2019-01-30 Wed

The United Nations Postal Administration says hello in more than 40 languages on its upcoming stamp issue for International Mother Language Day.

The day is observed each year on Feb. 21 to “promote awareness of linguistic and cultural diversity and promote multilingualism,” according to the UNPA. The UNPA will issue 18 World Languages stamps on Feb. 21 in three panes of six, one pane for each UNPA post office. Sergio Baradat of the United Nations designed the panes. His designs feature symbolic people in colorful clothes greeting each other, with their greetings inside speech balloons.

The six 55¢ stamps in the UNPA/New York pane, a woman in a pink dress says “Olá,” “hello” in Portuguese along other 11 languages Filipino, Chinese Mandarin, Swahili, Tamil, Persian, Italian, Bengali, Hungarian, Kazakh, Thai, and Czech/Slovak.

Geneva pane of six 1-franc stamps includes 14 languages in 13 speech bubbles. The other languages on the UNPA/Geneva pane are Burmese, French, Russian, Polish, Hebrew, Hindi, Azerbaijani, Urdu, Hausa, Amharic, Danish/ Swedish and Japanese. Inscriptions on this pane are in French with “Langues du Monde” at the top.

Vienna pane with the German “Sprachen der Welt” inscription includes 14 greetings representing the following languages: Sindhi, Mongolian, Vietnamese, Serbian/Croatian, Arabic, Korean, Dutch/German/Norwegian, Zulu, Gujarati, Yoruba, Telugu, Turkish, Greek and Spanish.

Image Courtesy: https://www.linns.com