The Mother Tongues Campaign

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The Mother Tongue carving for Bangladesh, in Bangla, Marma, Chakma and Mro.
The Mother Tongue carving for Bangladesh, in Bangla, Marma, Chakma and Mro.

My apologies if you’ve heard this through another channel, but I wanted to let you know what’s happening with my current Kickstarter campaign.

The original goal was for a short, sweet campaign to raise $1,000 so I could do a carving celebrating Mother Tongue Day (February 21st) and send it to Bangladesh, where there are several endangered minority languages.

Support was so great we broke that $1,000 in barely 24 hours.

At this point we’ve been going about 36 hours, and here’s what the pledges have already helped to pay for:

* materials, including a lovely piece of wide cherry, full of color and character, for the Mother Tongue carving;

* cost of high-quality, high-resolution photography that will enable us to create the International Mother Language Day poster based on an image of the Mother Tongue carving (see the image below);

* design fee for laying out and creating the poster;

* shipping cost to send the carving to Bistaar, the arts complex in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where it will be displayed as part of that country’s Mother Tongue celebrations on February 21st.

But here’s the thing: the pledges are still coming in. With every additional dollar we’ll be able to plan follow-up Mother Tongue carvings for 2017. I’d love to make a Mother Tongue carving for Indonesia and the Philippines–and what about the mother tongues of the indigenous peoples of North America! I can just see it, a vast slab of wood tipped up on end, with the phrase “mother tongue” carved in dozens of languages indigenous to North America: Cree, Cherokee, Navajo….

Keep supporting the work of the Endangered Alphabets.

Keep those pledges coming to https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1496420787/mother-tongues/. Or click HERE.

Thanks so much.

Tim