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This year, 2025, marks the 25th anniversary of International Mother Languages Day — a worldwide holiday to celebrate multilingualism and linguistic diversity. With over 7,100 languages spoken worldwide — and many of them not written and thus absent from text-based communication and social media — this date is essential in raising awareness about our world’s vast language diversity and the ways these languages can reflect and even shape cultures. UNESCO estimates that there are over 3,000 endangered and near-extinct languages today. This event also allows speakers and activists who are working to revive their languages an opportunity to promote their mother tongues within their communities and on the global stage. For many who speak more than one language, it is also an opportunity to inspect and question the power relations among languages, what languages are favoured, and what is passed on to the next generation.
Global Voices has a long and rich history in both amplifying and promoting a variety of languages, acknowledging regional differences within one language continuum, and also actively working with language activists to find tools to promote Indigenous and threatened languages.
Through Rising Voices, GV’s language and digital activism wing, we have brought endangered or Indigenous languages to the global conversation by providing training, resources, microgrant funding, and mentoring to local underrepresented communities that want to tell their own digital story using participatory media tools. Our Mayan Languages digital activism fellowship, now in its third iteration, has helped dozens of speakers of Mayan languages expand the reach of their languages in their communities and globally and has even drawn international accolades and awards. Rising Voices also participated in the “Mother Language Meme Challenges” in 2018, which helped connect Indigenous language speakers through memes and comedy on International Mother Language Day.
Most of the stories that Global Voices publishes are not monolingual, thanks to the Lingua translation project, which brings together volunteers from around the world to translate them into dozens and dozens of languages. Over its nearly 20 years of existence, the Lingua project has shown that the act of translation is not only a powerful tool of activism for strengthening the presence of a particular language on the media landscape, but it also is a transformative experience for individual translators, fostering increased creativity in and intimacy with their mother language.
Multilingualism is at the heart of Global Voices’ mission and is a cornerstone of what makes our organization unique. This Special Coverage celebrates that multilingualism and acknowledges the ways language can foster peace and understanding.
