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GIS marked the International Mother Language Day in a special assembly on 21st February 2018.   

Board member of the Dhivehi Bahuge Academy, Mr. Iyaz Nseem  was the chief guest at the assembly. In his address to the students, he explained to the students about the misconception people have about what makes a language rich or poor.

According to Mr. Iyaz,  a language is born to meet the needs of a people and the environment plays a significant role in the development of the vocabulary of a language.  He took the example of snow in the poles of the world. While the Eskimos' might have a number of vocabulary to refer to different aspects, shapes and conditions of snow, a country which does not experience snow will not have that much of vocabulary relating to snow. Likewise, a country which is surrounded by land and the people there have never seen the sea, will not have much words to describe the sea. Thus, no one language is superior to another. The need to make new words to accommodate the developments in any given community where a language is spoken, was also highlighted.  He also encouraged the students to make use of the opportunity in the school to learn Arabic or French and explained to the students about the benefits of knowing more than one language. He told the students that we are all in one way bilingual as almost everyone talks both in Dhivehi and English. Thus becoming multilingual and learning another language would be an added advantage in today's world, especially one of the UN languages such as French, Arabic, Spanish, Russian or Mandarin.

Students and teachers of different nationalities studying/working  in the school spoke in their mother language at the assembly. It was a good way of showing to the students the diversity in languages. Added to that, the students sang lullabies in different languages. Also, the significance of lullaby in a language was explained by a student, in an  informative speech on the history of lullabies.

Later in the day, students  did  activities in the class, based on the theme, " Linguistic Diversity and Multilingualism count for sustainable development" and the new Dhivehi words in the slogan were explained to the students.