International Mother Tongue Day 21 February

WHAT IS A MOTHER LANGUAGE? A mother language is the first language learned from birth or learned ‘naturally’ during childhood. People can have more than one mother language when they grow-up in a bilingual or multilingual environment.

Other words for MOTHER LANGUAGE? MOTHER TONGUE FIRST LANGUAGE NATIVE LANGUAGE L1

CLASS SURVEY What mother language(s) do you speak? MOTHER LANGUAGETALLYSCORE SLOVENE GERMAN ITALIAN HUNGARIAN ROMANI EX-YUGO OTHER

CLASS ACTIVITY CONSTRUCT A MIND-MAP WHAT MOTHER LANGUAGES ARE SPOKEN IN SLOVENIA?

WHAT MOTHER LANGUAGES ARE SPOKEN IN AUSTRALIA?

CLASS ACTIVITY MATCH EACH MOTHER LANGUAGE WITH ITS RESPECTIVE COUNTRY GROUP 1 Hebrew Arabic Latin Mandarin Malay Hindi GROUP 2 Pashto Kurdish Dutch Swahili Hausa Ojibwe

ARE MOTHER LANGUAGES IMPORTANT?

Key information summary from Languages matter! video More than 50 per cent of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world are likely to die out within a few generations, and 96 per cent of these languages are spoken by a mere 4 per cent of the world's population. Only a few hundred languages have genuinely been given pride of place in education systems and the public domain, and less than a hundred are used in the digital world.

CLASS ACTIVITY PAIR & CLASS DISCUSSION How are Slovenian mother language(s) treated? Is language extinction prevalent in Slovenia? As more immigrants move to Slovenia, how should Slovenia deal with the increased number of people with different mother tongues?

MULTILINGUALISM

TEEN SPEAKS OVER 20 LANGUAGES

READING COMPREHENSION TEXT

CLASS DISCUSSION How difficult is Slovene for an English native speaker?

CLASS DISCUSSION How difficult is English for a Slovene native speaker?