Sailing between tongues

21 February is observed as International Mother Language Day, a date proclaimed by UNESCO in 1999. Since then, it has become a global occasion to celebrate linguistic diversity and to protect mother tongues from extinction in the face of globalization – an expanding force that has moved beyond the realms of markets and economics to shape culture, the arts, literature, and language itself.

According to the latest report published by UNESCO, roughly seven thousand languages are spoken across the world today, nearly half of which could disappear by the end of this century.

This sobering reality has renewed the call to cherish and defend the mother tongue. At the same time, it has brought into focus a broader cultural debate: how to reconcile attachment to one’s native language with the practical need to learn others. On one side lies the value of multilingualism, which opens doors to other cultures and enables dialogue across borders. On the other stands the desire to protect the mother tongue from linguistic displacement that might relegate it to the status of a second language.

Across the globe, many languages are now fighting for survival under the dominance of what are often called the “international languages” of our age, foremost among them English. Whilst French also still functions as the official language in more than twenty countries, a lingering legacy of colonial rule.

In recent years, ideas such as the globalization of language have become central to discussions in sociology and the humanities. The debate intensified after the COVID-19 pandemic revived the notion of a shared global language, one that could facilitate communication in times of crisis, help spread medical awareness, and support coordinated responses across borders.

Yet this debate does not stop at the role a global language might play in medicine or in helping humanity respond to pandemics, it extends to the wider implications such a development could have across all fields of life. More importantly, it raises concerns about the threat that the globalization of language may pose to the linguistic and cultural diversity that has distinguished humanity since the dawn of civilization.

Most societies today try to navigate a middle path. Families, schools, and institutions attempt to keep pace with the demands of the modern world – where mastering at least one global language is often essential – while still preserving their mother tongues.

In many households this balance is visible in everyday choices. Parents may enroll their children in foreign-language schools from an early age, believing it will broaden their future prospects. At the same time, they often insist that the language spoken at home remain the mother tongue.

The same pattern appears in professional life. Companies, government institutions, and NGOs frequently seek employees who can operate in global languages such as English, which in many fields has become a basic requirement.

As natural and widely accepted as this arrangement may seem, this dual way of engaging with language carries a quieter risk: the fragmentation of language according to its function.

Language serves more than the purpose of communication. It also has a referential function: the mother tongue should be the very language through which knowledge is produced, transmitted, and accessed. When it is excluded from education, scientific research, and professional life – reduced to little more than a medium of everyday conversation – it loses not only its vitality but also the core of its function as a language. Yet this shift rarely troubles society at large, and it is seldom discussed with the seriousness it deserves.

The discussion takes a different turn when it comes to writing in a language other than one’s own. This is not only because writing is often seen as an expression of identity, but also because it is an intimate act – one that reflects a person’s deep attachment to their mother tongue. For that reason, writing in another language can sometimes appear, at least symbolically, as a kind of betrayal of the native language.

At the beginning of the new millennium, the term exophony was revived to describe writing in a language other than one’s mother tongue. The concept was first introduced by the French sociolinguist Louis-Jean Calvet, and has in recent years entered academic debate and literary conferences as a subject of sustained discussion.

Exophony refers specifically to writing in an acquired language chosen freely by the writer, not a language imposed by conquest or linguistic suppression, nor one adopted as a result of marginalization – as happens to certain minority groups, such as the Uyghurs in China. Nor does it refer simply to writing in a language because it happens to be official in the country where one is born.

Studies of exophony explore several dimensions of the experience of writing outside the mother tongue. They examine its emotional and expressive aspects, as well as sociological questions such as cultural displacement and linguistic alienation. At the same time, they investigate the shifting dynamics of identity that emerge when a writer chooses to write through the language of the other.

Among contemporary authors who have explored this phenomenon is the Japanese writer Yoko Tawada, recipient of the Goethe Medal for her contributions to German literature. Born in Japan, Tawada completed her university studies in Russian literature before moving to Germany in the 1980s to work in publishing. There she later studied modern German literature and eventually began writing in German in 2004. Prior to that, her novels and poetry written in Japanese had been translated into German. Later, the direction reversed, and her German works began to be translated into Japanese.

In her book Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, Tawada reflects on writing in German as a language she acquired and eventually mastered. She describes the movement between languages as a voyage beyond the boundaries of a single linguistic world, an exploration that allows her to discover new expressive possibilities without severing ties to her native language.

Tawada does not deny that this kind of voyage between languages comes with its own challenges. Among them is the question of how much effort a writer must invest before being recognized as a writer in a language that is not their mother tongue. There is also the way exophonic literature is sometimes perceived – as a kind of crafted performance rather than a spontaneous act of creativity.

