This week Sorosoro invites two members of the Mpongwe community from Gabon, a man and a woman, to tell us how they envision the future of their language.<\/p>\n
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Mongwe, a Myene dialect, is less and less spoken and thus slowly dying out. Henriette and Kialla can\u2019t but face the issue of their language with a little sorrow.<\/p>\n
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Reasons for this decline according to Henriette? The space given to French by the young generation who tends to give more attention to a foreign language than to their own. The appraisal of an alien language over a mother tongue is precisely what Henriette finds hard to understand, she refuses to accept it.<\/p>\n
And Kialla agrees: according to him, the imposition of the French language in his country is directly responsible for the extinction of Mpongwe. At school, he tells us, pupils would face punishment if they ever dared to speak their mother tongue. This story rings a bell\u2026 another interview, also on our website: the symbol story told by the Punu Mayor of Tchibanga.<\/p>\n
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So? Well, nowadays Mpongwe is threatened with extinction, and most of the very few youngsters who can still understand some of it would be unable to express themselves in their own language. Incidentally, our filming crew had a really hard time trying to find teenagers or even young adults able to hold an actual conversation in Mpongwe.<\/p>\n
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Sounds like linguistic colonisation\u2026 but according to Henriette and Kialla, another reason to the extinction of Mpongwe is the failure to convey the language, which is now dying out because the elders did not speak. Actually, most of them also use French to communicate with the younger generation\u2026 thus everyone bears a part of the responsibility.<\/p>\n
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Facing the pain of cultural loss, Henriette calls upon teachers and researchers to raise awareness among the young generation. As she says, If the language disappears then the whole community will disappear.<\/p>\n
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No small talk, their words are tough and marked with the deepest sorrow. Listen…<\/p>\n
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