The Intricacies Of Language – Why We Shouldn’t Speak Foreign Languages At Home With Our Children Part 2

This is the concluding part of my two-part piece on why Ghanaian parents should not speak English at home with their children.

“Herh! Leave There!” - The Appalling “English” We Speak At Home With Our Children.

Ghanaians have been blessed with a multitude of beautiful languages, each of which is a beautiful mosaic of the people’s history, culture and perspective.  In addition, colonialism has brought us English, which is our official language and the language of instruction in our schools. Unfortunately, English is gradually becoming the language of instruction at home in urban areas, among the educated classes. It is, in fact, becoming the first language of many urban children; a trend I find worrying for a number of reasons.

First of all, the children will speak English at school, anyway, and so do not need to speak English only at home.  Some parents claim that speaking English only at home helps the child to pick up the language and so do well at school. This is not wholly true, as teaching the child poor grammar will actually put him at a disadvantage. The child will pick the language up alright in school and master it with the help of books and other audiovisual learning aids. My parents, though highly educated, made it a point to speak Asante Twi at home with their children. I doubt very much that anyone could say that my sisters and I speak English or Asante Twi badly.  In fact, it was the norm while I was growing up in the ‘80’s and 90’s to find parents speaking their mother-tongues at home with their children; so when and how did this phenomenon creep into our homes?

Second, we, the parent generation for the most part, grew up speaking our mother-tongues as the primary or even sole language of communication in our homes. Thus, as bilingual as we claim to be, we tend to think in our mother-tongue, even when we are speaking English, hence our funny transliterations and the bad English we teach our children.  It is common to hear a parent say to their child as they hand them a toffee, a toy, etc: ”take,” “get,” or “collect”, instead of the more appropriate expressions “here, take this,” or “here you go.”   Other transliterated or just plain weird expressions that seem to be quite common are: “I will go and come” (to mean I’ll be right back) or “go and come, eh.”(to mean come back later); [i]“The money will not reach” or “the money is not up to” (to mean it is insufficient) and [ii]“On the light,” where “on” is used as a verb to give a command to turn on the lights! These funny expressions have no meaning, whatsoever for other speakers of English, so if the aim, in speaking English with the child is to make him or her communicate easily with others, then it has been totally defeated.

A direct consequence of speaking English at home is that our children will not have enough exposure to their respective Ghanaian mother-tongues and so will end up either speaking them very badly or not at all. This makes them awkward when they come into situations when they need to communicate with people in the Ghanaian languages. We end up only further alienating our children from their roots and culture. I think it is a terrible thing to put a child in an environment where he cannot communicate with others. This is invariably what we do when we speak English at home with them in our posh little cosmopolitan world, which is hardly representative of the country we live in. Ours is still largely illiterate and one needs to be able to speak at least one local language to function well. It is imperative, in fact, when one seeks political office.

Moreover, when English becomes the only language that we speak with our children, we rob them of their God-given multilingual cultural heritage. Some parents argue that speaking multiple languages with your child confuses him, but this could not be farther from the truth. The fact is that, research has shown that there are many benefits to children being bilingual or multilingual, such as ability to think quickly and to resolve complex issues, since different languages have different kinds of syntax and moving from one language to another demands a cognitive dexterity that being monolingual does not provide.  Now, the Europeans insist that each child at secondary/high school level learn at least two other European languages. Even previously neglected regional languages are being revived and taught in schools, because they now realise the importance of diversity.  In the United States of America, children are being trained to be bilingual, with television programmes such as “Dora the Explorer,” incorporating rudimentary Spanish into their dialogues. Why, then, do we want to rob our children of their right to be multilingual?

It is interesting to note that the immigrant or foreign student who never spoke his mother-tongue at home, still cannot blend in because he has an accent! He still has to write TOEFL if he wants to pursue higher education in the UK, US and Canada and will always be classified as a non-native speaker of English. Even finding a language teaching/coaching job to help pay his bills while he’s a student would be difficult because clients would prefer native speakers of English to him. He would be unable to blend in there, or in his native country because of a language barrier. In the face of this, how then can we justify making our children foreigners in their native land and robbing them of the ability to blend in and belong? It just does not make sense!

