Heritage Language Loss as Policy
Despite being told that I spoke Yorùbá as a small child, my earliest memories of language learning do not include it. By the time I reached school age, it had become a phantom in my home, hovering in the background, incorporeal. It was noticeable only because of its absence from my speech. My mum, from whom Yorùbá and English flowed naturally, enforced a strict language policy around ‘proper English’, but a laissez-faire one concerning Yorùbá. With English positioned as the language of education and progress, and Yorùbá as the language of chores and chastisement, I grew up with receptive fluency but productive silence, the linguistic half-life of “heritage grammar” (Polinsky & Kagan, 2007).
A family’s language policy can be an ideological battleground where parents negotiate maintaining a sense of belonging with social aspirations. In our home, the negotiation was quiet but decisive: English dominated because it promised protection from the racialized scrutiny of British society. When, as an adult, I asked my mum why she had never insisted on Yorùbá, she said that our schoolteachers had cautioned her against speaking to my siblings and me in anything but English. She, a product of British colonial rule herself, had no other source of knowledge to challenge that Anglo-centric falsehood. So my mum’s acquiescence reflected an architecture of fear; fear of her children being marked, misread, or dismissed.
Flores and Rosa’s (2015) concept of raciolinguistic ideologies sheds light on how, as Black children in Britain, we were (at least in the 80s, 90s, and early 00s) not only evaluated on linguistic grounds; our very bodies were read as linguistically deficient. Compliments I received of being “well spoken” carried the assumption of raciolinguistic exceptionalism (Pennycook, 2021), indicative of reverse language stereotyping (Kang & Rubin, 2009), where attributions of my Blackness trigger distorted evaluations of how I should speak. In addition to these prejudices, to speak Yorùbá or an accented English publicly would have raised eyebrows, questions, and the subtle violence of being rendered foreign in a country that already struggled to see us as fully belonging. This silencing of Yorùbá was not an individual choice; it was a legacy of linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992) that facilitated language shift among us and other African diasporas. My heritage language loss was not an accident; it was policy.
Trading Tongues
While Yorùbá struggled to exist in the domestic sphere, the public domain was governed by an ideology that prioritized ‘modern foreign languages’ for social mobility, meaning mainstream support for non-European home or heritage languages was sparse. Into this perceived vacuum of bilingualism first stepped French. I began learning alone at age eight, reciting the same conversations from a cassette that was gifted to me as perhaps a forward-looking aspirational gesture of an elder. Day after day, I was enraptured by the foreign phonemes as I unlearned how to sound out the tones I was born into. In primary school, I wrote that “j’habite à Londres”, and asked my pen friend whether she “aime la musique pop aussi”.
Things shifted slightly in secondary school when age twelve, the trilling rhotics of Spanish caught my attention. I abandoned my beloved French because Madame’s classes had become little more than a series of subjunctive conjugations. However, this new language felt expansive, worldly, and full of possibility. My continued pursuit of Spanish education, even at university alongside my Politics degree, was more than a supplementary elective; it was the catalyst for my first major lifestyle shift. In 2012, I left home and bought a one-way ticket to Spain, seeking new experiences and opportunities. My investment (Norton, 2000; Darwin & Norton, 2015) in Spanish was the outcome of perceived symbolic capital, mobility, cosmopolitanism, and a sense of belonging that felt denied in the UK. I sought to join an imagined community of the Spanish-speaking world that seemed more vibrant and accessible than the heritage I had silenced.
However, a moment arrived that revealed how deeply the new guest had settled into a place where, despite my fervent pursuit of it, I believed it did not belong. When on the phone with my mum, she asked how my Spanish skills were coming along, given that I spent most of my days teaching English:
Kúnmi: Yeah, it’s going well
Mum: But do you still remember Yorùbá?
Kúnmi: Of course.
Mum: O dáa, sọ ìyẹn ní Yorùbá. [Yoruba = Okay, say that in Yorùbá]
Kúnmi: Por supuesto! [Spanish = Of course!]
The slip stunned me. I had always assumed that the little Yorùbá I carried deep inside was safe and protected from erosion. Yet a foreign language had somehow encroached on the mental space that should have been reserved for culture and heritage. This small exchange carries the weight of a larger truth: that languages do not simply coexist; sometimes they compete for cognitive and cultural territory. In retrospect, I recognize that I had internalized the raciolinguistic hierarchy that placed other European languages above my African one. That incident marked the beginning of a steadfast resolve to reclaim space for my linguistic heritage that might otherwise be lost to external forces.
