International Mother Language Day, But Whose Language Really Matters?
- Soumyaranjan Sahoo
- 4 days ago
- 9 min read
International Mother Language Day is often presented as a soft celebration of “heritage.” Its origins are harder and more instructive than that. UNESCO notes that the observance emerged from an initiative by Bangladesh and was approved at UNESCO’s 1999 General Conference, with global observance beginning in 2000¹. The day is tied, historically, to the Bengali Language Movement and the politics of linguistic recognition, an insistence that a language spoken by the majority could not be treated as a second-class medium in public life.
This origin matters because it reminds us what is at stake. Mother languages are not only intimate home codes; they are also civic instruments. When a language is denied institutional space, schools, courts, media, and jobs, it doesn’t simply “decline.” It gets displaced.
So when we ask, “Whose language really matters?” we are not asking a sentimental question. We are asking a systems question: Which languages receive the conditions to survive as living, future-facing tools, and which are pushed into the museum of nostalgia?
The scale of the crisis: how many languages, how much risk
Start with the simplest global fact: the planet is linguistically abundant, but unevenly so. Ethnologue, one of the most widely used global reference databases, puts the number of living languages in use today at 7,159².
Now pair abundance with fragility. UNESCO has repeatedly highlighted the acceleration of language loss; in a 2024 UNESCO piece on multilingual education and Indigenous language justice, UNESCO states that at least 40% of the world’s languages are endangered and notes an often-cited estimate that a language disappears on average every two weeks³.
Even if we treat “every two weeks” as a rounded advocacy statistic rather than a precise scientific clock, the direction is clear: language loss is not a distant possibility; it is a current trend. And crucially, the loss is not distributed equally. Large languages (those embedded in state systems and global markets) accumulate more domains of use; small languages (especially those lacking literacy infrastructure or digital support) face a shrinking ecology.
This is why the core question is not “Do we love languages?” It is: Which languages get to function across modern domains, education, employment, bureaucracy, media, the internet, and AI?
What linguistics tells us: languages rarely “die,” they get replaced
In linguistic terms, most endangered languages are not extinguished by a single event. They lose speakers through language shift; a community gradually stops transmitting a language to children because another language becomes more useful, prestigious, safer, or economically rewarding.
A useful way to think about it is domains: where is a language used?
Home and intimacy (family talk, lullabies, scolding, kinship)
Ritual (songs, prayer, oral tradition)
School and knowledge (textbooks, exams, science vocabulary)
Work and markets (employment, contracts, services)
Power (police, courts, government paperwork)
Digital life (keyboards, interfaces, search, speech recognition)
When a language is confined to home and ritual, while school, work, and digital life demand another language, the long-term outcome is predictable: children become passive understanders, then hesitant speakers, then non-speakers. Commemoration may continue. Transmission does not.
That is why “preservation” as a word can be misleading. A language can be preserved in recordings and dictionaries, and still die as a community practice. The stronger goal is revitalisation: keeping a language in active use by ensuring children can learn it, and adults can live in it.
India’s paradox: extraordinary diversity, steep hierarchies
India is often cited as one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth. The Census of India’s language data makes the scale visible: the 2011 census recorded 19,569 “raw returns” of mother tongues (self-reported names), which were then classified and grouped into languages through linguistic scrutiny⁴.
The Census language portal explains that in 2011, there were 1,369 classified mother tongues, and 1,474 additional mother tongues treated as “unclassified” because they were not fully linguistically identified. This is not a trivial footnote; it reveals something fundamental: people’s lived language identities are far more granular than administrative categories.
At the same time, the Census report and related summaries point out a concentration of linguistic affiliation: 96.71% of India’s population reported one of the 22 scheduled languages as mother tongue. That statistic can be read in two ways:
It indicates the reach of major languages.
It also suggests how easily smaller tongues can become invisible in official life, especially when they are grouped under larger labels, treated as dialects, or absent from school systems.
In other words, India has both a vast language universe and a steep language hierarchy. International Mother Language Day often speaks to the first truth. The second truth is what determines whose language actually “matters.”
Odisha: one state, many mother tongues, one dominant civic language
Odisha is a clean case study of the same paradox. Odia is the major language of public life, with tens of millions of speakers nationally. A commonly cited 2011 Census-based figure puts Odia speakers in India at about 37.52 million, and notes that the overwhelming share live in Odisha.
