Don’t turn your kids into Englishmen and women

I have heard parents aspire for their children to speak only English or they prioritise speaking the English language above their own African languages.

I have often wondered why parents’ choices around languages often almost place English as superior to their own home languages. I have come to realise that this trend is often embedded in fear. Fear of children not progressing in school, fear of their children being the odd one out.

Parents also have an unspoken disregard of their own languages, internalised traumas of their own language journeys that they do not wish upon their children. It has also become glaring that black people use a person’s ability to articulate themselves clearly in English as an indicator of intelligence, of success.

It is all these things that make parents choose English, even when study after study tell us that children who are taught in their mother tongue in the early years of learning tend to do better later in school and that their acquisition of a second and even third language is a lot more seamless. Black parents however still want their children to start grade R in an English medium school.

Some parents ask why they should even choose an African language as a First or Second Additional Language when there aren’t enough “good” high schools where their children can do the additional language of their choice. Others are convinced that an African language will do their children no good.

Many are unwilling to challenge the status quo in the schools where their children are. No requests for African languages to be made available to their children or for more language options. But how can these requests be made by the very parents that have devalued African languages? It is a strange phenomenon given the history of SA, and the Soweto uprising of 1976, how is it then that even as we have a painful history of identity and language, we still prefer that our children speak English and in some cases Afrikaans rather than any African language?

I do not have the answers to these questions, save to say I have a observed these language choices since I have worked with children for most of my life. It is heartbreaking to watch a child who identifies as umZulu, for instance, and can barely pronounce her name and surname, let alone speak the language.

It is even more heartbreaking when that child realises they cannot speak their home language, not only do they deliberately avoid those who are likely to speak isiZulu, this child also feels embarrassed and ashamed, and as the children grow older they resent their parents who did not teach them their mother tongue.

We steal much more than we can comprehend when we take away a child’s home language, we steal their identity, their experiences, their connection with a world of extended families and ancestors, we steal their humanness, we rob them of so much more than we give them through the English language.

May we create better futures for our children, but not at the expense of their entire identities. May we teach our children, not just the importance of African languages but the practice of being eloquent in their home languages. It is an injustice not to do so.