[Peter Austin] 21st of February is International Mother Language Day.
This is the day that celebrates mother languages all around the world,
and it commemorates the date on the 21st of February 1952, that is, 60 years ago,
when a group of students protesting in Dacca, in what is now Bangladesh,
in the fact that they were being forced to use Urdu, the national language of Pakistan,
since it was then East Pakistan, and not able to use their mother tongue, which is Bengali or Bangla.
The vast majority of communities around the world are bilingual or multilingual:
that is, people are speaking two or more languages as part of their regular daily lives.
In order to support multilingualism and bilingualism, it's very helpful to have mother tongue, mother language education,
and for children and students to study two or more languages as part of their process of learning and studying at schools.
In Australia, the government is currently carrying out a national review, looking at the role of languages,
multilingualism, bilingualism, indigenous aboriginal languages and immigrant languages across the whole community,
and they have called for submissions, and the parliamentary committee that's looking into this
is currently interviewing a range of people, to try and understand the role of language and multilingualism and bilingualism within the Australian community.
So here at SOAS, the Endangered Languages project is concerned with recording, documenting and helping to support endangered languages all around the world.
We are training students, post-doctoral researchers and giving grants for researchers to travel to distant places,
and to record and document languages that are under threat.
We also have a major archive, with ten terabytes of material that is being collected and made available
to communities and to researchers and to members of the interested public.