A Slippery Mother Tongue

26.09.08

The phrase “mother tongue” is thrown around very liberally to refer to the dominant language of your family, but how many of us can really speak our so-called mother tongues fluently?
This becomes more evident when we try to either speak to our elders or to teach our children the language of their fore-fathers.

A conversation with the grandmother of my best friend always reminds me I never did master Xhosa – my home language. This realisation is usually met with a mixture of guilt and arrogance.

We greet each other in a different way. While I reply that I am 'okay' (ndikhona) when she asks how I have been – she always looks me in the eye (as if to straighten out my Xhosa) and says to me, 'Ndiyaphila'. Xhosa for I am well.

I have been schooled in English since I was nine years old. While many may accuse me of looking a gift horse in the mouth (I now have a fair working knowledge of the universal language), not knowing my vernacular very well has always left me vulnerable.

Expressing my thoughts and feelings accurately in either English or Xhosa has always proved to be a difficult feat. I tend to add a little English to my Xhosa and Xhosa to English to convey a message to my family. But I have no working knowledge of the language. The verbs, adjectives, nouns and pro-nouns... I can't write in Xhosa.

But growing up in Soweto has afforded me the luxury of tapping into a few other languages as well, including Zulu, Sesotho, Setswana and on a good day, Venda.

Now that I am on the verge of putting together my own family – I ask myself when I want English to be introduced to them.

While I may appreciate that English is a universal language, Xhosa is my heritage and Kilobedu is my beau's. While we may want our children to be proud Africans and speak their home language, there is immense pressure to have them schooled in English from a very young age in the age of broadening their world view.

A friend of mine once told me his mother hid the fact that she was Shangaan speaking from him. He says his mother only spoke her language to them in their home when their father was away. Now that he is older he understands his mother was trying to save him from the taunting she may have endured as a young child.

But in reality all she has done was encourage her child to never learn the language, the culture's intricacies.

He has endorsed English as his first language, leaving the rest of his family to feel backward for daring to communicate with it.

I am sensitive to the plight of these kinds of people but my best friend feels we are solely to blame. "He has had the chance to learn Shangaan. Just like you and I have taken to reading the Bible on in our home language to heighten understanding – anyone that does not take to correcting misperceptions of the past on their own has no real value for their languages," she says.

What do you think? How important is it to talk to your children in your mother tongue? When should you introduce English? And when should English speakers introduce an indigenous African language?

Source: Women24 Columnist, Nozipho Masabalala, finds herself twisting her tongue around South Africa's many languages, including her own.