of the observance, adopt a word from one of these languages.