Have you ever heard Tagalog, a language spoken by the ethnic Tagalog people making up a quarter of the population of the Philippines? “Ipinagmamalaki ko na Tagalog ang aking sariling wika,” says our colleague Venus, Middle Office Specialist at MET International. This means “I am proud to have Tagalog as my mother tongue”.
At MET Group, where our employees already represent close to 60 nationalities, we consider linguistic and cultural diversity as one of our greatest assets – this is why today we celebrate the International Mother Language Day. All over the world, languages transmit traditional knowledge and cultural heritage.
“Ek is trots daarop dat Afrikaans my moeder taal is,” says another colleague, Adam, Cyber Security Analyst at MET. He is proud to speak Afrikaans, which evolved from the language spoken by the Dutch settlers in South Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries.
“Би Монгол эх хэлээрээ бахархдаг,” this is our colleague Gegeenbileg, a Middle Office Intern, being proud of her Mongolian mother tongue. Nowadays the Cyrillic alphabet is used, although students still learn the traditional Mongolian writing at school – thus seeking to further preserve their linguistic diversity.
Every two weeks a language disappears, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage. UNESCO estimates that there are 8,324 languages, spoken or signed. Out of these, around 7,000 languages are still in use. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given a place in the global education systems, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.