What language do you speak?
How do you feel when your children learn to speak or understand their dialect? Excited right 😊
It is important and gives much joy to teach your children their culture and language.
They will be proud of their ethnic background. It helps them to identify themselves with the society and also appreciate other people's culture and value.
My challenges so far
Knowing the importance of language on children and still sees my kids struggle with their mother tongue has given me great concerns. Most times, I feel that I have failed on my own part, I didn't do the right thing on time by consistently communicating with the kids using our dialect. Can I still rewrite the wrong at age 7 and 4? Is it still obtainable? These are my thoughts recently but hopefully YES as the answer.
My husband, the kids and I resides in Lagos State Nigeria where almost everyone communicates with English language (Lagosians indeed, lol). On transit within Lagos, at the market, church, office etc. It's all about English language and that has mastered our tongues even before we started having children. So when the kids started coming, hubby and I kept blowing grammar to every little conversation ignoring our root,lol.
When they began schooling, they spend most of their day in school still communicating with English language and the little time they will be at home where we supposed to be speaking their dialect to them, we joined the moving train.
Fast forward to the last time we travelled to our village to see grandma, the kids felt so bad that they couldn't socialize with their fellow kids due to ***language barrier ***, they couldn't eat our native food as well because I failed to introduce it to them as well, though I tried at first and gave up immediately they rejected it.
However, my mom_their grandma said no to this type of nurturing and visited Lagos. wowwww, I was happy to receive such helping hand on language training!! Grandma spent months with us here and we loved it❤️. She started teaching the kids our dialect and culture on daily basis, consistently. They were catching up and so happy. Grandma was making our local delicacies as well and encouraged the kids to eat which they enjoyed! After one month of intensive training, I started seeing results, the kids started speaking their mother tongue and telling stories about our culture too, hmmmmm I became overwhelmed and excited...💃💃💃💃
They loved ever bit of the language even though the tune they are using is off point... hahahaha, they liked the native delicacies as well and so yearning to travel to the village again to showcase their new found language. Grandma indeed did a great job and I have continued from where she stopped!!
Do you speak your language to your children? Start early (don't be like me). Teach your children their culture. Make it fun! It pays in a long run😊.
Thank you for reading through.
Remember to keep staying safe and be happy 😊😏.
Catch you in my next blog!