As a number of language faculty and CLS staff prepare to participate in the upcoming Conference on Heritage/Community Languages at UCLA–which focuses primarily on the situation of language learners in the United States–another day of significance for heritage and community language learners around the world is upon us. As summarized here on Wikipedia, in 1999 UNESCO declared February 21 to be International Mother Language Day. Below we’ve included a few links you might find interesting or helpful in planning activities for students or peers as they learn about and celebrate their linguistic and cultural diversity.
- UNESCO IMLD page
- Global Voices Online, a community of citizen journalists writing in many languages, about events and issues around the world
- IMLD on Facebook
- IMLD on Twitter (and be sure to check out the #IMLD14 hashtag)
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And if you’d like to help us celebrate linguistic diversity on Multilingual Commons by adding another language to our brick wall (the image at the top of this page), please email a Word or image file with the name of your language to Dave Malinowski. Thank you!