I am yet to come across a 2^nd generation Hispanic or Asian (especially Chinese) in the US or UK, who does not speak his parents’ native tongue at home. They, more often than not, speak the language fluently. When it comes to the immigrant African, especially Ghanaman, it is the exception rather than the rule. Even where he or she speaks his/her mother tongue fluently, when he or she has children, he will speak English with them and so they will lose their language and claims to their heritage. The sad thing about this situation is that these children born to immigrant parents are never really accepted in the Western society. For as long as you carry an African name, that is all you will ever be; so why not give your child something to hold on to…an identity that he or she can cherish, knowing that when they come to the motherland for visits, they will belong?

In this era of globalisation, languages die every day, as the number of speakers steadily dwindles each year.  We put our respective languages in danger of dying out when we speak English alone at home with our children, because when these children grow up, they, in turn, will speak English at home with their children and before we know it, English would have become the mother-tongue of the cosmopolitan Ghanaian. What really gets my goat is that the semi-literate, or those who speak English badly have a penchant for speaking “English” with their children. Because they think it is posh to do so!

As pointed out earlier, language is a record of all the experiences of a people. This is very apparent in idiomatic expressions and in the rich and colourful proverbs that Africans love to decorate their speech with. There is a lot of native wisdom in these proverbs, as they deal with all aspects of life – how to live peaceably with one’s family and neighbours (especially important in a communal/compound house setting), what to eat and even how to cook it, local (herbal) medicines...the list is endless! Since our forefathers did not have a means of writing down what knowledge they had acquired, they transferred them through language – especially in the form of proverbs. We lose all this native wisdom when we trade our native language for another’s.

When we take on a foreign language, we take on all aspects of the culture that speaks that language and so we need to understand what we say and why we say what we say in the way we say it, so that we will be able to communicate clearly and effectively. How, for example, do you explain to your curious five-year old why we say ”saved by the bell,” when you have no appreciation of the cultural norm that brought about this expression?  This reminds me of a story: at an Accra nursery school’s Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols, during which the children sang Ïn The Bleak Mid-Winter, when the children got to the end of the first verse; ”snow had fallen, snow on snow; snow on snow on snow” the teacher who was conducting them started shouting emphatically and excitedly: “Snow!” over and over again. He obviously had never seen snow before and so had no idea how utterly miserable mid-winter is, especially when you have snow on snow on snow! 

It is my humble opinion that our lack of local official languages is an obstacle to our development. If we will not think, let alone write in our native language, how then can we develop the language to take in all these new technology-related words that keep springing up every day? We can hardly catch up with the rest of the world on this score and yet we are working extra hard at making our mother-tongues even more obsolete by speaking English at home with our spouses and children!

When we lose our mother-tongue, we not only lose the ability to communicate with our people; we lose our history, our cultural worldview and norms, our sense of identity and of nationhood...we lose everything! If we recognise the fact that language is the repository of our people’s experiences, culture and norms and our history as a people, and yet the most easily lost or subdued aspect of a culture, we will take steps to protect our heritage. Let us take pride in our mother-tongues and speak them with our children. Let us protect our heritage and equip our children to thrive in their own native land. It is the least we could do for them!

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[i] Top 20 most irritating Ghanaian English phrases of all time by Delalorm Kpeli inghana.wordpress.com. Retrieved on 04/04/12.

[ii] Top 20 most irritating Ghanaian English phrases of all time by Delalorm Kpeli inghana.wordpress.com. Retrieved on 04/04/12

For a list of funny, or rather, appalling “English” expressions parents commonly use when speaking to their children, read Top 20 most irritating Ghanaian English phrases of all time by Delalorm Kpeli on his blog: inghana.wordpress.com.