On February 21, Ukraine and the world celebrate the International Mother Language Day. The holiday was established in 2000 at the initiative of UNESCO to show that the uniqueness of language distinguishes one nation from another on planet Earth. The date was not chosen by chance. On February 21, 1952, an armed conflict over language took place in Bangladesh. Then, 4 students were killed. A mother tongue is a carrier of knowledge and values passed down from generation to generation as an intangible cultural heritage. Unfortunately, about 43% of languages today are on the verge of extinction. And 40% of people do not have the opportunity to receive education in their native language.
An interesting fact: there are about 7,000 languages in the world, but all of them are united by scientists into a relatively small number of language families. The most widespread today are Indo-European languages, native to almost half the world’s population. It is this group of languages that includes Ukrainian.
By the way, Ukrainian is one of the thirty most widely spoken languages globally, with about 45 million Ukrainian speakers. In total, the Ukrainian language has about 256 thousand words. Regarding vocabulary, the Ukrainian language is most closely related to Belarusian, with 84% of everyday vocabulary and 70% of Polish and Serbian.
