Each year, on Feb. 21, Mother Language Day is celebrated around the world. In 2024, Alberto Pastor brought the celebration to SMU’s campus.
Pastor is an associate professor of Spanish as well as the faculty in residence for Mary Hay, Peyton and Shuttles Commons. He received his Ph.D. from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and has been working at SMU since 2005.
Pastor started his initiative to bring Mother Language Day to SMU to reflect the rich diversity he knows is here—even if it isn’t always as obvious to others. He hopes that his work will inspire a more diverse student population to be drawn to SMU and to embody the wide range of people who call the DFW area home.
“We want to educate society on multilingual Americans,” Pastor said. “Many SMU students, faculty and staff that are bilingual are U.S. citizens. America is multilingual, Dallas is multilingual, SMU is multilingual. We want to make it about languages, not nationalities.”
The event was tabled by a dozen language clubs, from Chinese to Arabic to Italian. Each table was decorated with brightly colored displays of native foods and trivia.
Yasmine Boueri and Zaheen Chowdhury represented the Arabic Club.
“We’re serving baklavas, which are traditional Arabic sweets,” Chowdhury said.
Neither Boueri nor Chowdhury are native Arabic speakers, but they are drawn to Arabic for different reasons.
“I’ve grown up my whole life going to Lebanon every summer,” Boueri said. “I grew up in the States exclusively but I always had family around me that spoke Arabic, but I never spoke it. So I wanted to come learn it here.”
Though Chowdhury has no familial connection to the language, she loves it.
“It clicks so well and it’s so beautiful and there’s so much art in the language itself,” Chowdhury said. “I want to be able to speak another language. I think it helps with so many things.”
At the Persian Club table, Bahar Salehi and Melody Nadery had set up a Persian/English matching game with flashcards.
A native speaker, Salehi came to the United States at 17. She is studying biology on the pre-med track and plans to graduate this year.
“[SMU] has a lot of graduate students that come from Iran,” Salehi said. “They have no sense of belonging [when they get here]. They need to see their culture and have a familiar environment.”
Nadery was born in the U.S. but is of Iranian descent. The Persian Club provides a space for non-native speakers like Nadery to connect with their mother language.
Rashedul Islam Seum, a Ph.D. student from Bangladesh—the country where International Mother Language Day originated—also attended the event.
Seum explained that Pakistan was previously combined with what is now Bangladesh, and split into West and East Pakistan. West Pakistan had been met with protests when they tried to make Urdu the national language.
Protests continued until Bangladesh became an independent country in 1971 with Bengali as their national language. Since then, countries around the world celebrate their mother tongues every Feb. 21 to remember the day student protesters were fired upon by West Pakistan police as they fought for their national language.
Pastor started this annual event with support from International Student Scholars Services, Dedman College and the World Languages Department. Their main goal is to increase diversity awareness and show that there is not just one type of American. Additionally, Pastor stresses that the focus of the event is on languages, not just cultures.
Although the event had a line out the door, Pastor wants to make it even bigger next year.
“The plan is to add more celebrations throughout the week,” he said. “Maybe movie screenings, more signage on campus to explain the languages that are relevant to the SMU community.”
