Raising a child away from my home country is not an easy task. She may never ever experience life the way I did ( I sob for all the raka-raka, maflawu, hwishu and nhodo games she will never play). Granted, she probably will not suffer through half the things I did either but recently I have been wondering if its worth it?
I don’t know where things went wrong but what I do know is this, language corrosion started way before people started moving to other countries. I, for one do not use a lot of my vernacular words. Let’s take tea for example, I call it tii (a word borrowed from the English language) but the true Shona word for it is tsvutugadzike or the bicycle that we call bhasikoro (which is what you get on google too if you ask it for the shona word) but its proper name is bhizautare.. I guess Shona wasn’t cool.
I never really thought about it before, but because I am a mother now, I think about these things. I am raising a child away from home. Already she won’t experience a lot of our culture. Teaching her our language is the least I can do. I need her to be proud of it and flaunt it because it really is who and what we are. It’s sad how many words are dying and disappearing from our language. I can’t teach what I do not know but I will do my best with what I do know.
I am scared somewhere down the line, generations to come will be left with nothing of my language. How will they truly express themselves or our culture? Will they know Tsuro naGudo stories? Will they still have all the sub-Shona languages 50 years from now? Will they truly understand who we are without an understanding of our language? Without our language that understanding will be lost.
Preservation of African languages is vital, if we are not careful our languages will die. Let’s make vernacular cool again.
Amari Blog 
Great thoughts…I love it when you wrote, ‘Let’s make vernacular cool again!’. My 7th grade teacher used to talk about a pandemic called Language Acquired Deficiency Syndrome (LADS), and one of my aunts used to make reference to Cultural Poverty. And l see these buddies walking hand in hand killing what you are advocating for. The struggle is on.
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I love it when you wrote, ‘Let’s make vernacular cool again!’. My 7th grade teacher used to talk about a pandemic called Language Acquired Deficiency Syndrome (LADS), and one of my aunts used to make reference to Cultural Poverty. And l see these buddies walking hand in hand killing what you are advocating for. The struggle is on.
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One mind at a time. Thanks for the read!
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In Yoruba language we have a lot of “ear-borrowed” words from English too. Eg. Moto which is motor/car is “oko” in Yoruba
School is pronounced “shukulu” is actually ile-iwe which translates to house-book meaning a house/building for learning books.
But like in your clime, many people don’t know the original vernacular words anymore. In Nigeria, we’re taught these languages in school but not constantly communicating with them makes it easier to forget.
More like we just learn it to pass that class and that’s all.
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Exactly my point. It’s sad to see.
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[…] ago I wrote about how we need to preserve language to preserve culture. You can find that post here. African languages are dying at scary […]
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