But Odisha is not linguistically singular. Multiple tribal and regional speech communities, Kui, Kuvi, Saora, Desia, Ho, Mundari, and many more, form a dense layer of linguistic reality beneath the “Odia state” label.
One Census-derived secondary compilation of Odisha’s language profile reports 163 mother tongues recorded as spoken in Odisha (2011) and uses Odisha’s population base (around 39.9 million in 2011) to calculate shares. While that source is not the Census itself, it is explicitly derived from Census language tables and helps illustrate the pattern: a multilingual state operating with a largely monolingual set of civic defaults.
This is where “whose language matters” becomes a practical question. In Odisha:
Odia matters in schools, public signage, mainstream publishing, and state identity.
Smaller mother tongues matter intensely in home life, oral culture, and ecological knowledge.
But in many cases, these smaller tongues do not matter in the domains that decide future survival: early-grade instruction quality, textbooks, examinations, teacher training, and digital interfaces.
The result is predictable: language shift accelerates, not necessarily because communities “choose” to abandon a tongue, but because the system rewards exit.
Education is the pressure point: what evidence says about mother-tongue learning
In language policy, the single most decisive arena is early-grade education. If children cannot learn to read and write in a language they understand, the cost is not just cultural; it is cognitive and academic.
UNESCO has consistently argued for mother-tongue-based multilingual education, stating that beginning education in a learner’s first language improves comprehension and learning outcomes⁵. UNESCO’s India-focused education reporting has also emphasised that mother-tongue-based instruction strengthens comprehension and reduces early learning gaps, especially for tribal, rural, and minority learners⁶.
The World Bank’s synthesis on first-language instruction similarly summarises multi-country evidence: first-language instruction is associated with improved learning outcomes, reduced repetition/dropout, and equity gains, and can even lower overall costs when repetition declines⁷. The World Bank also makes the core point more simply in public-facing education work: children in early grades should be taught in a language they understand before transitioning⁸.
This is not an ideological argument against English (or any additional language). It is a sequencing argument: children learn best when literacy begins in a familiar language, and multilingualism is built on that base.
So when a system pushes early English-medium schooling without adequate support, it can produce double harm:
weak literacy and learning outcomes in the early years
erosion of mother-tongue transmission, because the home language is framed as less valuable
International Mother Language Day messages often say, “Multilingualism is good.” The evidence-based policy translation is sharper: mother-tongue foundations are an inclusion tool, not a cultural luxury.
Digital life is the new gatekeeper: if it can’t be typed, searched, or heard, it shrinks
Today, language survival is increasingly mediated by digital infrastructure. A language’s vitality is shaped by whether it can thrive in:
keyboards and fonts
Unicode support and rendering consistency
OCR (especially for older scripts and print styles)
search and indexing
speech-to-text and text-to-speech
translation tools
social media and publishing platforms
Here, the hierarchy returns. Global tech ecosystems are built first for dominant languages; minority languages arrive late, partially, or never.
Open projects try to close this gap. Mozilla Common Voice⁹, for example, describes itself as building publicly accessible open speech datasets in 130+ languages, aiming to improve speech technology through community participation. Initiatives like this matter because speech tech will shape which languages are usable in future interfaces. If a language is absent from datasets and tooling, it becomes harder to use in the digital world, which in turn reduces everyday use and prestige.
For many Indigenous and minority languages, digital inclusion is also a sovereignty issue: who owns the recordings, dictionaries, orthographies, and cultural materials? This is why community-governed platforms such as FirstVoices¹⁰ emphasise community control and ownership of language data while enabling audio, stories, dictionaries, and learning resources.
The principle is simple: a language that cannot live online is forced to live only in memory. And memory is not intergenerational transmission.
Global revitalisation: what “works” looks like (and why it’s hard)
Across the world, language revitalisation tends to succeed when multiple conditions align:
1) Clear public goals and long-horizon planning
Wales is a widely discussed example of a government setting measurable language targets. The Welsh Government’s “Cymraeg 2050” strategy explicitly states a goal of one million Welsh speakers by 2050, along with increased daily use targets¹¹. Whether every target is met is a separate debate, but the lesson is important: revitalisation requires measurable planning, not just cultural celebration.
