DOING MY HERITAGE TONGUE

African languages constitute approximately thirty percent of languages spoken around the world. However, owing to a range of factors, these African languages are rarely needed outside of the heritage communities of these languages, and hence, diasporic groups, and others, have limited use for these languages.

Yet, members of these ethnic groups do travel globally, and are hurled into contexts which require communication, in other languages. Not having the support of their heritage languages and communities renders these individuals vulnerable.

At times, however, groups emerge that consider and attempt to resolve this vulnerability, and hence organize support systems that encourage and give access to the use of these minority heritage languages for those who belong to respective language and cultural communities.

It is a truism that these communities  migrate, or temporarily sojourn in other countries, and the need for the use of the heritage language can wane. At these times, the knowledge of and competence in these languages declines, thus reducing the linguistic affordances of those in these communities.

Such language revitalization in diasporic contexts such as Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, can provide many benefits, such as the dissemination of cultural varieties, the education of larger society in such cultural and linguistic pluralities, and the reduced need for government programs for the internationalization of these diasporic contexts.

In each of certan parts of Canada, for example, respective communities speak their minority languages, which can at times number several hundred speakers, or less. However, at times, these communities have much larger numbers, and can thus become an almost mainstream language, where the community also attempts to draw in other outside populations through formal education in the form of classes, programs, schools, and so forth.

One such example is Jambo, as the only language school in Quebec, in Canada. Jambo provides courses on African languages, such as Swahili, Bambara, Lingala, Wolof, Tshibula, Yemba, and also Kikongo.

Operating for oever ten years, Jambo aims to increase the awareness and use of African languages, and in the process to sustain the life of these languages. Yet, the original purpose of the school was to assist communities originally of African heritage to use their languages vis-a-vis a waning awareness and use of these languages. The languages were experiencing a denigration, and the school acted to reverse this decline.