THE STANDARD
OPINION
Courtesy
“How many languages do you speak?” a friend asked me during a coffee date recently. “Four”, I responded. She is British.
“I marvel at the way you people [Kenyans] speak many languages unlike some of us who are monolingual,” she quipped.
For her, to speak such a number of languages is wonderful; something I had taken as normal till then. The interlocution was an eye opener for me. It left me with a number of questions lingering on my mind.
How many of us appreciate multilingualism? How many of us appreciate our first languages (popularly known as mother tongues)? How many of us view linguistic diversity as a positive phenomenon?