On February 22nd we celebrated the International Mother Language Day with a series of mother language courses led by our students and their parents. International Mother Language Day provides a chance to celebrate diversity, increase understanding and engage in dialogue.

The mother language or "mother tongue" is the language in which first words are spoken and thoughts expressed by an individual. Cognitively, the mother language is a crucial tool every child uses to understand the world. Culturally, the mother language is a fundamental expression of history and identity.

We have explored the diverse languages our students speak in our classrooms and found out that 27 languages are spoken at MG: Albanian, Azerbaijani, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, English, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Kazakh, Korean, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovakian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Ukrainian.

Kazakhstan at MG

The Mother Language Day Celebration started with the presentation about Kazakhstan held by Ms. Alvina Tursynkul, Ms. Dinara and Mr. Aidar with the assistance of Gauhar (MYP0). Through the wonderful presentation we got an insight into Kazakhstan and its geographical features, culture, national costumes, economy and poetry. We have learnt that the Kazakh language is a Turkic language that contains many words from Russian, Arabic, Mongol and Persian. We have also learnt that 99 out of 118 elements in the periodic table of elements were detected in Kazakhstan; that Sputnik, the world's first orbiting satellite was launched from Kazakhstan and that the first manned spaceflight with Yuri Gagarin took off into space from Kazakhstan.

This interesting lecture showed us how fascinating country Kazakhstan was and we are very thankful to Ms. Alvina, Ms. Dinara and Mr. Aidar for this educational and enjoyable lesson.

Students to Students: Mother Language Courses

The celebration was continued by the Mother Language Courses where MYP students - Era & Vesa, Arho & Marton, Alexander & Konstantin, Antonio & Jasa, Clemente & Andrija, Ilsu & Özge were teaching us the basics of Albanian, Hungarian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish and Turkish.

The students diligently prepared the language learning materials and stepped into the teacher's shoes. They all were immensely helpful and patient while generously sharing their knowledge. We are all thankful to our students who put so much effort and enthusiasm in teaching us the basics of their mother language. It was great to be a student again!

Linguistic diversity make us stronger, Exhibition at the School Library

The exhibition at the school library emphasised the importance of cherishing the multilingualism and the reasons why we should love our mother language.