Someone once wrote that language "is not just words; it is an embodiment of a peoples culture and history". Another called it "the body of thought". Our Mother tongue is our "primary" or "first" language. It is the language in which we think, i.e. that which gives expression to our culture. If you are able to suppress the language of a person’s thoughts, you could alienate him from his roots and make him into a cultural zombie receptive to all manner of vagrant ideas.
Yet, UNESCO estimates that about 50% of the worlds estimated 6000 indigenous languages would be extinct by the turn of the century. Meaning that the language in which you were given a name; the one with which your mother spoke to you in your cradle, sang you to sleep told you nighttime stories and tutored you in abiding cultural (and religious) values may be dead and unspoken by the year 2100. If you think this is far-fetched, consider that 96% of the worlds languages are spoken by a mere 4% of its population; that 80% of African languages have no orthography by which they might be preserved; that 90% of the worlds languages are not represented on the Internet (which has come to be the prime medium for the exchange of information and learning); and that an average of one language disappears every two weeks (UNESCO statistics).
To bring home the reality, how many parents do you know (outside the truly rural areas) who speak their native language to their children? Indeed, many so-called educated parents are proud that their children cannot speak in what is derogatorily termed the vernacular. If your children cannot speak the vernacular with which you were brought up, who will you express the culture of your fathers to your grandchildren? Much of this mess is caused by the urban myth that children would perform better in school if they use English (the schools medium of instruction) at home. There are two fallacies to this myth, and both have since been shattered by several respectable studies. In the first place, foreign languages are not ideal for teaching children.
A child taught in a foreign language whilst deliberately suppressing his primary language is immediately incapacitated by the vocabulary of the imposed language. He first has to learn new words to express his thoughts, then he has to translate those thoughts to the second language. Which is why "most experts agree that the mother tongue should be used as a medium of instruction during the childs early years. During this important and impressionable time, mother tongue instruction enhances a childs confidence. The child is able to assimilate knowledge through his/her own language and cultural references and this makes knowledge transfer more efficient" (quoting UNESCO, again). In our case, Arabic, the language of divine communication is a natural second language as effective as the mother tongue.
You may recall that with the language comes the baggage (and the garbage). The child is made to feel inferior, and the preferred culture is that of the borrowed language. When we lament the slide in moral and cultural values do we not realize that this is because we have broken their connection to the values with which we were brought up, and that our children are simply becoming strangers in the land of their birth? Do we see that we cannot seem to truly communicate with them, or to teach them the rich idioms, proverbs and adages which convey the essence of our cultural being? We are in fact breeding cultural zombies who are pliable to every hip seeming foreign fad. It’s so bad now that four year olds now use four-letter words - even to the hearing of their parents! It is worse in the case of the English language with which the media daily bombards us with all manner of indoctrination the solution? Let’s reclaim our children’s minds, and we can start by talking to them in the language they should best understand - the language of their thoughts.
This article was culled from the publications of Deen Communication Limited