New York: In a major development, the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) on Friday adopted an India-sponsored resolution on multilingualism that mentions the Hindi language for the first time.
The UN Resolution, co-facilitated by Andorra and Colombia, encourages the UN Department of Global Communications to continue disseminating important communications and messages in official as well as non-official languages, including in the Hindi language.
"This year, for the first time, the resolution has a mention of Hindi language...The resolution also mentions Bangla and Urdu for the first time. We welcome these additions," India's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Ambassador TS Tirumurti.
Mr Tirumurti said multilingualism is recognized as a core value of the UN and expressed gratitude to the Secretary-General for prioritizing multilingualism.
"India has been partnering with the UN Department of Global Communications (DGC) since 2018 by providing an extra-budgetary contribution to mainstream and consolidates news and multimedia content in the Hindi language," he said.
As part of these efforts, 'Hindi @ UN' project was launched in 2018 with an objective to enhance the public outreach of the United Nations in the Hindi language, and to spread greater awareness about global issues among millions of Hindi-speaking populations around the world.
He further stated it is imperative that multilingualism at the United Nations in a true sense is embraced and India will support the UN in achieving this objective.
"Multilingualism is recognized by the General Assembly as a core value of the Organization. As such, all United Nations Secretariat entities are expected to contribute actively and demonstrate their commitment to this joint endeavor. Multilingualism mandates also call for the mainstreaming of multilingualism throughout the Secretariat," according to UN.
Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish are the six official languages of the United Nations; English and French are the working languages of the United Nations Secretariat.