International Mother Language Month in MAU
- 02.04.2024
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This year, the International Cooperation Office and the student association «МОСт» started a tradition of holding the International Mother Language Day. It would celebrate the diversity of cultures and languages in Murmansk Arctic University. Therefore, the decision to devote not a single day, but a whole month of February to this holiday was made.
The series of educational events began on February 7th with the Turkish language workshop held by Mehmet Yavuz Cetinkaya. In an hour the audience refreshed their knowledge of the world history, learned about Turkey's traditions and cultural peculiarities and practiced a few useful phrases in Turkish. Mehmet also told the visitors about his hometown of Erzurum and shared his experience with learning Russian. At the end of the event, the audience got to know about homonyms that sound the same in Russian and Turkish, but mean the opposite.
From the 5th to 11th of February, Jigynas Porandla, a third-year student and member of «МОСт», shared interesting facts about Hindi and Telugu in the official group of the student association in VKontakte. Moreover, second-year students presented a video of Bharatanatyam, an Indian classical dance form.
On February 21st, on the official International Mother Language Day, Yousef Yaghi, a first-year student of «General Medicine», and Alaa Houria, a second-year student of «Information Systems and Technologies» of MAU Apatity branch, presented the history of Palestine and Syria as well as traditional Arab countries costumes. The workshop ended with a short lesson in Arabic — the native speakers showed several words and taught the audience how to write and pronounce them.
The final part of the International Mother Language Month was devoted to language of CIS countries: Armenian, Belarusian, and Tajik. Stella Khoetsyan, a second-year student and future interpreter, introduced the guests of the workshop to the history and the official language of Armenia. The speaker presented a few sentences in Armenian and even sang a traditional song. Then, Shukrullo Mirzosharipov spoke about rich history of the Tajik language.
A great surprise was the presentation from Tatyana Sokolovskaya, a Senior Lecturer of the Department of Foreign Languages, who told the audience about her mother tongue — Belarusian. Tatyana began by showing a video about the Republic of Belarus and then shared insightful facts on German borrowings in Belarusian. Of course, the audience got a chance to try and translate several Belarusian words and expressions which turned out to be quite a challenge.
In addition, every week the members of the student association «МОСт» made posts in the official VKontakte group, listing the words from the workshops such as snow, northern lights, love, and peace. To find out more words and information about each event, you can go to the official VK group of the association.
