Finally, Wednesday is International Mother Language Day, and education, science and culture agency UNESCO is calling on all countries to pursue a policy of multilingual education. 

That’s because it’s key to fighting the current global learning crisis, having produced positive results in the past. 

According to a recent agency study, children are more likely to start reading earlier when they are taught in their mother tongue during the earliest school years.

Lessons from Africa

Proof can be found across Africa. The continent has the world’s highest linguistic diversity, but only one in five children are taught their mother tongue.

To change that, Mozambique expanded bilingual learning to a quarter of its schools, and children are already performing around 15 per cent better in basic reading and mathematics, UNESCO said.

While people communicate in more than 6,700 languages around the world, 40 per cent of them are threatened with extinction in the long term, due to falling numbers of speakers.

Source: UN News

https://news.un.org/en/story/2024/02/1146817