Heritage Language Schools

Michael and Winnie Ward are settled travellers from Tuam Co.Galway, The Irish traveller community is also sometimes known as Rilantu Mincéirí and Shelta is recognised as their language. It’s widely known as Cant but fewer and fewer people within the traveller community speak it. But it hasn’t stopped them giving it a go.

We visited Presentation Primary School in Tralee who recently hosted an international day, to celebrate their multicultural school. A school where 36 languages are spoken by students from around the world!

Language expert Rose Bridle returns to Mothertongues to answer our students' questions about how different languages work!

On this weeks episode of Mother Tongues we are joined by a family who speak the native language of Mauritius - Creole!

On this week's episode of Mother Tongues, we meet Liane and her mother who speak Shona, the official language of Zimbabwe!

On this weeks episode we meet Niko, Mia and their Irish Finnish family who live in Dublin. Listen back to learn Finnish phrases and songs

How are languages invented? Why are there so many alphabets? We return with part 2 of 'Ask an Expert', where we asked linguist Rose Bridle to answer your language questions. Listen back now!

On this weeks episode of Mother Tongues, we meet Laura and her sister Clare - a musical, Brazilian Irish family who love to sing in different languages!

Weekend heritage language schools (also called Saturday schools) are community-based settings where children work on their family language or minority language. On this weeks episodes we meet students, teachers and parents from Swedish, Mandarin, Greek, Dutch and Czech Saturday schools.

This week we meet Neven and his mum Vicky - a Bulgarian-Ukrainian family that live in Ireland. If you would like to learn some Bulgarian phrases, or are interested in learning about life and culture in Bulgaria, listen back to this episode!