Silver Jubilee Celebration of International Mother Language Day 2025 - UNESCO
The International Mother Language Day, initiated by Bangladesh in 1999, is dedicated to preserving language diversity and promoting the use of mother-languages in education.
Today, we live in a highly multilingual world, with more than 7,000 spoken or signed languages. As a linguist and former professor, I’ve spent much of my life working in this field —and the simplest way to summarize centuries of research in linguistics is the following:
Language is the bridge between the brain and society
It is both a unique human faculty and a social construct.
Let’s start with a question: What do these three things have in common?
- “Women”
- “Fire”
- “Dangerous things”
Most of us would say—nothing. But in Dyirbal [dʒɜːrbəl], an Indigenous Australian language, these words belong to the same linguistic category. Linguist George Lakoff explored this in his book Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. He argued that languages don’t just label the world. They reflect—and possibly structure—knowledge in different ways. This insight helps us understand why multilingualism is so powerful.
For centuries, linguists have explored fundamental questions about what language is and how it functions in human society.
Questions like: How does language create meaning? Does it shape the way we think? Or does it simply reflect the world around us? Lakoff gives us part of the answer.
There are three other key perspectives that have shaped modern linguistics—and my own thinking about multilingualism.
Ferdinand de Saussure saw language as a system of signs. Words don’t have fixed meanings—they exist only in relation to other words. Noam Chomsky introduced the idea of universal grammar. He argued that humans are born with an innate ability to learn language and that all languages follow common patterns. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf showed how language and culture are deeply connected.