The Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Language Vitality Initiative and the Endangered Languages Project invite Indigenous and minoritized language content creators to Language Lodge, a free six-week series of workshops and challenges to co-create media with language communities around the world. The Language Lodge is an ongoing program in which a language content creator designs and produces an experimental online project to support relationship building across the broad expanse of online language users. The 2024 Language Lodge will run from Tuesday, March 12, through Thursday, April 18, and content creators can register on Zoom and participate for free.
This year, the program will be hosted by Ekpeye language activist Franca Umasoye Igwe. Ekpeye is a language spoken in Rivers State, Nigeria, with over 30,000 speakers. Umasoye began her work in language in 2020 when she spoke to a classmate in Ekpeye and realized they did not understand. She co-established the Speak Ekpeye Fluently Language Initiative to provide social media content and online learning classes to encourage youth to learn and use Ekpeye.
“The wrong way to speak a language is to not speak at all—especially if you are young,” Umasoye said.
The 2024 Language Lodge will guide Indigenous and minoritized language content creators through the process of creating weekly social media challenges for their own audiences. These challenges will take place throughout the program. Additionally, participants will meet each other through two online workshops and collaborate on challenges through a community discussion.
The first workshop, “Social Media Tools and Language Content Creation,” will take place on Tuesday, March 12, at 1 p.m. ET (6 p.m. West Africa Time). The ninety-minute facilitated presentation will focus on social media tools and relatable content creation. The second workshop, “Sharing Relatable Content with Your Community,” will take place on Tuesday, March 26, at 1 p.m. ET (6 p.m. West Africa Time). The ninety-minute facilitated discussion will consider effective ways for communities with language diversity to collaborate.
Creating social media content in Indigenous and minoritized languages is a celebration of language and a tool for learning. But it can be difficult for language content creators to connect with other creators across linguistic, geographic, platform, and algorithmic challenges. The Language Lodge provides a sandbox for considering what global collaboration and cross-content engagement could look like.
If you are not a content creator but still want to support Indigenous and minoritized language social media efforts, we invite you to follow along by searching for #LanguageLodge content on social media.
About the Language Vitality Initiative
With Indigenous and minoritized languages under threat, the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage’s Language Vitality Initiative supports community-driven language reclamation efforts. Our research promotes language use in new and traditional contexts and strengthens engagement in cultural heritage wellness. We work with digital and emerging media to promote unique voices and worldviews. We seek to educate new generations of community language practitioners and linguists through informal and formal workshops and institutes. All our work is used to educate majority-language users about the benefits of living in a multilingual world.
