The Mother-Tongue Project
Every language is as beautiful as music, and each one of them has their own fascinating idiosyncrasies - just like musical instruments. We like music not because of the region/race/language it belongs to but because we love the sound of it.
At the end of the day, language is also a sound.
In a culturally diverse country like India, the language changes from state to state, sometimes even every few kilometers. Unfortunately, according to PLSI (People’s Linguistic Survey of India) 400 of 780 languages in the country face extinction. A lot of people have slowly stopped talking in their mother tongue due to embarrassment or globalization laying higher importance to learn international languages etc.
The Mother Tongue Project—an One September initiative—is an attempt to bring awareness about possible extinction of native languages and to send out a message that every language is beautiful in its own way. This project is a fusion of type, design and linguistics. It blends letters from different languages with the shapes of various musical instruments.
The Mother Tongue Project was a 30 day campaign which was run all over the November month. As the first step, We have picked 30 languages from all over the world with a good mix of Indian and foreign languages, according to what intrigued us most. We believe there is a larger scope for this project and it might become bigger through different creative collaborations. For now, we are taking one step at a time.
It was a challenging and a fulfilling experience, as we got to explore and learn about different scripts around the world. I would like to thank our design head Jpax for letting me be a part of this project, and entire One September team for their support and motivation.
The Mother-tongue Project was featured in homegrown, type of India, cultureopedia and, India Design Project.
Platform magazine published an article about it. You can read more about the project here.
