On Monday, February 28, the Faculty of History, Languages and Literature, Penza State University, celebrated International Mother Language Day.

International Mother Language Day has been celebrated since 2000 at the initiative of the 30th session of the UNESCO General Conference. Its goal is to preserve and develop endangered languages, encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education, and raise awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions.

Celebrating International Mother Language Day at Penza State University has become a good tradition. The festival is being held for the eighth time at the Institute of Teacher Education, on the initiative of the Department of Russian Language and Methods of Teaching Russian Language, with the support of the Department of Russian as a Foreign Language. In 2023, its theme was: "The song is the soul of the people."

The event was attended by students from China, Zambia, Guinea and Indonesia, living in the Penza region. The students talked about their homeland, history, sang songs in their native language, and everyone tried to sing along with them.

Zhang Jiekun, a first-year master’s degree student in the study field "pedagogical education", training programme "music", performed the composition of the famous Chinese pop singer "Tornado". The young man noted that he chose this song because of its beauty and melody. “It talks about love that comes and goes as quickly as a tornado. I thought that this is the song everyone should hear today,” explained the master’s degree student.

In addition to foreign music, songs that are more familiar in our area were performed at the festival. So, third-year students Daria Brostilova and Railya Nazirova performed a song called “Krai rodnoi” ("Native Land"). “Tatar and Russian languages overlap in this song. It very accurately describes the beauty of the Tatar language and its connection with Russian, which is indicative of the friendship of their speakers. We believe that peoples should be friends, share creativity, culture, traditions with each other, so such events are, of course, important,” the students shared.

Each time, the audience met with enthusiastic applause the representatives of different countries, who were dressed in beautiful and bright national costumes.
The festival ended with a performance by the Pchelochka Folk Song Ensemble, which exists at the Department of the Russian Language and Methods of Teaching the Russian Language. After the event, according to tradition, all participants took a common photo as a keepsake.