International Mother Language Day

February 15, 2018  by

#MemeML: Language Diversity Has Never Been So Much Fun!

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 21st, 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 21st 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!

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February 4, 2017  by

Mother Language Day to Be Celebrated with Yorùbá Memes

Every year since 2014, 21st February has marked #TweetYorùbá day, an online campaign running concurrently with UNESCO’s International Mother Language Day, in which we flood our social media streams with posts in Yorùbá and bring attention to issues of language diversity online and offline.

This year, we start the fun early with a very exciting concept: an international meme campaign in languages such as Bambara, Swahili, Galo, Bininj Kunwok, Euskara, Pular and more, all under one hashtag: #MemeML.

Spanish meme “when you only speak one language…”

A fun way to celebrate linguistic diversity

Co-organized by Rising Voices and the Living Tongues Institute, First Peoples’ Cultural Council, Indigenous Tweets, Endangered Languages Project, First Languages Australia, and the Digital Language Diversity Project, the project is a fantastic opportunity to connect with other groups around the world who are working towards advancing their own languages, whether it be in the form of revitalisation efforts or a struggle for greater recognition in the public sphere. The official website’s introductory message has already been translated into 23 languages including Pular, Bambara and Afrikaans, and speakers of other languages are warmly invited to join in.

In previous editions of International Mother Language Day, online activities focused primarily on using Twitter as a way to promote endangered, minority, indigenous, and heritage languages. But this year is a bit different, as Eddie Avila, director of Rising Voices, explains:

We are hoping to make it a month-long activity culminating on February 21. We chose to try something different this year, and thought memes might be a fun and more creative way to encourage and celebrate linguistic diversity on the internet. 

With just 17 days to go, #MemeML needs all hands on deck to make this month-long event a true representation of language diversity and language activism online. Participants are already flooding in from all corners of the globe and together, we can make a point of adding our voices to showcase important aspects of Yorùbá culture as well as the need to preserve the language.

Add your creative voice!

At YorubaName, we were instantly taken with the idea and we’d love for Yorùbá memes to be a part of the global #MemeML. Here is how you can help:

1. Draw attention to Meme ML by sharing social media posts and inviting others to participate.

2. Create a meme and share it on all your social media platforms with the hashtags: #MemeML and #Yorùbá or #Yoruba. Feel free to tag all your friends as well, since fun is known to be contagious! You can also share your creations on this Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/mememl

3. Translate this page into Yorùbá and send your translation to project@yorubaname.com

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