Women and children human rights activists agree on the deep bond between a woman’s right and those of the child. This connection is so tight that one cannot be clearly studied without the other. Many of the reasons and acts that destroy the rights of a child also exist in the discrimination and violence against women.
In this short piece, I intend to take a look at the mother tongue or that of the ethnic group in which a child is born and where he is socialized.
This topic of course is studied from the linguistic, psychological and sociological perspectives. But in a country such as Iran with many ethnic groups, the issue contains special sensitivity.
The specific question that I pursued was whether the issue of learning a mother tongue is just a human right or the right of the child and that of a woman. That this is a human right in general is not in doubt but if someone looks at the issue more careful one can see its impact on the rights of a child and a mother.
Language is a communicative tool, related to thought and an instrument of literary expression. It is also a social institution and all human communities recognize the mother tongue as a fundamental element that identifies and shapes the personality of the child. As a child is conceived and grows in the womb the only world s/he knows is the mother’s womb. The sounds that s/he hears coming from the outside, and later the mother’s look and the feeling of touching and being touched by the mother are the first steps in her/his contacts with the world outside the womb. The cultural and geographic environment in which the child grows turn into inseparable elements of her/his personality. Since in most human societies, and particularly in Iran, the mother is the person who takes care of the child, she is the conduit for all of these inputs for the child. In fact, in addition to learning the mother tongue, the child acquires her/his cultural, social, and environmental notions while in the arms of her/his mother. There are two specific linguistic issues that can be studied along with the subject of this article: linguistic semantics or etymology, and the meaning of thought and language. According to the science of linguistic semantics, words carry connotative meaning in addition to their denotative meaning. Denotative meaning of words is what we normally find in any language dictionary. Whereas connotative meaning is derived in the cultural, social and political context or environment in which they are presented. For example, the denotative meaning of water is that it is a liquid composed of 2 hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But its connotative meaning depends on who or where we are. Its connotative or symbolic meaning for a person in the desert will be different than for a peasant in a fertile area. Words in religions too have different meanings. In one they may convey impurity and sinfulness whereas in another they may convey loyalty. Philosophers view man as a speaking animal, but this does not mean that the human being is an animal that talks. It means that he can think. Linguists too believe that language without cognitive powers is not possible.
The purpose in presenting this connection is to show that the cultural environment in which a child lives teaches him not just the language but also the connotative meaning of its words and naturally her/his immediate bridge to the connotative meaning of words and thus world is her/his mother. When the mother tongue and the official language of country in which the people live are the same, there is no contradiction in the child’s growing environment. Problems begin when a child’s mother tongue is different from the official language around here/him. Scientists believe that by about the age of seven, a child has acquired about 70 percent of his environmental and natural knowledge that he will acquire in his entire life and he thus possesses a deep understanding of the social and cultural conditions around him. Children whose mother tongue is different from the official language around them feel that they are entering a different world when they for go to school. In fact by banning the use of the mother tongue in schools (even as a second language) a child is completely cut off from the environment in which he was born and has grown. He faces a new environment which is intangible to him. This absence of affinity with the new world doubles a child’s stress because he is cut off from his family and mother. Speaking to children in Farsi in kindergarten is an unwritten law in Iranian pre-school institutions. But as more mothers in the country come to the large cities and find jobs, they need to send their children to these very institutions where the mother tongue of the child is not spoken, or even known. In other words, this stress begins for a child even before s/he goes to school at the age of seven and begins to create a double culture for her/him. This childhood stress turns into a social problem for the child in later years and bother him as discrimination. He feels there is no place for him to belong to in this new world into which he is thrown.
As we know, our educational system unfortunately does not value the many languages around the country which as a matter of fact are recognized as rich languages of the world as much as it does English or Arabic. Therefore, non-Farsi speaking children speak and write every day in Farsi without being able to say or read a single sentence of their mother tongue. So long as the mother tongue and ethnicity of these children is not recognized, and consequently there is no systematic and scientific teaching of their languages in educational facilities and schools, ethnic languages will lack a standard method of teaching and learning. The result of this situation is that children will continue to suffer from oppression and even anger.
If we look at this issue from the perspective of a woman and a woman’s rights, non-Farsi speaking mothers will attest to three types of responses to the situation. The first belongs to mothers who are not aware of this duality and therefore raise their children in their own cultural ways and within their own social environment. These mothers transfer the cultural elements surrounding them to their children as they are. They therefore enter the new world along with the children thus witnessing the stresses of their children and the anger that grows within them. These women usually believe that they have failed in their upbringing and have given them the wrong language thus putting them at social risk. In non-Farsi speaking environments, the accent that such children have is frowned upon and belittled. They view their children’s feelings of inferiority to be their own unforgivable sin.
The second group is made up of mothers are those who have themselves experienced this separation by going to a school or university in an environment that is different from their mother tongue. They themselves are among the angry people. These mothers try to raise their children according to the new world in which the children will find themselves in when they grow up. They therefore engage in their own created alienation which results in a sad distance between them and their children. The difference in the language of the two generations results in misunderstanding between them.
The third group of mothers is those that realize the importance of the mother tongue and therefore try to raise their children in the very environment that belongs to the children. These mothers face a different problem which is that they lack the knowledge to teach their mother tongue to the children in a scientific and systematic manner. In addition, they face the burden of convincing such children that the value of their mother tongue is as important as the official language that they know or are learning. But we know that the credibility of and value of a language does not rest in simply speaking it but must be declared to be so by official authorities of the country.
These issues exist in the multi-ethnic country of Iran. In many countries ethnic and local languages are officially recognized and the right to read and write in a person’s mother tongue is accepted and is part of their education. This is the right of these children. We should not forget that disregarding or not recognizing local languages and equalizing the various cultures generates hatred. Unfortunately while we have been hearing slogans about the multiplicity of cultures in Iran, nothing practical or effective has been done to officially recognize these languages and cultures.
Nafiseh Mohammadpoor
Source: Roozonline