In my country, where many people grow up speaking more than one language, I’ve noticed a strange contradiction. Speaking English is often celebrated. It’s seen as a sign of being smart, successful, or educated. But speaking our national language, Kinyarwanda, doesn’t get the same respect. Sometimes people are surprised when young people speak it well, and often it’s valued only by elders or used in very practical ways. This creates a paradox: people worry that Kinyarwanda is disappearing, yet at the same time, they celebrate English, the very language that pushes it aside.
This shows how a powerful language can take over and be treated as the “standard.” In schools, English is framed as the best or “proper” language, while Kinyarwanda is seen as less important. But praising English isn’t neutral. It reflects global systems built through colonization, globalization, and economic systems that reward people who conform to it. By positioning English as the gateway to opportunity, schools implicitly mark other languages as obstacles or limitations.
This hierarchy does more than just affect how people communicate. It shapes how they see themselves and their cultures. When students are taught that their mother tongue is not good enough for classrooms, professional spaces, or global platforms, they may begin to internalize that message: that their culture is less advanced or less valuable. English, then, doesn’t just open doors; it quietly closes others, especially the ones that connect people to their own traditions, ways of knowing, and forms of expression.
The result is that many people start to see their own language as “less than.” They might even feel ashamed of speaking it, or see themselves through outside perspectives that devalue their culture. Geneva Smitherman (1999) calls this a “push-pull”: people love their mother tongue because it connects to their identity, but they also push it away because society tells them it won’t help them succeed.
Even the way we talk about “fluency” is complicated. Henner and Robinson (2022) explain that ideas of fluency are shaped by class, race, and other biases. In many ways, celebrating English fluency is celebrating closeness to whiteness or privilege, while overlooking the richness of our own languages.
This makes me wonder: how can schools and education systems go beyond just saying they “respect” local languages, and instead actually work toward real linguistic justice? What would it look like to build a system where every language is treated as valuable, not just the ones tied to power and privilege? And on a personal level, how can young people like us reclaim pride in our mother tongues while still navigating the pressures of globalization?