Wiki Loves Mother Tongue Launches 2026 Campaign

Wikimedia has launched the third edition of its ‘Wiki Loves Mother Tongues Campaign 2026’.

The month-long campaign, which runs from February 21 to March 21, 2026, is a global initiative aimed at celebrating linguistic diversity and promoting knowledge of native languages.

According to UNESCO and the UN, a language dies every two weeks, meaning about 25 to 26 languages go extinct each year, with over 40 per cent of the world’s 7,000 languages at risk. Researchers have also warned that fewer than 5 per cent of the world’s languages are currently safe in the digital age.

In Nigeria, Tinubu’s administration recently scrapped language studies in secondary school curriculum, further endangering already vulnerable Nigerian languages, including the Igbo language.

Languages die when a people stop speaking their mother tongue, preferring dominant or colonialists’ languages that offer them more economic or educational opportunities.

Through the ‘Wiki Loves Mother Tongue’ campaign, it is not only creating new content and improving old ones on Wikimedia, but it is also preserving and creating visibility for hundreds of native languages, and more importantly, making knowledge more inclusive and (digitally) accessible.

To participate in the campaign, Chief Launcher of the campaign, Tochi Precious, said individuals and communities can register on the dashboard of the ‘Wiki Loves Mother Tongue’ Campaign to ensure their contributions are tracked. Contributions range from creating new articles in one’s local language to improving existing articles across the Wiki platform, translating existing Wikipedia pages, or uploading oral histories and language recordings.

Campaigns can be one-day or one-off events, week- or fortnight-long events, or month-long programmes. There will be awards for the top three individual and community contributors, recognition of an outstanding community organiser, and certificates of participation for all campaign participants.

However, Wiki Community member Chinonso Chisom urged potential contributors to prioritise quality over quantity.

“We strongly encourage participants to translate into their own languages. We also advise them not to rely solely on Google Translate results. Here, collaborative contribution is key. Ask members of your campaign community or language experts to help in translating words, sentences, or phrases that you find particularly difficult,” he said.