Academic Inquiry as Decolonial Praxis
My return to Yorùbá began with both sentimentality and scholarship. It was friction—the feeling of being linguistically displaced from my own ancestry—that prompted my move into academia. I chose to pursue my MA in Linguistics at SOAS University of London to ask: “Why don’t we speak our heritage languages?” Although SOAS offered a Yorùbá elective, it was through the study of Yorùbá linguistics rather than language that I began to forge a reconnection. When I encountered Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs), a syntactic phenomenon in which two or more verbs are used concurrently to create a single meaning that does not typologically occur in English, I felt an unexpected jolt of recognition; this was a grammatical structure I had heard all my life but never named. Studying Yorùbá through the lens of linguistic theory became a first act of reclamation. In studying Yorùbá SVCs, I was not simply analyzing syntax; I was partaking in my personal decolonial project that challenged my own marginalization of African languages and linguistic systems. By seeing Yorùbá as worthy of academic inquiry, I was initially restoring credibility to a knowledge system that I had previously dismissed.
Some time later, I remember perusing the SOAS library and finding books whose titles and authors echoed in my mother’s voice as ones she had read in her youth. I felt excited because I was finally learning the architecture of my own language; yet conflicted that I needed the academy’s permission to value it. I was sensitive to the dualism in utilizing a European intellectual framework as part of my decolonial project. But perhaps this tension is precisely what decolonial praxis sometimes looks like: using the master’s tools not to destroy the house, but to excavate the foundations and create a third space for enunciating a new cultural identity through appropriation, translations, and re-historicization (Bhabha, 1994, cited in Kubota & Miller, 2017).
Spanish as Solace
Years later, as I began my PhD studies, Spanish returned in an unexpected form, not as aspiration but as survival. In Honolulu, far from family and familiar cultural rhythms, I found and formed a community of transnational Spanish speakers. Our conversations were not about grammar or literature; they were about loneliness, food, cultural exchange, and academic life. I was not pursuing Spanish to integrate into an imagined community, but to be part of an affective one. Amidst feelings of isolation, the ability to speak Spanish offered warmth and social connection.
This shift revealed another important truth: languages are not static in their meanings. The same language that once displaced an important identity and symbolized escape later held me together and came to mean belonging and emotional preservation. Here, we may see an example of Bhabha’s concept of hybridity (cited in Kubota & Miller, 2017) that seeks to question the conventional understanding of language use and legitimate linguistic practices of the minoritized. This is also the essence of my idea of a lingual cycle, that languages rise and recede at different times, in different spaces, for different purposes.
Fellow-Selves and the Codes of Real Talk
If Spanish offers solace during the semester, my other Englishes offer a truth that I only came to appreciate recently. Education is dominated by one English variety, and the institutional demand of Standard American English takes up both cognitive and emotional space, crowding out other identities that struggle to find reciprocity in the academy. However, back home during a recent summer break, I met a small community of fellow-selves: other Black women pursuing doctoral study, navigating the racialized terrain of academia with humor, exhaustion, and brilliance.
Academic spaces demand a performance of appropriateness and its implicitly “monoglossic language ideology” (Kubota et al., 2023) that privileges typically Anglo middle-class norms. This ideology weighs heavily on some of us like a cumbersome winter coat. Alone, we constantly measure the temperature of a room to select the most appropriate voice to put on. But with my fellow-selves, my tongue rolls freely, loosening in a spring-like space where the binds of standard English give way to the cadence of my London, Lagos, and the African diasporas. In these moments, language ceases to be a site of surveillance and becomes one of hybridity and liberation.
Here, I inhabit what Bhabha (1994) called a Third Space, an in-between site where meaning is negotiated rather than inherited. In this space, I am not forced to choose only one linguistic identity, but can inhabit all simultaneously, moving fluidly between Nigerian English, Caribbean English, the AAVE of 90s MTV, and London slang. This is my translingual space (Wei, 2018) where linguistic boundaries dissolve, and unbounded identities emerge.
Conclusion: The Lingual Calendar and the Seasons of Selfhood
I have come to understand that languages do not exist merely as additive cognitive ability; they compete, they overlap, and can rescue one another. My Yorùbá language loss was the initial price paid in pursuit of Frensh the Spanish. It was the realization of this loss that led me into language study, transforming Yorùbá into a reclaimed inheritance. Today, my relationship with these languages is no longer a zero-sum game. Spanish continues to provide the social and emotional support necessary to navigate the isolation of educational migration, while the Yorùbá language blossoms when I spend time with my family and implement a more deliberate family language policy. My language use has never been linear; it has always been seasonal. The lingual cycle gives me a way to name this complexity. Languages in my repertoire do not simply accumulate or attrite; they respond to migration, to aspiration, to love and shame. Languages ebb and flow in line with institutional demands and migratory rhythms of “home, school, and friends” (Lyiscott, 2014, 2:23). What I once believed was fragmentation, now I understand as cyclical attunement.
References
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Adekunmi Olatunji 