With a programme featuring over 40 artists, Mother Tongues has announced its 2021 Mother Tongues Festival line-up, which will take place primarily online, keeping participation at the heart of their programme with the Walk A While initiative.

The Mother Tongues Festival remains the largest Irish Festival celebrating linguistic diversity throughout the arts. Until 2020, the weekend-long Festival took place on the 21st of February to celebrate its founding organisation's first birthday and UNESCO's International Mother Language Day. This year, the programme will take place throughout May 2021 in conjunction with World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

"We aim to go beyond ‘inclusion' to create a universal feeling of genuine belonging. We created the Mother Tongues Festival with a dream to connect people through diverse creative experiences and experiencing performances from an extensive range of cultures", says Dr Francesca La Morgia, Founder of Mother Tongues.

The Festival will feature a dynamic programme of art workshops, school visits, film screenings, and a series of events available in 20 different languages.

Some highlights of the 2021 festival to watch out for includes;

● Walk A While, an invitation to walk your favourite loop with friends/family and share it with people. With

your captured images and embedded sounds, a map will be featured on a special Walk A While webpage.

● PAL & Windowpane, a screening of two short films by Shane O’Reilly originally commissioned by

Culture Night 2020 and The Abbey Theatre as part of the Dear Ireland project, respectively.

● Stop Clowning Around, Creative Theatre Workshop, an adult clowning workshop presented in Spanish

and English that challenges the connection between emotion and theatre.

● A Ciorcal Cómhrá with a twist, facilitated by professional comedian Áine Gallagher, this fun, inclusive,

bilingual workshop creates a space people can practise speaking Irish or simply listen to Áine as she shares

stories and introduces the true levels of ‘fluency’.

● Together in Harmony, a night of creative celebration to mark World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development.

Mother Tongues

Mother Tongues is a not-for-profit organisation founded in 2017 by Linguist and Professor Dr Francesca La Morgia to promote multilingualism and raise awareness of the value of linguistic diversity in Ireland. Since its founding, Mother Tongues has reached thousands of people with its wide range of cultural and educational projects, including the annual Mother Tongues Festival. In 2018, Mother Tongues were awarded the European Language Label Award and the GHP Social Care Award for Best Bilingualism Support Advisory.

Festival | Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram