21 Şubat Dünya Anadil Günü Tüm Dillere Özgürlük Günü Olsun!
21ê Sibatê Roja Zimanê Zikmakî ya Cihanê Li Hemû Zimanan Pîroz Be!
Freedom to All Languages: International Mother Language Day 21 February
United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) approved 21 February as the day to celebrate International Mother Language Day at the 1999 UNESCO General Conference and the day has been observed throughout the world since 2000 to support cultural and linguistic diversity. Languages used by communities for all their relations and activities enabling them to communicate with one another at ethnic and national levels are the mother languages of these communities. Within a wider scope, the language that a person learns through her family, social circle and society without being exposed to any formal education is defined as her mother language. Each year February 21 is observed through various activities worldwide in order to support international consensus, cultural and linguistic diversity focusing on the significance of mother languages.
18 languages face extinction in Turkey. Although a number of languages are defined as mother languages in Turkey, the medium of education in languages other than Turkish are offered as electives beginning with fifth grade. Moreover, a language class can be opened up only on the condition that more than 10 students take it as an elective. The training of educators teaching these classes and the adequacy of teaching material have yet to become sufficient.
One of the most fundamental tools for progress in the resolution of the “Kurdish issue,” which proves to be one of the most pressing problems in our country that await immediate solution, and in the achievement of social peace is no doubt based on the fact that each and every child gets the opportunity to freely realize herself with the language of the community she feels she belongs. International universal documents set forth that states bear the liability to provide opportunities for each child to be able to freely learn the language she communicates with others without having to be subjected to any kind of education beginning with the day she is born and to get involved in all social processes with her mother language.
The Educational Vision 2023 document, which has often been modified and recently become a current issue again, does not incorporate any projection regarding the inclusion of all children into educational processes with their own mother languages which is acknowledged to be the most critical pedagogical step.
The Human Rights Association demands that the right to access to education in one’s mother language, which is among the human rights of the child, should be realized without delay. IHD, therefore, invites authorities to particularly remove Turkey’s reservations to articles regarding the learning of mother languages and different cultural identities in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, to which Turkey is a party; to sign the UNESCO Convention against Discrimination in Education that was adopted on 14 December 1960; and to immediately take steps to put into practice the necessity of legal judgments of the European Court of Human Rights that provide enabling access to education for different ethnic and religious communities to learn about their languages and cultural values in their own mother languages.
HUMAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION