Mr Stanley Quaynor, the Accra Metro Director of the National Commission on Civic Education (NCCE), has appealed to the Ministry of Education to ensure that Ghana’s indigenous languages gain prominence in the school curriculum.
Mr Quaynor told the Ghana News Agency (GNA) that to preserve the languages, the sector ministry and the Ghana Education Service (GES) must ensure that the languages of the 16 regions were adequately taught in the schools in the region.
“The appeal to the GES has to do with the fact that in the Greater Accra region, for instance, most schools are not offering a course in the Ga language, which is ‘killing’ the language,” he said.
He further said the current educational policy had also made the local language optional for the Basic Education Certificate Examinations.
According to him, these things were detrimental to the development and growth of the country’s indigenous languages, which the International Mother Language Day (IMLD) sought to address.
Meanwhile, the Accra Metro NCCE Office, as part of the commemoration of International Mother Language Day, held a day’s Ga language reading session at the Kaneshie Bishop Basic School, as one of the 15 selected schools to observe the day in the Greater Accra region.
Mr Quaynor said the IMLD, which was celebrated annually on February 21, was instituted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) to promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.
He noted that the celebration was in recognition of the two students of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, who were shot and killed by the police in 1952 during a demonstration for the recognition of their language, Bengali, adding that the first IMLD was held in the year 2000.
He said the theme for the observation of IMLD 2024 was “Fostering multilingualism for inclusion in education and society,” aimed at ensuring that all languages were valued and respected in education and society, contributing to inclusion and promoting cultural heritage.
He said a UNESCO report indicated that 40 per cent of the world’s population had no access to education in their mother language.
The NCCE, as part of promoting the reading of the Ga language among pupils, presented six copies of Ga language storybooks to the host school.