Closing keynote on International Mother Language Day and Bangla: transcript

Key points

• International Mother Language Day was announced by UNESCO in 1999 and recognized by the UN in 2002; the 2021 theme is fostering multilingualism for inclusion in education and society.
• In Bangladesh the day marks the 1952 language movement, and language is described as part of identity, culture and emotion.
• Love for language must be backed by action, and Wikimedia communities need more contributors writing in their native languages.
• Bangla was an early adopter of Unicode, but Indic languages faced a lack of tools and slow technology adoption.
• Wikimedians stand silently with banners at public places such as book fairs on 21 February, inviting people to contribute to Bangla Wikipedia; this began in 2007 and reached China in 2019.
• He calls for more collaboration between South Asian languages and respect for other people's languages.

Chapters

1. 0:00Introduction of the speaker and session
2. 1:07Origins of International Mother Language Day
3. 2:43Language movement and what language means
4. 5:44Love for language and its meaning
5. 7:07Digital era challenges and Bangla Unicode adoption
6. 10:26Youth, action and engaging contributors
7. 13:05Ekushay Wikigathering and silent banners
8. 17:57Spread to China and closing call for collaboration

Full transcript

0:00Many people, many communities, I can speak on behalf of Bangla community and the Bengali community really likes it. Maybe, hopefully, we can really go forward with this in the future. Thank you very much, Amit. Thank you very much, Pao and Nick. thank you very much amir to all and nick thanks for being with us and sharing your knowledge with us we will we are going closer towards the closing session and now uh today is international model language day so we have a session we will talk about international mother language and shabab will talk about this uh he is going to speak now before that i will quickly introduce shabab he is a wikimedian bangla wikimedian and he is also the president of wikimedia bangladesh he is going to talk about international mother language day the love for language and the soul and the sound of silence so over to you shabab for your talk

1:07Okay, thank you very much, everyone. I hope you can see my screen now. So, yes, today is the International Mother Language Day and the International Mother Language Day as a Bangladeshi is very important for us and it's very emotional for us. So this session will not be very technical. It will be very lighthearted and just have some fun. okay so who am i i'm the native speaker of an indian language that is called bangla also it is referred as bengali and in british english uh so but we call it bangla i have i'm a wikimedian and i've been i have been on wikimedian since 2010 i'm one of the founding members of wikimedia bangladesh chapter and i'm the chief chair leader of wmbd also known as the president So International Mother Language Day, it was first announced by UNESCO and on the 17th November 1999 and formally recognized by the UN by the year 2002.

2:10And on the 7th, 2007 it becomes the part of the bigger UN initiative to promote and to promote and preservation and protection of all languages used by the people of the world. Okay. So this year, the International Mother Language Day 2021, the theme for this year is fostering multilingualism for inclusion in education and society. And Wikipedia is doing very good on that. And we have been contributing to that course quite a few years now.

2:43even if you are following the language track that that we have been uh saying for the last three four sessions uh this is all about the multilingualism and the cherishing the language of your language and other language as well in bangladesh uh international mother language day actually have a different significance because uh many of you uh most probably all of the our indian uh friends who are all already aware about the international mother language day actually the language movement day in bangladesh in the year 1952 there was a language movement that that is a we call it bengali language movement or bangla language movement and on that day uh we stood together and uh we stood very firmly against the operation and we wanted to protect our language our right to use our language as official language as well so international mother language take and maybe observing like 2002 and something like that but we have been observing the language movement

3:49day for Many, many years. And this is a very significant event in Bangladesh, the history of Bangladesh. And we are very, very much as emotional and sentimental about this thing. So on the Etherpad, I also linked few articles on Wikipedia, so you can go to the Wikipedia and learn more about that. so we have been uh actually these these questions are philosophical questions this session means to be uh be very uh kind of self-realizing or or exploring the same points that we have been working together it's nothing new to you uh it's nothing new to us uh it's just a reminder because why we are working on our own language so if we ask about the what is uh the len what is language means to us language is just not a medium of a communication or something like that this is the important part of our culture language is a part of our identity and language is a part of

4:55our emotional values and i can say it for bangladesh so the uh word bangladesh means country and bangla means the language bangla so essentially bangladesh is the country where people talks in Bangla and cherish the Bangla culture. So then the question, what is love? The burning questions of the universe. And in today's pop culture, every other year, some pop star releases a song about what is love, what is love, and many much more poets and scientists, many people have been actually exploring what is love, asking themselves what is the definition of love and things like that.

5:44so i'm not a philosopher i'm not a i'm i consider myself as a commoner as a common with a commoner with some common sense and common sense uh actually i understand the love is just not a word it's more than that so love love can be seasonal love can be eternal we have been observing so much today so many days like specialized days and for one or two days we have been uh cherishing the love and other things and then the rest of the year we do not care about that but there is another type of love that is an eternal love and that love comes from within there can be a selective love for the selective things and there can be an universal love that we can be universally inclusive with.

6:36So on my definition, this is extremely my definition. So the love for language, as I understand that, that eternal and universal love for language. So we love our language. We cherish our language. We dream in our native language. And also when nightmares come, we also, when the nightmares comes also on our native language. So native language is very close to our heart and very, very endearing to us.

7:07love is a meaningless word if not backed up with positive actions or good ones so if we just say ourselves that we love this we love that but we do not mean it or our actions doesn't match up with that uh yes this is this is something else it is not allowed again disclosure disclaimer this is entirely my own interpretation you you can disagree with that also so how about language about language when we entered the digital era uh darling struggles of maximum indic language and some small indic language also is struggling with this i had that at the digital era at the beginning of that we had lack of tools there was delayed adoption on technology people were wasn't very friendly with with devices and things like that And another thing where when we have some kind of tool, it was hard to create an awareness and motivate people to use that the technology was available. I can speak for the Bangla community or Bangla language.

8:20language. We were the lead adopter of the Unicode system, both in national level and personal level. And there was a trend, which was a very bad trend, according to us, that we started for the lack of technology, we started writing Bangla on different like an English alphabet it and things like that and and that way uh at that moment we felt we we means a few uh young people like me and you we felt that this should not be happening we should use our own language with our own alphabets and own uh our own uh literally we we need to cherish our own culture so bangla language you already know this is the second most spoken language in south asia according to the number of native speaker and this is the seventh month most spoken language in the world

9:22in the whole world So early struggle, as I was talking about, it was almost the same of the other Indian languages. There was the same issues, but somehow we actually overcome that. okay so next slide again uh love is a very very big term uh if that does not uh match up with your positive action or good work so we need to express our love through our actions through our good works and changes happens mostly by the youth and this is this is the one of the most uh this is this is the one of the most um thing that happens like like in every society and every uh every every community what what what happens that the change happens uh mostly by the youth the people

10:26who are uh who are not afraid to uh experience new things they are not afraid to fail and they I do not have a steep mindset. So youth is a big part of the Wikimedia journey, I guess. And in Bangla community also, we have lots and lots of young Wikipedians who are very promising. They're very young at age, but their writing, you cannot actually, just by reading their text, you cannot distinguish between the age of this. They're really, really mature.

11:03so for love we need some actions so what should be the actions someone's uncle's site uh real love comes with great responsibilities uh well someone's ankles must be someone's ankles so yeah the real love for language that really comes with great responsibilities and definitely what we need we need more contributors in our wiki projects and i believe this is uh truth for every community because there are lots and lots of work uh yet to be done uh there we need to uh encourage people more to more uh more and more to come to the uh wikimedia movement and contribute and contribute within their languages uh and uh contribute uh to to the some of the knowledge and make the knowledge accessible, not only on a different language, but also accessible to specific specifically on their native languages.