2) Schooling ecosystems, not one-off “language periods”
Where revitalisation has taken root, whether through immersion schooling models, bilingual programs, or strong early-grade mother-tongue education, the key is not a symbolic “language class” but an ecosystem: curriculum, materials, teacher training, assessments, and community reinforcement.
UNESCO’s consistent advocacy and evidence summaries repeatedly return to this: the home language is the foundation; additional languages can be built on top; outcomes improve when the foundation is strong¹².
3) Documentation plus public access repositories
Documentation matters because many endangered languages lack written resources, teaching materials, or recorded corpora. Organisations like the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP)¹³ fund documentation of endangered languages and aim to create repositories and make documentary collections freely available.
But documentation alone is not revitalisation. Documentation becomes revitalisation when communities can use it, through curriculum, apps, media production, and everyday practices.
4) Community ownership, not extractive archiving
The ethics of language work have shifted strongly: communities want control over their recordings, narratives, and learning tools. FirstVoices explicitly positions itself as a secure platform where communities own data and manage access, enabling elders and youth to collaborate on recordings and dictionaries.
This is a crucial corrective to older models where languages were “collected” like artefacts.
5) Digital tooling and open datasets for the AI era
As voice interfaces and translation systems become default ways of accessing services, language survival will increasingly depend on being present in data and models. Common Voice’s multilingual dataset work is one example of an effort to widen language representation in speech technology.
So, whose language really matters? Follow the money, the marks, and the machines
A language “matters” when it is rewarded across the systems that shape daily decisions:
Money: Does the language help you earn, access services, publish, or build products?
Marks: Can you learn well and score well using it as a foundation?
Machines: Can you type it, search it, speak to it, translate it, train models on it?
International Mother Language Day often gestures toward “equal respect.” Systems do not run on respect; they run on incentives and infrastructure.
If a tribal child in Odisha must learn reading through an unfamiliar dominant language early on, the system has already chosen which language matters more. If a language cannot be typed cleanly on smartphones, the market has chosen. If a language does not appear in the datasets, the future interfaces will choose.
This is why UNESCO and the UN’s broader initiatives matter: they try to convert moral attention into institutional action. UNESCO is leading the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032)¹⁴, with a Global Action Plan spanning education, digital inclusion, and heritage preservation.
But global decades do not automatically change local realities. The translation has to happen inside states, school systems, publishing ecosystems, and technology stacks.
Odisha’s opportunity: treating language as infrastructure, not ornament
For Odisha, the language question is not “Odia versus others.” It is Odia plus: a model where Odia thrives as the civic medium while the state’s other mother tongues have real pathways to literacy, learning, and digital presence.
A serious language future for Odisha would require at least five visible commitments:
Early-grade mother-tongue scaffolding in high-density tribal language regions, supported by teacher training and material creation (aligned with UNESCO/World Bank evidence on learning outcomes).
Digitisation pipelines for Odia classics and contemporary works, including OCR and searchable archives, so that “classical status” translates into actual access.
Community-governed archives for smaller languages, audio, video, and stories, borrowing governance principles seen in platforms like FirstVoices.
Open data participation so these languages can exist in future speech and translation systems (the kind of gap Common Voice is trying to narrow globally).
Public goals and metrics, not to reduce language to a KPI, but to keep policy honest (a lesson from long-horizon strategies like Cymraeg 2050).
This is a shift in imagination: language not as a cultural accessory for festivals, but as a knowledge infrastructure, how people learn, remember, participate, and build futures.
Ending where the day began: a question that should make us uncomfortable
International Mother Language Day exists because people once died insisting that a mother language must not be treated as inferior in public life. If we reduce the day to a celebration, we betray its origin.
The honest question is not whether we post in our mother tongue once a year. The honest question is whether our institutions, schools, courts, public services, publishers, and platforms make it possible to live in that language without penalty.
Because languages do not vanish because they were unloved. They vanish because they were made unusable.
And until the smallest mother tongues can function in the domains that decide survival, learning, livelihood, and digital life, International Mother Language Day will remain a commemoration of what we say we value, not proof of what our systems are willing to sustain.
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