Eat, speak and play like our ancestors

Like many foreigners and immigrants in the United States, African people might also struggle about how to maintain their native, first, or heritage language in this mainstream English-speaking society. African-born children in America fall into the category of heritage language learners who are raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, speak or merely understand the heritage language, and are to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language. ¹ Unlike children from Latin America and Asia to which linguistic assistance is somehow offered sparingly, African children do not always receive supports in various settings. For example, in professional sites such as workplaces, hospitals, and stores, Spanish, Chinese, or Vietnamese visuals are made available to accommodate the language needs of people, but not of those of African origins. Likewise, social and cultural communities such as worship, leisure, or sports centers lack staff members who possess linguistic competence about Africa, but sometimes have Latino or Asian staff. It is understood that for a continent with between 2,000 to 3,000 languages and 8,000 dialects ² spoken in 54 countries. ³ It seems unrealistic to always find interpreters to facilitate the communication for African people in America. Sometimes, especially in big cities with a high percentage of African immigrants, widely spoken languages including Swahili, Amharic, Arabic, and Hausa are used among people during social gatherings. This situation leaves those who live in small communities without any country mates unable to socialize with people who share their language. Similarly, African people who do not know one of those main African languages do not have the opportunity to practice their mother tongue in groups. Therefore, often, home remains the only place to keep the African native language alive, especially for children. To that extent, parents play an important role in helping their offspring in not only the maintenance of the native language, but especially the transmission of the heritage culture because as pointed out by Lily Wong Fillmore, languages erode and are lost when parents do not pass them on their children. ⁴