Youth of the African diaspora revive ancestral languages online
In Nigeria and Zimbabwe, young people from the African diaspora are learning their families’ languages through online classes, social media and cultural projects. In particular, 15-year-old Nyashadzaishe Machingura from Canada is learning Shona with a teacher from Zimbabwe in order to speak with her grandparents in their language. This was reported by TimesLIVE.
Machingura said she previously felt excluded when her relatives spoke Shona and she could not understand them. After lessons on traditional greetings, proverbs and clan symbols, her conversations with her grandparents in Zimbabwe became longer.
Online lessons for the diaspora
Teacher Shungu Chidovi left her job in banking in January to focus fully on the ZimbOriginal platform. She teaches Shona through storytelling, book clubs and “buddy pairing” exchanges.
Chidovi currently teaches around two dozen people in Zimbabwe, Canada, Australia, South Africa, Ireland and Scotland. Tuition costs $50 per month. The platform emerged after readers of Chidovi’s blog about Zimbabwean traditions began asking whether she taught Shona.
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According to UNESCO, Africa is home to more than one billion people who speak around one-third of the world’s languages. The continent has between 1,500 and 3,000 languages across 54 countries. At the same time, fewer than 2% of African languages have a noticeable presence online, leaving little data for training artificial intelligence systems.
Languages in technology and entertainment
Beliv Mubonderi, a linguistics lecturer at the Zimbabwe Open University, noted that African languages have often been pushed into the background and not adapted for use in commerce, science and technology. He stressed the importance of their presence in technologies that affect communication, education and trade.
In 2022, the African Union adopted Swahili as an official working language. The UN proclaimed 2022–2032 the International Decade of Indigenous Languages, while the African Union and UNESCO support the documentation and revival of African languages, including through artificial intelligence to create and translate children’s books and teachers’ guides.
In Lagos, the television show Masoyinbo, whose name means “Don’t speak English,” tests participants, including members of the Nigerian diaspora, on their knowledge of the Yoruba language and culture. Speaking English on the show means losing. Host Olalekan Fabilola, who launched the programme in 2024, links its popularity to people’s desire to return to their cultural roots.
