International Mother Language Day

• 24 Feb 2026

For Prelims: International Mother Language Day, UNESCO, ,National Education Policy (NEP) 2020, DIKSHA, PM eVIDYA, Article 29, Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities, Indian Sign Language (ISL).                      

For Mains: Key facts regarding the International Mother Language Day, key findings of the UNESCO SoER 2025 Report, need of mother tongue based education, key challenges in implementing MTB-MLE and way forward.

Source: TH

Why in News?

As the world observes International Mother Language Day on 21st February, UNESCO’s 7th 'State of the Education Report for India 2025', titled Bhasha Matters: Mother Tongue and Multilingual Education, reframes linguistic diversity as a cornerstone of quality learning. 

Summary

• The UNESCO SoER 2025 highlights that while NEP 2020 strongly endorses mother-tongue-based education, a significant gap between policy and classroom practice exists.
• A major learning crisis persists as 44% of children face a language mismatch at school, underscoring the need for robust MTB-MLE implementation.
• The report calls for urgent action, including teacher training, leveraging digital infrastructure like DIKSHA, and establishing a National Mission for MTB-MLE.

International Mother Language Day

• About: The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) declared 21st February as International Mother Language Day in 1999, celebrating it globally since 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
  • The theme for International Mother Language Day 2026 is "Youth Voices on Multilingual Education."
• Historical Origin: The day commemorates the sacrifices made during the Bangla Language Movement in Dhaka (then East Pakistan) on 21st February 1952, where students were killed while advocating for the recognition of their mother language, Bangla.
• Objective: The primary aim is to protect linguistic heritage, cultural diversity, and intellectual traditions worldwide.
• Crisis of Language Loss: The UN estimates that a language disappears every two weeks, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. This loss is exacerbated by globalization and the pursuit of foreign languages for economic opportunities.

What is the UNESCO SoER 2025 Report for India?

About

• It is an annual flagship publication by the UNESCO Regional Office for South Asia, offering evidence-based analysis of key themes in India's education landscape while aligning with SDG 4 (quality education) and UNESCO's inclusive learning commitments. 
• The report urgently calls for strengthening Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) and provides a comprehensive roadmap to make inclusive education a national priority.

Core Focus

• Access, Inclusion, and Equity: Ensuring all learners, particularly tribal children, girls, and those with disabilities, can participate in school through languages they understand.
• Contextual and Lifelong Learning: Embedding local languages and cultural knowledge across all stages of education, from school to teacher training.
• Appreciation of Linguistic Diversity: Recognizing children's full linguistic repertoires as assets and promoting an understanding of India's diversity.
• Skills for Sustainable Futures: Using multilingual learning to build cognitive flexibility and stronger foundations for learning additional languages, including English.
• Institutionalization: Strengthening policies, teacher education, and digital ecosystems to support sustainable MTB-MLE.

Key Findings

• Policy Alignment: Mother-tongue-based multilingual education is steadily moving from the margins to the centre of India’s education reforms. It is now increasingly recognized as critical to achieving the goals of the National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 and global commitments like the International Decade of Indigenous Languages (2022–2032).
  • They endorse mother-tongue-based instruction, multilingual pedagogy, and culturally responsive learning.
• State-Level Planning is Underway: Systematic language mapping—essential for decisions on the medium of instruction, teacher deployment, and material development—is expanding across the country but is not yet a universal practice.
• Vibrant Community-Led Practices: The report highlights compelling examples of schools and communities co-creating learning materials rooted in local knowledge and oral traditions in languages such as Saora, Kui, Gondi, Santali, Khasi, and Mizo. These demonstrate the educational value of Indigenous knowledge systems, though they remain localized.
• Promising Ground Realities: It highlights successful models already at work in India:
  • Odisha’s Tribal Programme: A long-standing Multilingual Education (MLE) programme covering 21 tribal languages across 17 districts, supporting nearly 90,000 children.
  • Digital Innovation: The use of DIKSHA-enabled multilingual resources in Telangana and national initiatives like PM eVIDYA and AI4Bharat show how technology can create local-language content and document endangered languages.
• Institutional Collaboration is Growing: Several promising initiatives demonstrate the value of collaboration between ministries, SCERTs, Tribal Research Institutes (TRIs), NGOs, and technology partners. This coordination is creating space for more contextually grounded pedagogy.

Why is Mother-Tongue-Based Education Critical for India?

• Learning Crisis: A 2022 NCERT report reveals a startling statistic. Nearly 44% of children in India enter school speaking a language that is different from the medium of instruction.
• Pedagogical and Cognitive Benefits: Mother tongue instruction enables deeper comprehension by reducing cognitive load, leading to stronger foundational literacy, enhanced critical thinking, and improved academic performance, unlike early non-native immersion which causes lower outcomes.
• Cultural Preservation: Language is the vehicle for indigenous and traditional knowledge. Mother-tongue education builds self-esteem by validating a child's identity and counters "language death" among endangered linguistic communities.
• Social Equity: It acts as a great equalizer by breaking the "English Elite" monopoly. For marginalized groups like tribal (Adivasi) communities, it prevents the "triple disadvantage" that leads to high dropout rates.
• NEP 2020 Alignment: The policy mandates instruction in the home language until at least Grade 5, preferably till Grade 8, marking a shift from the colonial-era mindset.

