A long-lasting campaign against the worldwide cultural desertification.

A long-lasting campaign against the worldwide cultural desertification

The “International Day of Mother Tongue”, organised by UNESCO in 1999, is celebrated every years on the 21th February in order to promote the recognition and the use of the mother tongues, particularly the minority languages.
A lot of mother tongues are disappearing because of the lack of local recognition and the globalization.
Both these elements are producing a real cultural disaster; according to some statistics, a lot of languages (from 50% to 90%) will probably disappear by the end of this century.
The International Day of Mother Tongue will turn into the “Day of the Memory”, if nobody makes a decision against the languages’ death.
UNESCO has published the “Linguistic Atlas of Disappearing Languages” to reveal and noise about the seriousness of this phenomenon. In Italy, the Esperanto Radical Association (ERA) attended to the translation of this Atlas and currently is dealing with a lot of initiatives supporting the long-lasting campaign of sponsorship of the disappearing languages.
“SAVE A LANGUAGE, MEET A PEOPLE”: this is the slogan of the campaign of this year.
We all need a deeper consciousness of this situation, the time of words and theories is over, it is time to act!
Social and cultural workers drew up some documents by which they make known how many languages have already disappeared and how many languages are nowadays in danger.This is an irreparable damage for the worldwide community; we all should become a sort of “doctors without frontiers” who take care of languages.
ERA’s initiatives would be represented a first important step on this direction to evidence that ineluctability and resignation are not useful in order to a solution.
The goals of this campaign are making people aware of the problem. Volunteers can cooperate to spread of notion of “cultural biodiversity”, by using Internet, CD, DVD, radio-tv programs and to convince people to “adopt” a language in danger.
Institutions can contribute to this campaign too adopting a language and dealing with some initiatives in the country where this language is endangered.According some contacts and direct acquirements, there are 6 languages whose status is danger.