Mother tongue matters in an English-dominated society

I think it’s no coincidence that my first column this year centres on language, what it means to a society and the signi­ficance of the cultural heritage it holds.

This week, I had to give some fairly technical presentations in my mother tongue, isi­Xhosa, as part of Google’s pilot project
of making business development tools for journalists available in various countries’ native tongues.

As I prepared for the presentation, it quickly dawned on me that although I am fluently conversant in isiXhosa, I am more at ease speaking in English, a language I use without batting an eyelid during presentations and while giving talks, writing articles and in my personal life with loved ones.

As I reflected on my discomfort during the isiXhosa presentation, I grappled with why it unsettled me. I also shared how I felt with friends and family, who said they would have felt the same because it isn’t easy using our native tongues within a work context, mostly because a lot of English words do not exist in our native lexicons.

You see, we live in a society that does not reflect us back to ourselves in language, culture or examples of what it looks like to move through the world in full expression of our culture. It is in moments like these that we have to face the fact that colonial conquest stole our languages and relegated them to second-, third- and, in South Africa, up to 11th-place status. This was while English was being rammed down our throats, making it our actual first language.

The topic of mother tongue in South Africa is not altogether uncommon. It’s now playing out in the education sector, with research showing that learning in one’s mother tongue yields better educational outcomes. In fact, Unesco has been doing a lot of work on reprising mother tongue use, stating that “most importantly, multilingual education based on the mother tongue empowers all learners to fully take part in society. It fosters mutual understanding and respect for one another and helps preserve the wealth of cultural and traditional heritage that is embedded in every language around the world.

“There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world today. But linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened as more and more languages disappear at an alarming rate. And when a language disappears, it takes with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage.”

However, although there is strong advocacy for the use of mother tongue education in schools, the same is not reflected in our day-to-day lives as we navigate workspaces that almost exclusively use English. Government departments use English, important communication from institutions is in English, road signs, shops, the majority of television shows, the internet... and so it goes on.

What this reinforces is the prioritisation of one language. However, there is also the practical question of how are we to navigate such considerations in a linguistically and culturally plural society?

I don’t claim to have any clear-cut answers. However, I do think the crisis of confidence I experienced this week is a clear indication that we need to speak more about meeting one another with cultural honesty and a commitment to preserving our languages. If not, then the destructive colonial legacy of empire wins. DM

Zukiswa Pikoli is Daily Maverick’s managing editor for Maverick Citizen and news.

This story first appeared in our weekly DM168 newspaper, available countrywide for R35.