The Day is an observance held annually on 21 February worldwide to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism. It was first announced by UNESCO on 17 November 1999. Its observance was also formally recognized by the United Nations General Assembly in 2008.
While the Day is given widespread recognition across Bangladesh every year, it’s importance, or better, the importance of what the Day celebrates is a highly charged one today when people are much more aware that powerful national lobbies override the rights of minorities and sideline their languages.
This happens even in Bangladesh itself where the largely Buddhist ethnic minorities of the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) are losing land and livelihood to the Bengali-speaking majority invading their ancestral lands from the plains and decimating their local cultures.
It is currently a ‘hot topic’ in Latvia where a dominant Russia is vocally critical of a Latvia language vote as Moscow says a referendum outcome was biased because it excluded 319,000 Russian-speaking “non-citizens” (media reports 19 February, 2012).
Moscow has criticised Latvia for rejecting Russian as a second language in a highly charged referendum that exposed the tensions lingering in the Baltic nation since its years under Soviet rule.
The Russian foreign ministry says: “The referendum’s results far from fully reflect national sentiments because 319,000 ‘non-citizens’ were denied the right to express their opinion, even though many of them were born in Latvia or have lived there a long time. We hope that the voice of Latvia’s Russian population will be heard by both the ruling government and international organisations whose job it is to make sure that basic laws protecting the legal rights and interests of minorities are followed.”
Thus we see a big power using that minority language value to try to reassert at least some control over that ‘little’ country where about one-third of the country’s 2.1 million people consider Russian as their mother tongue.
“An overwhelming majority of Latvian citizens have expressed their unequivocal support for one of the core constitutional values, the national language,” Andris Berzins, the Latvian president, said in a statement.
The three Baltic states remained the most unruly members of the Soviet Union after their World War II annexation and often flaunted their suspicions of Russian settlers in the subsequent decades. An independent Latvia emerged from the Soviet Bloc in 1991 and quickly adopted some of the strictest language rules of all the former Soviet-run nations.
Hundreds of thousands of Russians, many of them living in the capital Riga, ended up failing those exams and became deprived of the jobs and other social privileges that accompany Latvian citizenship.
Many consider Russian the language of the former occupiers.
“Your votes show we need to do a lot of homework in order to help a significant proportion of the population feel that the Latvian state and its core values are their own,” Edgars Rinkevics, Latvia’s foreign minister, told the losing Russian voters. “Many feel alienated, and for them it was a protest vote,” Rinkevics said in a statement.
Russian-language activist Vladimirs Lindermans told Latvian television he felt vindicated by the referendum.
“Now we will see if people are ready to open dialogue with the Russian community. We have shown that Russian is not a foreign language here,” the Native Tongue group leader said.
Latvia formally joined the European Union in 2004 and has largely avoided criticism from Brussels for its language policy despite Moscow’s complaints.
A language policy is a two-edged sword and can be used to rescue a minority or crucify the once powerful. It has to be remembered that with languages ‘the more the merrier’ as the day celebrates diversity not uniformity.
