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A television game show in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos has an unforgiving rule: Speak English and you lose. For a U.S.-born millennial in the audience and a student of her parents’ mother tongue, the high-stakes setting is a perfect classroom.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old Canadian speaks to a teacher about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away in Zimbabwe, learning a language her parents feared she would never speak. “Mhoroi,” Nyashadzashe Machingura says cheerfully with a pronounced Canadian accent while greeting in Zimbabwe’s vernacular Shona.
The scenes capture a new generation of interest and entrepreneurship around African languages once pushed to the margins by decades of colonialism. Often seen as secondary to English, French, and Portuguese, they are enjoying a renaissance that is also creating business opportunities.
Africa is home to over 1 billion people speaking roughly a third of the world’s languages, with between 1,500 and 3,000 across 54 countries, according to UNESCO.
Experts say the revival in some of them is driven partly by second- and third-generation Africans in the diaspora finding it easier to reconnect with their roots and communicate with older relatives, thanks to social media, online learning, and entertainment.
English remains the dominant language for education, business, and government affairs in the Southern African nation that officially recognizes 16 mostly Indigenous languages.
“When you talk of Africa, you talk of English, French, Portuguese,” said Believe Mubonderi, a linguistics lecturer at Zimbabwe Open University. His research notes the importance of ensuring that African languages have a place in technologies shaping how people communicate, learn and trade. “In most cases, African languages were sidelined. They were never exposed or modernized to be used in commerce, science and technology,” he said. “When a language has a very low status, there’s a danger that that language eventually becomes endangered.”
Governments and international organizations are trying to reverse that trend.
The African Union’s 2022 decision to adopt Kiswahili, spoken in much of East Africa, as an official working language has raised its international profile.
This article was provided by The Associated Press.