Great Success for the first Mother Tongues Festival!
The Mother Tongues Festival is the largest festival celebrating linguistic diversity through the arts in Ireland.
The idea for the first Mother Tongues Festival started over coffee during a sunny afternoon in August 2017 and, as the project developed, we discovered that many artists were very keen to be involved in a project aimed at celebrating language. More than 200 people attended the festival, which took place at the Outhouse, at 105 Capel Street and all events were well attended. What made the festival really unique was the possibility to take part in art, music, drama and science workshops in over 10 different languages. In each class native speakers of the language used by the workshop leader worked together with language learners and people who had never heard the language before. What was really interesting was to see people of all ages and nationalities walk into a class led in a completely new language. This is what really showed us that the project worked. Our festival allowed people to connect through language and diversity did not represent a barrier, but rather a reason to get together and celebrate.
Photo credits: Sarah Ryan and Zoë Holman.
