Mother tongue as the foundation of democracy and human rights.

Talking about the mother tongue as the foundation of freedom, identity and democracy is very important today because language, unfortunately, is often used and is being used as a political weapon – a means of division, denial and manipulation. That is why it is the task of every individual and the SBK to defend it as a fundamental human right and a pillar of democracy.

Someone will probably ask themselves - How can we put language on the same level as the right to life, to food, to a roof over our heads?

Easy.

Language is the home in which a people lives. When they take away your language, you are left without a roof over your head. Therefore, its abolition, renaming, denial... is not accidental. To deny a language means to deny the right to exist.

History teaches us that tyranny often begins with an attack on language.

When a people is banned or restricted from using their language, not only is their speech taken away, but also their right to think, create and participate equally in society.

The past, tradition and intellectual value of a people are preserved in language. By taking away the right to that language, you take away all the cultural and intellectual heritage with which it is associated. In doing so, you subjugate, humiliate and label it as a less valuable member of society. We find evidence for such claims throughout history throughout the world, and the most obvious examples are colonized countries that have not yet achieved full democracy or gotten rid of the burden of the language imposed on them, the language of the colonizers. Proof of this is the denial of the Bosnian language in some areas of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

It is simple - without the name of the language, there is no name of freedom.

If this thought is projected onto the reality of Bosnia and Herzegovina, we understand that when someone says "the Bosnian language does not exist" - it is not just a statement.

It is a blow.

It is violence against a child, against identity, against an entire nation, against speakers of the Bosnian language.

It is the theft of intellectual wealth and heritage. And that should hurt us, that must bother us.

It must pain us to realize that children in our homeland live under tyranny — it must hurt to know that we have not found instruments to implement the articles of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, nor to implement the decisions of the Constitutional Court, which clearly ruled in favor of the children of Konjević Polje, Kotor Varoš, Liplje, Potočari...