By Lionel Kubwimana
••4 min
The moment I realized my children needed my language, and how one small decision changed everything.
It happened on a rainy Saturday afternoon. My four-year-old daughter, Lea, was sitting on the floor surrounded by old family photographs I’d pulled from a dusty album. She pointed to a picture of my grandmother, wearing traditional Rwandan attire, her face creased with laughter.
"Who’s this, Daddy?" she asked in French, the language we speak at home.
I smiled, ready to tell her about her great-grandmother, a woman whose voice I still hear in my dreams, singing lullabies in Kinyarwanda. But as I opened my mouth, I froze. How do I say "great-grandmother" in Kinyarwanda? I knew the word—"nyogokuru"—but it felt foreign on my tongue. I’d left Rwanda when I was eight, and over the years, French and English had become my primary languages. Kinyarwanda had retreated to a quiet corner of my memory.
I fumbled, mixing French and broken Kinyarwanda. Lea listened patiently, but her eyes glazed over. She didn’t understand. In that moment, I didn’t just see my daughter’s confusion; I saw a generational thread fraying. My children were growing up without the language that held our family’s stories, our humor, our way of seeing the world.
That rainy afternoon was my wake-up call. I realized I wasn’t just losing a language; I was letting my children lose a key to a part of themselves.
Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I decided to start small—very small. I chose one word: "umugani." It means "story" in Kinyarwanda, but it’s more than that. An umugani is a tale that carries wisdom, a lesson wrapped in metaphor. It’s how my grandmother taught me about kindness, courage, and community.
That night, instead of reading a French bedtime story, I told Lea a simple umugani about a little bird who finds its voice. I mixed French for the narrative but dropped in Kinyarwanda words: "inyoni" (bird), "ijwi" (voice), "umugani" (story). She loved it. She repeated the words, giggling at their musicality.
We didn’t do language lessons. We didn’t drill vocabulary. We just played. I labeled objects around the house with sticky notes: "imbere" (door), "ikirago" (bed), "ikiyiko" (spoon). Lea would run around pointing at them, shouting the words. My two-year-old son, Noah, joined in, babbling his own approximations.
Within weeks, those single words became phrases. "Shinga imbere" (close the door). "Tuje gukina" (let’s go play). The children didn’t learn Kinyarwanda; they absorbed it through daily life, just as I had.
The shift wasn’t just linguistic. It was relational. Speaking Kinyarwanda with my children created a private world between us, a space where we could share jokes, secrets, and tenderness that felt uniquely ours. My kids started asking questions about Rwanda, about my childhood, about the family they’d never met. Language became a bridge to their heritage.
My own confidence grew, too. Reconnecting with Kinyarwanda healed a part of me I hadn’t realized was wounded—the part that felt like an outsider in both my birth country and my adopted one. Now, I could stand firmly in both worlds, and bring my children with me.
Most importantly, I saw my children’s minds expand. Research shows bilingual children develop greater cognitive flexibility, empathy, and problem-solving skills. But watching it happen in real life was magical. Lea began noticing patterns between languages, asking why some words sounded similar. Noah started code-switching effortlessly, choosing the word that best expressed his emotion.
Friends noticed the change. Some asked how we did it. I told them: start with one word. One song. One story. You don’t need to be fluent; you just need to begin.
Now, Kinyarwanda isn’t a "heritage language" we study—it’s a living part of our home. We sing Rwandan nursery rhymes in the car. We cook traditional dishes while naming ingredients in Kinyarwanda. We video-call relatives back home, and my children can greet them, laugh with them, understand a little of their stories.
That rainy Saturday feels like a lifetime ago. Today, Lea is six and can tell her own simple umugani. Noah is four and chatters away in a delightful mix of French, English, and Kinyarwanda. And me? I’m still learning, still stumbling over grammar, still rediscovering words I’d forgotten. But I’m no longer afraid of losing my language.
Because now I know: a language isn’t preserved in dictionaries or grammar books. It’s kept alive in the voices of children, in bedtime stories, in kitchen laughter, in the quiet moments when a father and his daughter look at an old photograph and say, "Nyogokuru."
That one word started it all.
