Just how many languages are there in the world? The figures vary: According to the German Economic Institute, there are currently 7,186 native languages worldwide. The world cultural organization UNESCO puts that figure at just over 6,000 languages.

What is undisputed is that the diversity of native languages is under threat. Researchers say that every two weeks, another mother tongue falls silent. To counteract this trend, International Mother Language Day was launched more than 25 years ago.

What is a mother tongue?

"Russian, of course," answered this author's 16-year-old son when asked what his mother tongue was. Born in Cologne, he's spent only a few months of his life in Russia. His friends are German speakers, and he speaks German — even the distinctive Cologne dialect of it — at least as well as he speaks Russian. The teenager isn't keen on reading books in Russian (or in German, for that matter). But he replied, "You speak Russian, don't you, Mom? So my mother tongue is Russian!"

The Collins Dictionary defines mother tongue as "the language that you learn from your parents when you are a baby."

So not a language learned at school or as an adult. It's often mothers who teach their children their first words, which is why so many cultures refer to a first language as a "mother language." But that's not the case everywhere: In Ukrainian or Russian, for example, it's called "ridna mova" or "rodnoj jazyk" — the "innate" language, or the language of relatives or family.

German uses the word "Muttersprache," which means "mother language" or "mother tongue." But that word has only been used in German since the early 16th century. It was a translation of the Latin "materna lingua" and initially referred to the colloquial language as opposed to Latin, the academic and liturgical language. Latin, the "lingua patria," or "father language," was primarily reserved for men in the Middle Ages, while women usually received no schooling and stuck to their mother tongue, explains German scholar Claus Ahlzweig in the foreword to his book "Muttersprache — Vaterland: Die deutsche Nation und ihre Sprache" (Mother tongue — fatherland: the German nation and its language).

Fatherland — the country of the mother tongue?

Similarly, the German word "Vaterland" (fatherland) is a translation of the Latin "patria." Attempts by German poets and philosophers, especially Johann Gottfried Herder, to introduce the term "Mutterland" (motherland) as an analogue to "mother tongue" did not catch on. Today, the word is only used in German to refer to countries as the home of something, as when England is described as the "motherland of soccer."

Yet there is a close connection between homeland and mother tongue. In many languages, such as Slavic and some African languages, "homeland" is feminine and does not mean "land of the fathers," but rather "land of the mothers" or "land of the people."                                                                                  

And even in this age of global migration, it is often our mother language that shapes our identity and sense of home. For example, the Russian poet Maria Stepanova, who lives in Berlin, speaks of "a substitute home in the Russian language." Afghan poet Shafiqa Khpalwak, who fled from the Taliban, also describes Pashto, her mother tongue and the language she writes in, as "her true home."

German: Language of poets and thinkers not in danger

"A language dies out when the number of people who speak it is too small, and parents can no longer pass it on to the next generation," language researcher Aria Adli said in a 2019 DW interview. "It is worse when the language doesn't play a role in institutions, either."

That is precisely the threat that more than 2,600 languages are currently facing.

The interactive UNESCO World Atlas of Languages allows users to search these languages by region and degree of endangerment. For example, fewer and fewer people in Germany speak Bavarian, Alemannic, East Franconian, Rhine Franconian, Moselle Franconian, Lower Saxon, Limburg-Ripuarian, Sorbian or Yiddish. North Frisian and Sater Frisian as well as Jutlandic and the Romani spoken by Sinti and Roma are also considered to be under serious threat.

However, there is less need to worry about German: according to the Federal Statistics Office in Wiesbaden, some 77% of the population speaks only German at home. A further 17 percent use at least one other language in addition to German within the family — most frequently Turkish, followed by Ukrainian, Russian and Arabic. And only six percent of people living in Germany communicate exclusively in a language other than German at home.

Multilingualism as an asset

Researchers, including Cologne-based linguist Aria Adli, consider multilingualism to be above all a resource for the enrichment and advancement of culture, as well as a key to respect and understanding.

"Language changes all the time, that's natural," Adli told DW. "For the past few generations, English has had that prestige, also thanks to the internet, movies and pop music. Before that, the French language had prestige in German-speaking countries for a long time. Such fads are mirrored in the way we speak, it's natural."

Date of February 21 not coincidental

But why is the diversity of human languages celebrated on February 21? The date was not chosen at random. It is a reminder that in 1952, the Pakistani government decided to introduce Urdu as the country's sole official language — even though Urdu was the mother tongue for only a tiny minority of just under three percent of the population.

People, especially those whose first language was Bengali, took to the streets in protest. There was a police crackdown that resulted in injuries and even deaths in Dhaka on February 21, 1952. In 1971, what had been East Pakistan became the newly-founded state of Bangladesh, and Bengali was established as the official language. In 1999, Bangladesh proposed that the United Nations declare February 21 to be International Mother Language Day.

The application was approved by UNESCO, and now each year on this day, the whole world remembers that a mother tongue is a valuable asset that creates identity, and one that must be fought for.

This article was originally written in German.

Correction: The Bangladesh Language Movement protests unfolded in February 1952, and not in 1957 as previously stated in this article. We apologize for the error.