One of my biggest regrets as a Nigerian mum raising my children in the UK is this:
I didn’t make sure my children spoke and understood my mother tongue.
And honestly, if I could go back and change one thing about how I raised them, this would be high on the list.
When my son was born, I spoke Yoruba to him.
Not occasionally. It was just how I communicated with him. He understood me. He was picking it up naturally, alongside English.
Then he started nursery.
And somewhere along the way, the message we received was that speaking two languages might be confusing for him. So we stopped.
Looking back now, I wish I hadn’t.
And because we stopped with him, we never really established it with his younger sister either. It just became our normal. English was easier. English was what everyone around us spoke. English was what school, nursery and the wider world used.
And just like that, something that had been part of my son’s early life slowly disappeared.
“But they live in the UK…”
I think this is where many of us get caught out as migrant parents.
We assume that because our children are growing up here, English needs to be their focus.
Of course, they need English. They live, learn and function in an English-speaking society.
But what I didn’t fully appreciate then was that learning English didn’t have to come at the expense of Yoruba.
I thought I had to choose.
I didn’t.
Children can grow up with more than one language. They can navigate different languages and cultures. What they need is consistent exposure and opportunities to use those languages.
And that’s the bit I didn’t understand when my children were little.
My own relationship with Yoruba
The irony is that Yoruba wasn’t even really my “home language” growing up.
I grew up in Lagos, but English was spoken a lot in our home. I learned Yoruba through my community, extended family and the people around me.
It was something I absorbed.
I didn’t sit down and study Yoruba.
Nobody had to create a five-year language strategy for me.
It was simply there.
That’s what my children don’t have.
Living in the UK, they don’t automatically have the same community around them. They don’t have the same everyday exposure. They don’t hear Yoruba everywhere they go. They don’t have neighbours, aunties, uncles and random people in the market switching between English and Yoruba.
The village that helped me learn my language doesn’t exist around them in quite the same way.
So if I want them to have it, I have to intentionally create opportunities for it.
And I didn’t realise that soon enough.
I’ve tried to bring it back.
I still try.
But it’s hard.
Because Yoruba was never really my default language. I can speak it, I understand it, and I can hold a conversation, but English is the language I naturally reach for.
So now I’m trying to do something that should have been much easier if we’d simply carried on from the beginning.
And that is probably the biggest lesson for me.
What we don’t intentionally preserve can easily disappear.
Not because we don’t value it.
Not because our children don’t care.
But because life gets busy.
School takes over.
Friends speak English.
Activities happen in English.
TV is in English.
Social media is in English.
And before you know it, your mother tongue becomes something your child doesn’t understand when Grandma speaks it, and they don’t have a clue how to respond either.
That hurts.
It’s not just about language
The older I get, the more I realise that language is about so much more than communication.
It carries culture.
It carries humour.
It carries history.
It carries stories.
It carries the little expressions that don’t quite translate properly into English.
It connects children to grandparents and relatives.
It gives them another way of understanding where they come from.
And perhaps most importantly, it gives them another piece of their identity.
I don’t believe our children have to choose between being British and being Nigerian.
They can be both.
They can grow up knowing who they are while fully belonging to the country they were born or raised in.
They can speak with a British accent and still understand their grandmother when she switches into Yoruba.
They can love fish and chips and still know what proper Nigerian party jollof tastes like!
Identity doesn’t have to be either/or.
It can be “and”.
To the African parent raising children abroad…
If your children are still young and you have the opportunity to teach them your mother tongue, please don’t underestimate it.
Don’t wait until they’re teenagers.
Don’t assume they’ll “pick it up later”.
Don’t worry that speaking your language will somehow hold them back from learning English.
Speak it.
Let them hear it.
Let them answer you in English if that’s what they can manage.
Play songs in it.
Watch programmes in it.
Let grandparents speak it.
Tell stories in it.
Visit family where they can hear it being spoken naturally.
And if you are like me and your children are already older and you feel like you’ve missed the boat?
You haven’t.
It might be harder.
It might feel awkward.
You might get the teenage eye roll when you suddenly start speaking your mother tongue.
But start anyway.
Because perhaps the goal isn’t perfection.
Perhaps the goal is simply to reconnect.
I’m still trying.
And I will probably continue trying for as long as it takes.
Because if there is one thing I wish I’d understood earlier as a Nigerian mum raising children in the UK, it is this:
We don’t have to choose between giving our children a future here and giving them a connection to where we came from.
We can give them both.
And sometimes, that starts with something as simple as:
“Come here, let me tell you something…”
In Yoruba.
