Weaving Tongues: How Language Moves with Us

 

“To speak is to remember. To remember is to belong.”


By HerDithy Digital | Global Voices: Roots & Routes | June Edition

When We Migrate, Our Languages Migrate Too

Across oceans, over borders, through the whispered hush of goodbye at airport gates—our tongues travel with us.

Long before passports, language was our first identity card. Etched on the walls of wombs and woven into lullabies, it carried the weight of ancestors, grief, livestock counts, lullabies, and coded survival prayers. Language isn’t just words. It’s breathwork. Memory. Geography disguised as grammar.

So when we move, it moves.
 Sometimes with pride.
 Sometimes in pieces.

🌍 Today, over 7,000 languages are spoken across the globe. Yet according to UNESCO, nearly 40% are endangered—spoken by fewer and fewer people each year.

The Matriarchs of Language: Mothers, Aunties, Caregivers


Before school. Before church. Before cartoons.
 A child’s first language is shaped in the kitchen, on a hip, by a hum. It’s women—mothers, aunties, grandmothers, sisters—who are often the first language transmitters.

Linguists call it “primary language socialization”, and studies like those from Prof. Elinor Ochs (UCLA) and Bambi Schieffelin (NYU) show that children learn not just words, but values, emotion, and identity through the everyday language of women in their early lives.

So when language gets lost, it is often the silence of women that echoes first.

In multilingual African households, it’s common for a mother to be the linguistic bridge—softly blending Gĩkũyũ, English, and Kiswahili in the same sentence, long before the child learns how to read.

These women are our first poets.
 First oracles.
 First grammar teachers.

The Accent is a Story, Not a Mistake


The world has a complicated relationship with accents.
 Some are romanticized (French, Italian). Others? Mocked. Silenced. Rejected.

According to a 2020 study by the University of Chicago, people often perceive accented speakers as less credible—even when they’re saying the exact same thing as a native speaker. This reveals a dangerous bias: that “sounding global” too often means “sounding Western.”

But for many, an accent is an archive.
 A braid of geographies. A musical note of migration.
 It tells us: I came from somewhere. I carry more than one world inside me.

And in places like Nairobi, Johannesburg, or Lagos, it’s not uncommon to hear a teenager say:
 “Wueh, si you chill!”—seamlessly blending Sheng, Kiswahili, English, and flair.

This is not confusion.
 This is genius.

When the Mother Tongue Becomes the Forgotten One

UNESCO estimates that a language disappears every two weeks.
 Gone.
 Just like that.
 With it disappears a worldview: indigenous medicine, rituals, climate wisdom, storytelling.

In many African urban homes, children no longer speak the languages their great-grandmothers wept in. Sometimes it's shame. Sometimes, it’s a result of schooling systems that label native tongues as backward, or even punish children for using them.

But increasingly, the loss is unintentional—a quiet consequence of globalization and survival. Parents, hoping to equip their children for jobs in “international” spaces, swap out Ewe or Chichewa for English and French.

Yet every language lost is a memory erased.

Young People Are Fighting Back—With Apps, Memes, and Reels

Across Africa and the diaspora, young people are refusing to forget.

  • In Kenya, platforms like ShengApp are preserving the fast-evolving urban slang by creating a searchable dictionary.

  • In Nigeria, tech innovators are building tools to digitize Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa for AI compatibility.

  • On TikTok, creators blend fashion, culture, and language to reclaim dialects with pride and humor.

This isn’t nostalgia.
 It’s digital resistance.
 It’s linguistic survival, by design.

Because Language is a Type of Freedom

To speak your language—without fear, without apology—is a radical act.
 It’s declaring: I belong. And I bring my whole self to the table.

Languages are not dying.
 They’re being reborn in hashtags.
 Remixed in trap beats.
 Rewritten in code.

When women whisper them into the ears of babies,
 When teens blast them through their earphones,
 When diasporans Google how to say "home" in their mother tongue—
 They live.

So, What Tongue Are You Weaving Today?

Is it your grandmother’s?
 Your own hybrid?
 A new language of love, diaspora, and defiance?

Wherever you are, whatever your route—remember this:
 Your tongue carries roots.
 And roots remember.

🧠 References & Stats

  • UNESCO – Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger

  • University of Chicago (Lev-Ari & Keysar, 2010) – Study on accents and credibility

  • Elinor Ochs & Bambi Schieffelin – Language socialization research in early childhood

  • ShengApp (Kenya) – Urban language preservation

  • YorubaName.com – A crowd-sourced linguistic archive

  • Endangered Languages Project – Tracking languages at risk

#GlobalVoices #RootsAndRoutes #HerDithyJune #WeavingTongues #MotherTongueMatters #LinguisticFreedom #AfricanLanguages #AccentPower #CodeSwitchQueens #DiasporaDigital

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