Mother Language Day Emphasizes Cultural Roots and Poetic Expression

On February 21st, the International Mother Language Day, proclaimed by the UN and UNESCO in 1999, along with the Sustainable Development Goal on education of Agenda 2030, re-evaluates and protects mother languages, especially in the early years of schooling. This day aims to provide an opportunity for listening and reflection, not only to comply with a constitutional dictate that protects minority languages, but also to promote the culture of the word. The plurality of voices allows for a constantly evolving dialogue in search of one's roots, giving shape to the chaos of the soul. In the poem "Cosa significa" [What does it mean], written in Montgeran, France, in 1960, Czeslaw Milosz illustrates how people are often unaware of their origins: "Non sa di brillare/ Non sa di volare/ Non sa di essere questo e non quello" [He does not know he shines/ He does not know he flies/ He does not know he is this and not that]. Therefore, one is not capable of questioning oneself to rediscover, as Petrarch argued, the memory of places, not only physical but also emotional and spiritual, that generated us. Retaining the feelings that populated our childhood in a Foscolian correspondence of loving senses means preserving the wonder of poets fascinated by the mystery to seek the ontological meaning of being. Now more than ever, immersed in a media world invaded by communication aimed at narcissistic individualism, hedonism, and the economic laws of the markets, it is necessary to make poetry. Writing poetry in various idioms means having faith in civil progress as integration and solidary acceptance; it means opening a door to the future of new generations. All writers originate their inspiration from native places to make them countries of the soul. From the particular to the universal, to reclaim in everyone that divine spark called dignity. The word can grasp the essence that lives beyond the word itself to become sacred towards all that we are not given to understand. Only linguistic, objectual, affective, and community identity allows us to survive in the world. Above all, poetry is not only an aesthetic expression conforming to the rules of rhetoric, but it is an act of resistance against the oblivion of our humanity. Poetry has gone to war not to sing of pain but to restore the essence of human experience in the hope of a fraternal and solidary future, beyond diversities. Lyrics, which are the language of feelings even when using the so-called cultured code, have their deepest motivations in jargons and dialects that represent the vehicle of true emotions, preserving the identity of individuals and various social groups. Landscapes and local idioms shape the words of poets with emotions. As the philosophical existentialism of the twentieth century argues, being is defined by its limits, by the difference with respect to non-being and the other. Not perceiving one's linguistic and human identity rooted in the territory in which one is born and lives, without perceiving one's essence and one's role in the world, is alienating. To understand difference without prejudice, one must have universal values that, while starting from the local, allow one to embrace the global, encouraging critical thinking. In the era of the media network in which the internet reigns supreme, the mother language, like poetry, places the word at a certain place and time to make personal history universal history. The vernacular, just like the linguistic and semantic structure of poets, absorbs the reality that surrounds it and returns its soul. Against the depersonalization of one's expressive and communicative roots, a new term, "Paesologia" [Landscapology], was coined by the poet Franco Arminio to celebrate the lyrical beauty of our villages. Italy, one of the nations that, for geographical and historical reasons, is rich in villages, makes the various dialects unique and precious voices harmonized in the chorus of the mother language. A human family, ours, that bears witness to the power of language to make common chords vibrate in the intent to build the civilization of love. "Vorrei parlarti/ nel natio dialetto/ che a fatica ormai ricordo/ della bellezza del cielo posato/ sulla corona frastagliata/ dei Marsi monti/ a rischiarar gli occhi/ del terso aprile" [I would like to speak to you/ in the native dialect/ that I hardly remember anymore/ of the beauty of the sky placed/ on the jagged crown/ of the Marsi mountains/ to light up the eyes/ of the clear April].