A special debate devoted to the Polish langauge, under the title "Language in the pandemic", has been held at the Presidential Palace in Warsaw, led by Poland's First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda. The discussions, with the participation of journalists and language experts, focused on the changes in Polish language over the past year. The First Lady pointed to the appearance of new words, used to describe the situation with the epidemic, words,which have already become part of everyday spoken language.
As part of many campaigns underlining the importance of the mother language, a programme has been initiated by the Polish National Culture Center. It's aim is to help promote the Polish language and this year 29 culture insitutions across Poland are to receive funds from the National Culture Center to finance their initiatives, devoted to Polish language, including workshops, online games for children, also courses and lectures on literature and the history of Polish language as well as radio and television broadcasts.
The campaign popularising Polish among Poles was initiated in 2012, and aims to raise language awareness and focuses on the importance of using correct, grammatical Polish in everyday communication . On Sunday the National Culture Center invites to visit its online pages for a new series of vlogs by Mateusz Adamczyk, a populariser of the Polish language on the Web, in which he presents different variations of Polish language- the slang, dialects, but also the academic and scientific variations, as well as the language of politics.
The “Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger” prepared by UNESCO and intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world’s linguistic diversity, features some three thousand languages. Eight different languages have been defined as being spoken in Poland : Kashubian, Belarusian, Yiddish, Rusyn, Roma, Polesian microlanguage , Germanic and Slovincian.
Polish language is among the 25 most popular languages in the world. It is reportedly spoken by over 45 million people , of which 38 million live in Poland.
International Mother Language Day was first proposed by UNESCO in November 1999.
UNESCO chose 21 February as suitable date, recalling demonstrations in Pakistan on that day in 1952, when Pakistani police shot students protesting for the use of Bangla (Bengali).
International Mother Language Day was formally recognised by the UN in 2008.
This year’s theme of the Day is “ Fostering multilingualism for inclusion and society.”
Source PAP