Looking back, I wondered if anyone clocked how absurd it was. I wonder how our forefathers were sold those lies. I wonder what measure was used and/or what was promised. Who could have even believed that such thoughts and words would be attached to people’s identity and language—vernacular.
Because when you strip someone of their language, you don’t just take away words, you take away the pulse of their being. Colonizers knew this. That’s why they walked into villages and declared certain tongues “inferior,” why they built schools where children were beaten for speaking the only language their mothers ever sang to them in. Imagine being told your own name, in your own language, was wrong. And yet, somehow, people bought into it. Some through fear, others through the promise of “progress.” English, French, Portuguese; these became tickets to survival, to a seat at the table of modernity. The trade-off was subtle but brutal: keep your tongue and stay “backward,” or give it up and gain access to the world.
What really is the correlation of foreign language to development?
But is it really true that development is tied to a particular language and backwardness to our local languages? We have examples today to show that this is not, because not everyone took the false deal. Some nations fought to keep their languages alive and made them the backbone of their growth. Japan modernized without abandoning Japanese. South Korea rose into a global powerhouse while teaching children in Korean, not English. Countries like Israel revived Hebrew from near extinction and made it thrive in schools, streets, and homes. Even in parts of Africa, places like Ethiopia and Tanzania leaned on local languages; Amharic and Kiswahili; to bind people together, proving that progress doesn’t have to mean forgetting who you are.
It’s proof that the lie could have been resisted all along. That language could be both a root and a ladder; that you don’t have to sell your tongue to climb. This is a fact that most Africans nations are just waking up; and some, not yet. Alas! comes a new, more brutal, enticing, quiet but fierce form of colonization – AI.
Ai as the New Colonizer
The “beautiful” thing about AI is that, it doesn’t come with canes in the classroom or bans in the marketplace. It comes with silence. With absence. With algorithms.
AI doesn’t punish you for speaking your language; it simply pretends your language doesn’t exist. If your mother tongue isn’t in the dataset, the machine won’t hear you. If it isn’t coded into translation apps or speech assistants, your words vanish into digital air. No recognition, no echo, no presence. That’s how erasure works now; not through force, but through invisibility. A child who can’t ask Siri or Alexa a question in their native tongue begins to think that their language doesn’t matter. That it belongs only to the past. And little by little, the same logic that once ruled colonial classrooms begins to rule our devices.
The question hanging in the air now is, how do we keep our local languages alive in the face of this AI hurricane?