12:05So, ways of engaging more contributors. These are very, very, I mean, copybook things. We need to do awareness. We all know that. We need to do more trainings. Definitely, definitely, and definitely, we need to motivate people over and over again. So, these are really things. so in bangla community we also have been doing some some awareness work we have been doing our trainings and motivations and sometimes for for real cause and sometimes uh for real constraints and limitations and sometimes uh for for the sake of innovation we innovate a lot of things and and we tried a lot of other tactics and things like that uh to just to motivate people because after the awareness and training part we have been seeing a drop on active wikipedians in bangla wikipedia very frequently so we also do some motivation works on on our country so

13:05my experience actually based on bangla community that's why bangla is coming over and over again so in bangla community we have been doing some innovative things those who have been joining on the international conferences might also already know about this because this is one of the traditional programs that in Bangladesh, Wikimedia Bangladesh 2, that is called Ekushay Wikigathering. So, the Ekushe means 21st, and Ekushe means 21st in Bangla. And on, as I was saying, that International Mother Language Day, actually, the Language Movement Day, the National Language Movement Day in Bangladesh, and we have been, there is two part. One part, we mourn about our martyrs, and that other part, we actually celebrate the language and celebrate the freedom of speech.

14:03and celebrate that uh and express our love to that so usually what happens people actually goes outside and there is a kind of a festive mode uh during this day uh in in in our country so we started doing some wiki gatherings uh on public places so it started from uh 2007 and it started with only one city and then spread to many many cities and even uh on 2019 it even happened in china so what is wiki echo wiki gathering this is an yearly awareness program that we do and on the 21st february each year uh the wikimedians gather in public places they hold a banner on their hand and you stand there in silence And the banner says come contribute to Bangla Wikipedia. So sounds very weird, right? Why on public place people will be standing with banner and saying nothing to anyone, not preaching, not explaining people what is Bangla, what Bangla Wikipedia is. So what's the point of this awareness program?

15:18so you're right uh if we we if uh it was a vocal event uh there was a certain type of people who will be listen to us and then forget us uh completely because they will think uh most of the time they think that we are trying to sell something to them but we found that sometimes silence can be more powerful than sound and this is the result so this is the picture of wiki gathering and in this weekly gathering uh this is the uh we have a book fair that happens every year on the month of uh february and this is a very big event in bangladesh and in before before uh in front of wiki uh i mean a book fair we stand there and we preach people uh we just stand there we do not preach anything we there there are some banners and all people are just uh standing in line in silence so what's the result for that one so this happens when uh when this kind of events

16:20happens. People are actually noticing and some people come and they grab a picture and they take a picture of the banner so they can go home and search about Bangalore Wikipedia and they find that there is something called Bangalore Wikipedia where you can also get the knowledge and you can also contribute to the sum of the knowledge. and we have been this program have been very successful here uh in terms of having long-term wikipedians because uh they're in bungalow community there are there are incidents that some people got engaged with that so much that they became some kind of international internationally recognized wikipedians at some point of time so this program is very very very uh special to us so here again we are standing there and you can see every uh kind of people

17:25from different age different uh different background uh there we just stand there silently And that silence has a louder voice than anything. So this happened, so this became very viral and very popular among the Bahala community. Okay, what is happening? I can hear some background noise.

17:57Thank you. uh just a second i think there is some technical difficulties around that please go on we have started out okay uh so what happened in 2019 uh there was some exchange student uh in in the chakra university uh in china in hoonan china and they actually uh they got very inspired and they want to be inclusive with our our programs and things like that so so they started there their campaign on on 21st of uh february there so this happened on china also though it's it looks like uh the chinese people are not uh very uh how they can understand bangla they do not but they are also wikipedians and they are actually uh chinese wikipedians so Yeah, so that kind of solidarity actually motivates us very, very well.

19:03So, interesting, right? You can also join us and try it next year, maybe when the pandemic is over. And yes, we can together celebrate the International Mother Language Day together. and definitely south in south asia indic language can actually need some collaboration so we need to increase the inner collaboration between the language in south asia and also universal love for own languages that means uh love your language and also allow others language love to have your rights and also you need to protect other people's life and facilitate them if you were a in a position where you can facilitate others we should be doing that and help others to grow as well so that ends my keynote speech i hope um if you uh i i hope that

20:04you followed along well and if you get some inspiration from this it's all your credit and it if it bores you that the complete failure is mine i'm sorry for that

Source and licence

Recording: File:Closing keynote speech International Mother Language Day.webm by Jayanta (CIS-A2K) (2021-02-20), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 4.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.