Mother Tongues Learning Hub

Learn from experts at your own pace

Our Learning Hub

Mother Tongues Learning Hub is an online platform that provides unlimited access to training courses, videos and materials to support you in learning more about bilingualism in children.

The Learning Hub is a central repository for training courses and materials developed by Mother Tongues and hosts video lessons delivered by expert speakers, articles on all aspects of bilingualism and parents resources that you can download and use with your children. Whether you are a first-time parent of a bilingual child, or you are juggling three languages in your day-to-day family life, you will find useful content and tools to help you on your journey.

With a once-off payment of € 59, you will have unlimited access to our platform and special discounts on books.

Mother Tongues is a not-for-profit organisation, and all our profit is reinvested in our mission. You can read more about our vision, mission and programmes here.

Is there fake positivity towards being bilingual?

Mother Tongues has polled parents about their experience of raising bilingual kids with Irish or any other language. We were interested in finding out more about parents’ experiences and challenges, and whether they felt supported by individuals around them in the journey to bilingualism.

These are our main findings:

70.5% of parents always speak their mother tongue with their children

70.5%

Only 28.9% of children always speak the parents' mother tongue back

28.9%

Only 27.7% of families manage to sustain regular conversations in their mother tongue *where both parents and children use the mother tongue.

27.7%

36.1% of parents don’t feel supported at all by their community

36.1%

64% of parents who do not regularly speak their mother tongue to their child struggle to avoid switching to English.

64%

We want to change the narrative and encourage all of you to reap the benefits of bilingualism!

We are an Irish family with a French background on my part. My mother is French, and I grew up in a bilingual home. When my Irish husband and I had our first son, Dara, 5 years ago, I didn't speak French to him. I deeply regretted it when we went on holiday to France and he couldn't communicate with his French cousins. When we had our second child, Amelie, 18 months ago, I was thinking about the idea of speaking French to her but I didn't have the motivation because I thought perhaps it was too late for me to start, until I read a wonderful article written by Soraya Sobrevía in Mother Tongues. She wrote about the joy of her daughters growing up in Ireland, being able to speak her mother tongue of Spanish. The article inspired me to do the same so I started speaking French to my daughter. I also became a member of Mother Tongues as I needed guidance to figure out how best to support both my children to learn my home language. I have found the online webinars and toolkits very useful and the facilitators are excellent at answering my specific questions to meet the needs of my family. And most of all, I am already beginning to see results.

Céline, Dublin

Fast forward 20 years

Listen to the stories of those who will be forever grateful to their parents to have kept insisting and those who sadly admit that they feel a part of them is lost in translation, for not being able to communicate with half of the family or not having the possibility to fully embrace their origins.