Constitutional Framework for Language and Linguistic Landscape of India

Constitutional Framework

• Article 29: Article 29 grants all citizens the right to conserve their language, script, or culture, and prohibits discrimination against any citizen on grounds of language.
• Article 120: Provides for the conduct of parliamentary business in Hindi or English, but grants members the right to express themselves in their mother tongue if they cannot adequately express themselves in Hindi or English.
• Part XVII (Articles 343-351): Articles 343-351 deal exclusively with official languages at the union and state levels.
  • Article 350A: It places an obligation on every State and local authority to provide adequate facilities for instruction in the mother-tongue at the primary stage of education to children from linguistic minority groups.
  • Article 350B: Provides for the appointment of a Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities by the President. This officer investigates matters related to safeguards for linguistic minorities and reports to the President, who then places these reports before Parliament and the concerned state governments.
• Eighth Schedule: Recognizes 22 official languages, including Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Kashmiri. Languages added later include Sindhi (by 21st Amendment Act, 1967), Konkani, Manipuri, and Nepali (by 71st Amendment Act, 1992), and Bodo, Dogri, Maithili, and Santhali (by 92nd Amendment Act, 2003).

Linguistic Landscape

• Unparalleled diversity: Home to 1,369 mother tongues, including 121 languages spoken by over 10,000 people, with a Linguistic Diversity Index of 0.914, one of the highest in the world.
• Language families: Languages belong to four major families i.e., Indo-Aryan (78% of speakers), Dravidian (20%), Austro-Asiatic (1.2%), and Tibeto-Burman (0.8%).
• Language endangerment: Nearly 200 languages are vulnerable or endangered, disproportionately affecting Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic languages.
• Double Divide: A rigid hierarchy exists where English is at the top, followed by dominant regional languages, while Indigenous and tribal languages are at the bottom, largely excluded from education, governance, and digital spaces.

What are the Key Challenges in Implementing MTB-MLE in India?

• Language Mismatch: Young learners, particularly in tribal areas, often begin school in a language they do not speak at home, hampering early participation and comprehension.
• Lack of Materials: There is limited availability of textbooks and learning materials in children's own languages, especially where scripts are still developing.
• Teacher Preparedness: Many teachers persist with monolingual practices as multilingual pedagogy, translanguaging, and transknowledging remain inconsistently embedded in pre-service and in-service programmes, leaving educators underprepared for multilingual lesson design.
• Premature Transition: An early switch to regional or global languages often disrupts learning before a strong foundation in the mother tongue is established.
• Digital Exclusion: Tribal and minoritized languages are under-represented on digital platforms. Accessibility features are inconsistent, and connectivity gaps persist in remote regions.
• Fragmented Efforts: Institutional responsibilities are often fragmented, and there is a lack of language-disaggregated data to support coordinated planning.

What are the Key Recommendations of the UNESCO SoER 2025 Report?

• Establish a National Mission: Create a high-level National Mission for MTB-MLE to strengthen institutional coordination, provide strategic leadership, and oversee the sustainable implementation of these recommendations across the country.
• Invest in Inclusive Language Technologies: Bridge the digital divide by investing in tools for lesser-known languages, improving accessibility features (like Indian Sign Language (ISL) and Braille), and ensuring connectivity reaches remote regions.
• Ensure Sustainable and Equitable Financing: Guarantee long-term, predictable, and targeted financing for all aspects of MTB-MLE, including teacher preparation, material development, and digital inclusion.
• Strengthen Teacher Systems: Revamp teacher recruitment, deployment, and professional standards to prioritize and assess multilingual competence.
  • Utilize platforms like DIKSHA to create and disseminate inclusive, multilingual teacher support resources and learning materials.
• Institutionalize Community Participation: Create formal mechanisms to systematically integrate Indigenous knowledge, oral traditions, and community participation into school curricula and practice.

Conclusion

India’s linguistic diversity is its strength, yet a learning crisis persists due to a language mismatch in schools. The UNESCO report underscores that realizing NEP 2020's vision requires moving beyond policy to action. By investing in teacher training, digital inclusion, and community participation, MTB-MLE can bridge the gap and ensure equitable learning.

Drishti Mains Question:

Q. Discuss the challenges in implementing Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) in India. Suggest measures to overcome them

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is the significance of International Mother Language Day?

Observed on 21st February, it was declared by UNESCO in 1999 to promote linguistic diversity and multilingualism, commemorating the 1952 Bangla Language Movement in Dhaka.

2. What is the core focus of UNESCO’s State of the Education Report (SoER) 2025 for India?

The 2025 report, Bhasha Matters, advocates institutionalising Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) to ensure access, equity, inclusion, and sustainable learning outcomes.

3. Why is Mother-Tongue-Based Multilingual Education (MTB-MLE) critical in India?

As per NCERT (2022), nearly 44% of children enter school in a language different from the medium of instruction, leading to learning gaps, weak FLN, and higher dropout risks.

4. Which constitutional provisions safeguard linguistic rights in India?

Key provisions include Article 29 (cultural rights), Article 350A (mother-tongue instruction at primary level), Article 350B (Special Officer for Linguistic Minorities), and the Eighth Schedule (22 languages).

UPSC Civil Services Examination, Previous Year Questions (PYQs) 

Prelims

Q. Consider the following statements: (2021)

1. 21st February is declared to be the International Mother Language Day by UNICEF. 
2. The demand that Bangla has to be one of the national languages was raised in the Constituent Assembly of Pakistan. 

Which of the above statements is/are correct? 

(a) 1 only 

(b) 2 only 

(c) Both 1 and 2 

(d) Neither 1 nor 2 

Ans: (b)

Q. With reference to India, the terms ‘HaIbi, Ho and Kui’ pertain to (2021)

(a) dance forms of Northwest India 

(b) musical instruments 

(c) pre-historic cave paintings 

(d) tribal languages 

Ans: (d)

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Mains

Q. National Education Policy 2020 is in conformity with the Sustainable Development Goal-4 (2030). It intends to restructure and reorient the education system in India. Critically examine the statement. (2020)

Q. Are we losing our local identity for the global identity? Discuss. (2019)