Yet the author rejects the idea that writing in another language inevitably produces linguistic alienation or cultural displacement. For her, the most complete form of human existence lies beyond the confines of any single language. Only there, she suggests, does creativity fully unfold. As she writes in one passage: “What occupies me is the distance between two languages more than writing in either one alone. Perhaps, after all, writing in one or the other was never my true aim. What mattered was the pleasurable sailing between them, where poetry springs from the flow of small streams in a valley between two languages.”

When it comes to the question of identity, Tawada acknowledges that language and identity do intersect. Still, she sees writing as an act independent of national identity. For that reason, she finds little meaning in the question she is asked most often – whether she considers herself a German writer or a Japanese one. Before anything else, she says, she is simply a writer, and her identity takes shape through the crossing of linguistic borders.

Any discussion of crossing linguistic borders inevitably leads to the idea of languages that themselves move across borders. Some languages have spread far beyond their original homelands, usually through historical processes such as trade, migration, and colonial expansion, and sometimes through their role as carriers of religious traditions.

Arabic offers a clear example. It is among the most widely spread languages in the world, in large part because it serves as the primary religious language for Muslims across many regions. In Somalia, Arabic long functioned as a bridge to understanding the Qur’anic scripture, and later as a bridge to the Arab world, particularly after Somalia joined the Arab League in the 1970s. Alongside Somali, the country’s mother tongue, Arabic has remained an important language.

This bilingual environment has shaped literary choices in Somalia. A generation of writers found themselves drawn to Arabic, captivated by its poetic richness and rhetorical depth preserved in vast libraries of classical literature. What began as curiosity gradually evolved into a literary commitment among many young Somali writers, some of whom adopted Arabic as a language of literary expression. At the same time, a number of Somali diplomats and academics turned to English for their writing, while Somali itself continued to serve as the principal language of Somali poetry and artistic expression.

It is worth mentioning, in this context, that Somali cultural life today is witnessing a quiet revival in translation, including self-translation. Somali authors have increasingly begun translating their own works from English and Arabic into Somali, in what resembles a reverse voyage, one that sails back toward the mother tongue rather than away from it.

In a conversation with the podcast platform Thmanyah, the Sudanese poet Mohamed Abdelbari reflects on the relationship between human beings and the mother tongue at both the individual and societal levels. He argues that the existential dimension of human life is deeply tied to language: “There is something in human existence that cannot reach its fullest possibility except through a genuine relationship with a language, especially the mother tongue.”

Abdelbari also speaks of what he considers the central dimension of language: its cognitive role. Language, in his view, is the first gateway through which human beings perceive the world. Through the mother tongue, a person acquires their most basic forms of understanding, including their awareness of self, identity, and history. To migrate from one’s native language into another, he suggests, can feel like a separation from these foundational elements. In this sense, he describes his own poetic experience as inseparable from both cultural and personal identity, not merely from linguistic technique.

His view contrasts with that of Yoko Tawada, who approaches writing largely apart from questions of identity.

From language and identity, Abdelbari moves on to the concept of civilization. He suggests that we often misunderstand the nature of civilizational development: “We are mistaken when we think civilization is synonymous with openness. There is a curious historical paradox here. At the moments when civilizations shine most brightly, contrary to what people assume, they are often moments of inward turning rather than outward gaze. Looking outward may be a path toward civilization, but it is not in itself a civilizational act”

Despite the insight in Abdelbari’s perspective, and the importance of reclaiming the mother tongue as both a personal identity and a civilizational symbol, his argument approaches language and civilization at a largely abstract level. It treats civilization as a state of intellectual self-sufficiency grounded in cultural dominance, overlooking the forms civilisation can take in multilingual settings and the new forms of knowledge that emerge from linguistic plurality.

Innovation often begins precisely at the moment when one language encounters another. From the instant a writer sails from one language into the currents of another, new possibilities appear. Entire fields, such as comparative literature and comparative linguistics, have grown from these crossings. Translation, in this sense, becomes not merely the transfer of knowledge from one “civilized” culture to another supposedly less so, but a foundational act in the making of civilization itself.

On International Mother Language Day, then, there is reason to celebrate the mother tongue, and every other language alongside it. Glory to language itself, and to the human being who invented it. One is tempted to believe that humanity did not create this astonishing multitude of languages out of mere playfulness, but out of a deeper necessity: the struggle to reach the farthest edge of meaning. Each time meaning grows too narrow, human beings seem to respond by inventing another language somewhere across the vast stretches of geography and time.

Even today, there is no definitive scientific answer to the question of how language first emerged. What seems certain, however, is that the human impulse to speak precedes language itself. In that sense, the philosopher René Descartes may have been right in suggesting the primacy of thought over language.

Perhaps the greatest gift a mother tongue offers is not simply a voice with which to speak, but a way of seeing, a lens through which one can appreciate the beauty of sailing between the languages of the world.