Sometimes back every one knew how to speak her mother tongue. Heck others even knew to speak more than one language. When we were kids our main language was Kisii kama ile ya akina @Eng’iti @Koolibah@Emamba@Etigere. Kiswahili was way foreign to us. Fast forward to today I can still speak Kisii but not very fluently since moving to Nairobi. I speak as if I am looking for words to say and am slow in doing it sometimes mixing it with kiswahili. Nikiwa ocha I sometimes have to tell guys to speak slowly ndo nieze kuelewa wanasema nini since they speak so fast you would think they are rapping. Mimi hata nko afadhali.
Nowadays its not hard to find someone who can’t even speak her mother tongue. Kids nowadays speak sheng’ and broken english leave alone speaking fluent Kiswahili and English. No one can be blamed though times are changing. The bad thing is that most parents are presurring their kids to learn foreign languages like Italian, French, Spanish or German yet they can’t even speak their mother tongue. Its so bad that when you go upcountry its your parents acting like translators yet its your own language. There this Kisii lady we used to hang out sometimes back she was really pretty but couldn’t speak any single word of the language. When going to Kisii I usually act as the translator.
My folks had this tradition of taking us back to ocha every holiday (April, August & Dec) while still young. This was their attempt at making us not forget our language…many years later, I still can write and speak my local language very well…always feels so good. It’s something I’ll do with my family too in future
Yes, It’s proving to be quite difficult. They say the age to grasp or maybe learn a language better is when one’s young…so I guess my parents knew this when they did what they did…unazoesha mtoto kuenda ocha akiwa mdogo…you let them mingle with relaz there, do those traditional chores etc such that by the time they’re growing into adults they’re better off…
My grandma fluently spoke 4 languages. Luo, Luhya, Kikuyu , Kisii because she was a business lady. If a particular language soothes or interests one, you can learn it. Otherwise, in China, do as the Chinese do. Learning Luo( or any other local language) doesn’t help me in Nairobi.
very nice.i think we as parents are to blame partly, unapata naongelesha mtoi swa yet with others ni mother tongue. Ata learn aje. hio ya kupelea watoi shags is important, the survival skills impacted huko ni mingi unlike hapa town. @Elgin uko na tuition ya greek?:D:D
Spoilt boichild @Stinger acha upuss na kujifanya, kwani in your familyhouse in Nai what language were u speaking???, to me i hate people who cant communicate in local dialect unless there is an intermarriage, with me we also used to go back to rural area during holls and am proud of what my paros did, i know a lot of skills we learned in the bushes during hunting and herding
Dehydration. we never carried water as we went herding, so if it was too dry, we just went to cotton plantations, pick the young fruits before they burst into cotton, has a lot of water or pick cactus fruits, but this was a tough job since the fruits are deep in the shrub so ingia na jacket but still you come out pricked, the itches are flaming and its hot, part 2 the fruit itself has tiny thorns, so use a waxy leaf as peal it, the waxy one is also good for ass wiping after dumping
2Hunger. we set animal traps on a daily basis from birds to rodents and fish, you must track a bird to its nest or to their common feeding grounds, here we weaved using animal hair from the tail to make knots which would tighten on contact, or just use katunja(feya) or onjura"odundu" made from sticks or dissected bamboo or dried maize stem, fishing we used hooks and earthworm as bait, the sinker was the inside part of papyrus, its very spongy.
I only hated hunting honey. i hate being stung, its done at night via smoking
3Safety. mostly we studied dog behavior, the greatest threat was normally puffader vipers, they like staying around sisal plants, the other was the wild cat, but we just killed them because they could raid chicken and inflict losses
4.The ART of potery, modelling and Weaving got a good foundation from my rural background hence helped me do well in multymedia crafts back in colle.
Am still good with the AXE, MATCHETE also good at tying knots, be it tying an animal or a thief, i can also get back to milking too, thanks to [B]ocha manenos
Language is part of culture and never abandon the positive sides of culture, we have some backward culture though which we need to drop[/B]
I have seen some people castigate vernacular radio stations on this and other forums and just shake my head. Once we lose these languages we will have lost that what makes us unique. Our uniqueness is what makes Kenya so interesting. That uniqueness is transferred from one generation to the other through the spoken language.
I appreciate those who can speak a different language coherently but appalled if they cannot equally speak their vernacular language properly. I would be extremely thrilled if I heard Gladys Gachanja talking vernacular.
Uhuru’s son disappointed many Kenyans (the social climbers were excited) with that swanglish greeting. I hope he never ever gets a leadership position in Kenya.
I saw some Kenyans hate on Babayao because he isn’t as eloquent in mzungus language as Kabogo. There are probably less than 500 mzungus who live in Kiambu county yet Babayao critics are not satisfied with his Kizungu-njeri. These are the people who get excited when a mzungu can only say “Jambo” to them. They get so excited and they feel such strong connections with him that they are ready to give him their lunch and supper.
I have never seen the need for teaching kids the local languages, mimi I am fluent in both maragoli and kikuyu lakini I have never seen any advantage I get from that, kiswahili is a must, add English, French and Chinese and one will have prepared their kids well for the world.
I always imagine what would have happened, if say the americans were fixated on keeping their mother tongues, I guess they quickly learnt there was benefit in keeping to a single unifying language.
Unasema hauoni the value of mother tongues and your fluent in two kama hazingekua na maana haungezijua.Second of all wale native Americans bado wanaongea lugha zao. You seem to want us to kick out our mother tongues and replace them with the so called cooler languages
The rules of my house are very clear. Language; Mother tongue. Speak to me in lusungu and I totally ignore you. Wacha zoea sasa. And yes, now they speak mother tongue very fluently. And can read and write.