20 Taka International Mother Language Day

International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by UNESCO in November 1999 — just months before this coin was struck — directly at Bangladesh's proposal, honoring the February 21, 1952 Dhaka University shootings in which Pakistani police killed students demonstrating for the right to use Bengali as an official language. That date, Ekushey February, is arguably the founding trauma of Bangladeshi national identity, predating independence by nearly two decades.

The 1952 killings triggered a language movement that ultimately fed into the broader Bengali nationalist politics culminating in the 1971 Liberation War.