Topic: 2024-Indigenous Languages
Country: Mozambique
Delegate Name: Benjamin Harris
Mozambique is a country with many Indigenous languages, they have 43 established languages, 41 of them are Indigenous and the other 2 are non-indigenous. Mozambique’s official language is Portuguese but only half of the population speaks Portuguese. Recently the people of Mozambique have been losing their Indigenous tongues and the languages once spoken are sort of fading away.
Some efforts to preserve these languages are that they’ve:
Put these languages and the ways to speak them more into education
Added more to the media on this language and how to preserve it
Made cultural events that celebrate the languages that they speak and their culture
Made folktales, songs, and stories about their culture too
I believe that we should try to preserve these indigenous languages. These indigenous languages meant a lot to their ancestors and I think that it is nice to be able to speak the same language that your ancestors spoke in the past. Another thing is that when there is one main language that everyone speaks, it is a lot easier to travel and communicate with people from other places than you and if it’s always changing then there will never be a language that everyone speaks there which is not a great thing for the people of Mozambique.
One way that we could preserve these languages is by teaching them primarily in schools and making sure that every school is teaching the same language. Another way is by making an official language that every building, business, and advertisement uses so that it would become normalized. One more is by having some language-based classes for people who want to learn or are losing their ability to speak the language.
