Today is #InternationalMotherLanguageDay #MotherLanguageDay - an initiative by the United Nations to promote #Indigenous #Languages, #multilingualism and #linguistic #diversity.

What languages do you speak?

https://www.un.org/en/observances/mother-language-day

@KathyReid I only speak English natively (my English is a mix of USian and Australian), I'm not fluent in anything else but have studied a few (primarily French and Chinese)

@betsybookworm not being fluent is the first step toward being fluent ;-)

@KathyReid I'm about to start taking actual language classes (Chinese) for the first time since uni and I'm super excited!

@betsybookworm oh I think @ctudball is learning Chinese too!

@KathyReid Speak? English, Sinhalese, Tamil, Hindi … Understand to some extent — Spanish, French, Telugu, Malayalam, Punjabi, Arabic … Learnt but mostly forgot …Malay

@f Wow!

@KathyReid It’s sort of a thread-unravel situation, honestly 🙂 I grew up speaking Sinhalese (which has its roots in Pali and Sanskrit) and hearing my parents speaking Tamil.

When I got to learning Hindi, I realized that it too had a lot of Sanskrit (not sure about the Pali) and some Persian/Arabic words. So it was fairly easy to pick up.

Spanish had a lot of Latin in it and so by way of English, it was again easy to pick up. Written French is easy to understand for somewhat the same reasons, but spoken French is something I have a hard time with.

Malayalam and Telugu again have similarities to Tamil and so again, easy to understand if you look for the connections.

The trouble with most of these is the written part since except for the European languages, everything else has it’s own alphabet and I can read in only some. Though again, a lot of them have similar letters which can help you figure at least some of it out …

@KathyReid I’m learning Spanish, and I’m a native English speaker.

I’ve discovered that I love language learning, but I’m very much not a natural, so it’s a slow effort :)

@ada hola! languages are like that - lots of small efforts compound 😉