WHEN Kingsley Omosigho joins hundreds of others walking across Commonwealth Bridge next week to mark International Mother Language Day he’ll have a very special reason for being there.

For while by day he’s a senior policy adviser with the National Innovation and Science Agenda; after-hours Omosigho is a passionate advocate for the right of all people to express themselves in their mother tongues.

This is his 17th year in Canberra and, while thoroughly acclimatised to Australian ways and sympathetic to those brought up in a monolingual culture, he is determined that his seven-year-old son should know the language of his forebears.

That language is Benin, spoken mostly in Nigeria, the land of his birth and he’s busy preparing an app for mobile devices that will enable children to speak their families’ mother tongue.

“This means it will be a platform to be used in Australia by original Australians and not just people from overseas,” he says.

“As a parent, if I don’t transmit my language and my culture, my children won’t be able to pass it on to their kids, my grandchildren,” he tells “CityNews”.

“The real importance of mother tongues is that they give children a different lens through which to view life – unfortunately, if you speak only one language, you have only one way to view the world,” he says.

Omosigho was first drawn into the International Mother Language Movement and met its president, Canberra economist Ziaul Hoque, after a colleague at the ANU told him about the UNESCO-designated International Mother Language Day.

Hoque, who describes Omosigho as a “language champion”, told “CityNews” that he had walked with them across Commonwealth Bridge from the first Canberra event in 2014, at which he also spoke about the importance of mother languages.

Hoque says International Mother Language Day is held worldwide on February 21 in commemoration of the Bangla people’s struggle to retain their mother tongue, Bengali. Because it falls on a weekday this year, it will be marked on the following weekend.

Luckily, Omosigho’s seven-year-old son’s generation is “technology savvy” and, if the app is well designed, it won’t be a task but a game that he can play in competition with his friends.
“I’m in the process of forming a team, I’ve been basically doing it on my own, but now I’m looking for people with skills,” he says. He’d be very happy to hear from anyone interested in helping with his project by email to kingsley.omo@hotmail.com

The two-kilometre International Mother Language Day Walk begins at the International Flag Display behind Questacon car park at 10am and ends near Stage 88, where there will be free activities for children. Inquiries to 0408 089235.