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Following last year’s successful campaign, we invite you to take part in the Second Mother Language Meme Challenge 2018 by creating a humorous or reflective internet meme in your native tongue. Starting on February 14 and running through February 21st, we invite you to take part in this fun online campaign to commemorate International Mother Language Day.
International Mother Language Day [2] was founded to promote and celebrate linguistic and cultural diversity around the world, with a special emphasis on indigenous, minority, heritage, and endangered languages. With the help of digital tools and the internet, there is now a unique space for expression and connecting with others also working to revitalize their mother tongue.
During last year's challenge, we also met language champions who participated by creating memes in Berrichon-Bourbonnais [3], Karuk [4], Fulfulde [5], Wiradjuri [6], Quechua [7], and Kwak̓wala [8]. Memes in hundreds of languages were created and shared online. You can see a selection of these memes in this summary post [9] from last year’s campaign.
Once again, this Challenge is co-organized by Rising Voices [12] and our friends at the Living Tongues Institute [13], First Peoples’ Cultural Council [14], Indigenous Tweets [15], Endangered Languages Project [16], and the Digital Language Diversity Project [17], as well as a number of global partners. The Mother Language Meme Challenge invites you to put your creativity and passion for languages to work by creating a meme in your mother language.
To take part, just follow the simple steps outlined on the Challenge’s website (http://memeML.org [18]), which includes finding an image, adding text and hashtags, including #MemeML, and sharing on your favorite social media platform. Make sure you “tag” someone inviting them to create their own meme in their mother language.
You will also find links to some free, web-based platforms to create and save your creations. In the week prior to International Mother Language Day 2018, we’ll be sharing, retweeting, and liking contributions from around the world and featuring some of our favorites here on Rising Voices.
If you are an organization, collective, project, or other group currently working on language revitalization around the world, we are looking for new partners to join us to promote this Challenge. We are also looking for others to help translate approximately 150 words to bring the site into more languages so that we can reach speakers of more languages. Right now, we have the site [18] available in more than 35 languages, and we hope to add many more this year. Please contact us [21] for more information.