Mother tongue is the language of the heart, and we can express ourselves in this language unlike any other, because this is how our deepest contemplation takes place. It is a language of prayer, grace, and forgiveness. It is the language of friendship and love. It’s because of the mother’s perception that we are raising us as children because she first hears the language and tries to express what we hear.
The expression in our mother tongue is related to sustainable development. When we work with community groups through participatory dialogue, we focus on identifying what is being sought most and what people want to dedicate to. Such introspection should be completely honest and reflect deepest on ourselves in the language we enjoy most. Language is therefore an integral part of achieving sustainable development.
Participatory community planning is a hallmark of civil society organizations committed to sustainable development, but it can be challenging when multiple languages of expression are present. Civil society workers are often in situations where there is no choice but to use their many different languages - in Morocco, for example, this includes Arabic and Tamazight – to communicate effectively and try to express themselves in the most personal way and closest to what they really feel. This requires movement within and from languages, creating an atmosphere of multilingualism.
The ideas of multilingualism are, in fact, old. In the Hebrew tradition, for example, the Supreme Court had 70 judges to reflect what was held in the world’s 70 root languages. The idea was that if each of these essential languages is represented, the issues that came before the court were approached from all different perspectives and perspectives in order to make the issues under consideration more truthful.
We should learn as many languages as we can, not just as a skill, but as an opportunity to create an understanding. Through experiences such as travel, international work, immigration and personal experiences, we develop a multilingual and thus pluralistic perspective. While this contradicts the philosophy that a committed and networked citizen benefits from a common root language, the ability to “code-exchange” demonstrates the ability to negotiate between personal and public areas of higher education, the workplace, commerce, and society. It also allows us to share our cultural and linguistic knowledge with our peers.
As the language is alive and constantly evolving, and as thousands of languages are now under threat, the nature of language is also something that must be preserved. We understand that there have been people on this planet for tens of thousands of years. Then imagine how many languages have appeared and disappeared during that time? Current languages can be traced to some of them, but some have been forgotten. Even thousands of current ones cannot be compared to the totality of all languages. Like plant and animal species, linguistic biodiversity is becoming rarer and will continue in the same trend as speakers of endangered languages move or merge into larger groups.
We must therefore work to preserve languages through multilingualism. We need to document and archive them, like Endangered Languages Projectbut we must also learn and use them in real situations through practice and experience. While studying in the classroom is valuable, most of us learn best by immersing ourselves in learning new languages. People learn best to care for trees or supply legal aid as clinics and community ministers in real-world situations, and we know that we integrate these skills and abilities and perceptions and better adopt them by applying them in the everyday world.
Heartfelt language expression allows initiatives to be tailored and tailored to our human needs and lays the foundation for their sustainability. Multilingualism gives us the different perspectives we need for a more complete understanding, and then decisions that take into account the factors behind (and surrounding) the circumstances of our lives. Diving as well as we can into our home languages and what is spoken around us, preserves them on earth and takes advantage of the richness of symbols and knowledge they contain.
Sender Yossef Ben-Meir and Ellen Hernandez
Yossef Ben-Meir is President of the Moroccan High Atlas Foundation. Professor Ellen Hernandez teaches English at Camden County College in the United States.
Source: The Nordic Page