Keep your mother tongue alive, protect your culture

TOMORROW is International Mother Language Day, as declared by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

The day was first proclaimed by the general conference of Unesco in November 1999 and, according to the Unesco website, has been celebrated annually since 2000 “to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism”.

February 21 marks the day, in 1952, when police in what is now Bangladesh shot and killed students protesting to demand recognition of their language, Bangla, as one of the two national languages of what was then part of Pakistan.

In South Africa this year we mark 40 years since the June 16, 1976 uprising in Soweto when police shot and killed pupils protesting against being educated in Afrikaans. They wanted to be educated in their mother tongue.

I was in Standard 8 (Grade 10) at Crystal Senior Secondary School in Hanover Park in 1976 and remember how Albert Fritz, now a prominent DA member and Western Cape MEC for social development, came to our class to tell us about what had happened in Soweto. Fritz was then the unofficial student leader at Crystal because we were not allowed student representative councils.

Ironically, we were having an Afrikaans lesson at the time – taught by one of the few white teachers at the school – and she was clearly upset when she heard Fritz’s version of what had happened and what he expected us to do, which was to join in protest with pupils and students from around the Western Cape the next day.

Most pupils at Crystal joined the protest which, predictably, was violently disrupted by police and which continued for months after that, long after the protests in Soweto had subsided.

In many ways, these protests introduced many young people like myself to the struggle.

I grew up in an Afrikaans-speaking home, but took a decision then, in protest against Afrikaans and the police’s action in its support, to stop speaking the language altogether unless I had no choice.

At the age of 16, I turned my back on my mother tongue and decided to embrace another language, English. It was one of the most difficult decisions I made.

I ended up with the strange situation of being educated in Afrikaans, because it was too late to change in my final two years in school, while speaking English everywhere else.

It was only after we became a democracy that I felt I could comfortably begin to speak Afrikaans again and realised how much I had missed the nuances that one only finds in one’s mother tongue. Plus, I realised Afrikaans was never the language of the oppressor because it is spoken mainly by people who come from disadvantaged communities, not only in Cape Town, but also in other parts of the country.

In 1976, it was also the first time I really moved out of my comfort zone and began going into the African townships of Cape Town, where I interacted with other young people embracing the Struggle.

I realised then that apartheid had been effective because of the way it had used language to divide people.

People in so-called coloured areas did not have the choice of learning Xhosa at school.

One learns languages best when young; it becomes more difficult to learn new languages when one is older.

The theme for International Mother Language Day this year emphasises the “importance of appropriate languages of instruction, usually mother tongues, in early years or schooling”.

“Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing our tangible and intangible heritage.

“All moves to promote the dissemination of mother tongues will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue,” Unesco says on its website.

In simple English, they emphasise the link between language and culture.

In a country like South Africa, with 11 official languages and a few unofficial ones (like Afrikaaps), one would think International Mother Language Day would be commemorated widely, but, as far as I know, there are only two commemorations planned – at Iziko Museum in the Company’s Garden today and in Pinelands on Tuesday.

Language is a key part of one’s identity and in South Africa, mother tongue has been neglected over the years and will probably be neglected even more over the next few.

Already we have seen the disappearance of languages spoken by the first nations of South Africa because adults decided to raise and educate their children in other, more popular languages.

It stands to reason people would want to educate their children in a language that would yield economic benefits, be it English and French at the moment or Mandarin in the near future.

However, we cannot allow languages spoken for generations to die. Every time a language dies, a part of culture dies with it.