The Importance of Mother Tongue

Mother tongue is the first language a person learns at infancy or the native language. It is possible for a person to have more than one mother tongue; this may happen in intermarriages involving bilingual persons. The principle objective of a mother tongue is communication, however, the current international trend has tended to suppress many native languages. There are many tongues in the world but the most spoken are about ten. The united nations work with only six languages. This is a trend that is endangering many mother tongues in favor of only a few. Thus it is important to make efforts to preserve the mother tongue globally just like endangered animal species are preserved to avoid more of them going extinct. 

The mother tongue is an important communication tool among all the people endowed with speech. Many mother tongues globally are increasingly getting less attention with many learners at the early stages using other tongues for instruction ( Deller & Rinvolucri, 2017). The learners advance their education using other tongues to the detriment of their mother tongues. This apparently lack of attention on the mother tongue has seen a number of native languages dying the most prominent of which is Latin. Indeed, it is estimated that half of the currently estimated 7000 languages will be extinct by the end the current century (Thomason, 2015). The sidelining of the mother tongue is visible even at the highest levels of international institutions where for instance the united nations works with only six languages namely English, French, Arabic, Chinese, Russian and Spanish. The loss of native languages can be addressed by several measures one of which is to make sure that local languages are used as tools of instructions at local levels. 

References 

Deller, S. R., & Rinvolucri, M. (2017).   Using the mother tongue: Making the most of the learner's language . Ernst Klett Sprachen GmbH. 

Thomason, S. G. (2015).   Endangered languages . Cambridge University Press