For the second year in a row, International Mother Language Day (Feb 21) is preceded by a week-long meme campaign that challenges commonly held expectations of minority languages.

Led by co-organizers Rising Voices, the Living Tongues Institute, First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Indigenous Tweets, Endangered Languages Project, and the Digital Language Diversity Project, the 2018 Meme Challenge brings together individual language advocates and organizations from around the world to highlight the cause of language diversity online, with a humorous twist. Last year’s edition led to the translation of the Meme Challenge website into 34 languages, including Yorùbá, and the creation of memes in languages like Asturian, Inuktitut and Bengali, to name just three.

As a collective that is deeply committed to supporting diverse language use online, the YorubaName team invites you to add your voice to this meme challenge. The only requirements are an Internet connection and a good sense of humor! You can find user-friendly meme templates on websites such as MemeGen and Memegenerator (need more tips? Head over here.)

This is a unique opportunity to collaborate on a global level and share your love of language with the world. The celebration will culminate on February 21^st, with International Mother Language Day, a special day that recognizes the importance of each language and sheds light on speaker communities that are too often forgotten or denigrated in official discourse.

February 21^st also marks Speak Yoruba Day! What started as a campaign to pressure Twitter into offering a Yoruba interface, has taken a life of its own and become a yearly social media event during which participants post in Yorùbá, share each other’s posts and generally delight in the Yorùbá language. No matter your language level or confidence in writing it, you are welcome to the party :). This year, we are also inviting people who speak every other Nigerian language to join in with their own language as well. The International Mother Tongue Day is set aside by UNESCO to help call attention to language diversity around the world.

Look out for #MemeML on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook and fill our timelines with all the beautiful languages you speak! See you on the web!