Tema morsmål – support for multilingual education

Tema Morsmål is a website that offers resources to support different mother tongues and multilingual work in child care, mother tongue education and bilingual education in schools.

It offers learning resources in a wide variety of mother tongues for all employees in kindergartens and schools, focusing especially on multilingual staff in kindergartens, mother tongue teachers, bilingual teachers and teachers in special Norwegian schools and for minority language children and parents.

Tema Morsmål communicates current information about native language and multilingualism, both nationally and internationally, from research environments to educational practice and builds networks for the site’s current audiences.

The website’s main language is Norwegian but it has also versions in Arabic , in Dari, in Sorani Kurdish, in Lithuanian, in Pashto, in Persian, in Polish, in Russian, in Somali, in Spanish, in Tamil, in Thai, in Tigrinya, in Turkish and in Urdu.

Nypon förlag – lättläst också på andra språk

Nypon förlag is a publishing house located in Helsingborg, Sweden, specialized in books that are easy to read (lättläst/ selkokieli). It publishes books mainly in Swedish but also in other languages, either as bilingual or monolingual publications. The languages of the collection  include Arabic, Dari, English, French, German,  Meänkieli, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Somali, Spanish, Swedish and Tigrinya.   

The mission of Nypon förlaget is that all the children have an opportunity to become great readers, develope their language(s), imagination, the pleasure of reading and thus their learning skills.

Story Sharing Universum

Story Sharing Universum is a project which helps immigrants, asylum seekers and Finns to meet and share stories together in several languages. The project has two parts: Story Sharing Cafés, which are open to the public, and storytelling workshops for asylum seekers at reception centres. Story sharing cafés have developed work formats that permit to communicate in a multilingual way with guides who speak different mother languages. The group speaks at least Arabic, English, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, French, Dari, Pashto and Farsi (/Persian).

Story sharing café is a part of City of Helsinki’s official integration programme for year 2017.

Multilingual Library, Helsinki, Finland

The Multilingual Library is located in Pasila Library, Helsinki and its collections cover over 80 languages. Customers living outside of Helsinki can order all materials to their local libraries around Finland.

The Multilingual library also hosts a blog about current topics related to literature and multilingualism. The blog has blogs in English and occasionally in other languages, e.g. in Somali, Persian and Arabic.

Customers who cannot find their own language among the language collection can suggest items to add to the collection.

In the book collection you find books at least in the following languages:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Bengali, Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, Bulgarian, Burmese, Byelorussian, Catalan,  Chinese,  Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Esperanto, Estonian, Faroese, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek,  Greenlandic, Gujarati,  Hebrew,  Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Karelian, Khmer, Komi, Korean, Kurdish, Latin, Latvian, Lingala, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Mari, Nepalese, Norwegian, Pashto, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romani, Romanian, Russian, Sanskrit, Sámi, Sign language, Slovakian, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Tagalog, Tamili, Tatar, Telugu,  Thai, Tigrinya,  Turkish,  Ukrainian,  Urdu, Vietnamese and Yiddish

The mother languages of the permanent staff at Pasila Library, which is the physical location of Multilingual Library, include Finnish, Swedish, English, Russian, Estonian and Somali.