Zimbabwe: Killing Our Languages Slowly

analysis

IN our desperate hunger to master the English language, we did not see the slow death of our mother tongues. Thirty two years after independence, we woke up one day to see our children talking in English to relatives and friends on Facebook but unable to speak Shona, Ndebele, Kalanga, Tonga, Ndau or any of our Zimbabwean languages. When our parents want to talk to these children, we step in to become translators of the English language to our parents and translators of the mother tongue to our children.

Translating languages this way is a difficult job and we are not doing it so well. At the same time, we are slowly killing the language of our mothers.

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