'Unique country where majority of language speakers learn language of lesser numbers'

The Official Languages Commissioner of Canada, Graham Frazer, on a brief visit to Sri Lanka, had a warm and friendly two hour dialogue with the reconstituted Presidential Task Force for a Trilingual Sri Lanka at the PTF office at the BMICH, Colombo on Wednesday.

An exchange of perspectives and perceptions of language as an instrument of peace, harmony, sharing and reconciliation concluded with a vote of thanks to the Canadian Language Commissioner delivered on behalf of the chairman and members of the Task Force by young Sri Lankan IT graduate, Tharani Somachandran.

Speaking first in Tamil, her mother tongue, then in Sinhala and finally in English, Tharani shared an educated young girl's vision of a Trilingual Sri Lanka by thanking the visitor.

She said: "On behalf of the Presidential Task Force for a Trilingual Sri Lanka and its chairman, Presidential Advisor Sunimal Fernando, it is my honour and privilege to thank you for visiting the Task Force this evening, listening to its members and exchanging views with them.

"Though you belong to a cultural, institutional and political experience very different from ours, there are many valuable insights from your country that are of interest to us as much as there surely are many experiences from our country that need to be correctly understood in the northern hemisphere with its very different history, culture and politics. The national dream of our country and of our visionary President is to evolve within 10 years a new generation of Sri Lankan citizens who think, speak, sing, dream and relate to each other in both Sinhala and Tamil, and relate to the external world in English as a Life Skill.

"Ten years from now as a young Tamil girl, I and tens of thousands of Sri Lankan youth like me will be stepping into the wide-open world as the proud citizens of a unique Asian country, the only one of its kind in the world, where the majority of language speakers, the Sinhala speakers, in their gracious and magnanimous, have willingly learnt the language of the lesser numbers, the Tamil speakers, in the spirit of brotherhood, love, reconciliation and peace, - something that can perhaps only happen in a South Asian country where the spiritual, cultural force of Hindu and Buddhist practice, and Islamic and Christian practice, rather than politics and economics which dominate the West, remain the critically most powerful forces that finally determine the destiny of a nation.

"Mr. Graham Frazer, Sir, we thank you once again for blessing the central hub of the new Sri Lanka, the Trilingual Nation, struggling to be born, today with your distinguished presence."