February 21 - International Mother Language Day

Let's not forget to speak our mother language! Thanks to it, we are an independent nation with our own different worldview and mentality.

Mother Language Day is an initiative of the 30th General Conference of UNESCO. The resolution was taken in November 1999. This day is dedicated to five and a half thousand languages of the world! This is how UNESCO decided to protect linguistic identity every year.

State institutions of Belarus have been celebrating Mother Language Day since 2009.

The Belarusian language has three alphabets. The most common one, Cyrillic, has existed since the 14th century. There is also the Latin alphabet and even the Belarusian language in Arabic script! This is how the Tatars, who settled in Belarus in their time, wrote it.

Songs can be composed endlessly in Belarusian. The dictionary is one of the richest in the world! If you count the lines from the colloquialisms of people in different regions, you will get a 'savings box' of two million words. The literary Belarusian language amounts up to 500 thousand words.

Almost a thousand Belarusians will take part in the Republican Dictation. Even online residents of Japan, Canada, and America shall join the event.