Bridging generations: Minnesota educator works to preserve Somali lullabies, children’s rhymes

As a young mother in Somalia, Asha Mohamed raised 10 kids in a tight-knit community rich with support from nearby family members.

Traditional lullabies, songs and sayings were woven into her child-rearing. Earlier this fall in Minneapolis, the 64-year-old grandmother remembered one such rhyme.

“Hobeey hobeey hobeeyaa,” she chanted, reciting the familiar nighttime call to bed for Somali children.

But in the Somali diaspora, the lullabies sung by mothers and grandmothers, the folk tales passed on by fathers and grandfathers, and the poems recited by community elders are quickly disappearing.

Minnesota educator Marian Hassan, who has written bilingual children’s books of Somali folk tales, has launched a project to preserve this oral treasure trove.

This fall, she received a $121,000 Minnesota Legacy Cultural Heritage Grant to launch the Sing-Again Lullaby and Oral History Project, where she and her team collect and preserve Somali oral traditions.

She has been holding story circles with Somali elders to capture their experiences, which she will turn into a book along with video and audio resources.

“The project includes collecting children’s oral traditions, such as lullabies and songs we’ve used to soothe and nurture our children, which are beautiful and rich, but many of them have not been committed to writing,” she said.

The Somali language had no single standardized script until the early 1970s, when it became the official government language. That made oral tradition important to preserving cultural knowledge.

“Our elders were the preservers of the language,” Hassan said.

The Sing-Again project will showcase the elders singing lullabies and reflecting their method of child rearing, Hassan said. It will include bilingual materials for young people who are struggling to understand the Somali language.

On an October morning at the Brian Coyle Community Center in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, Mohamed reflected on her experience as a mother and grandmother.

Raising 10 children was a demanding job, she said in Somali. However, she lived among grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles in Somalia, who were always ready to help when needed.

Previous generations used nurturing language with their children, including proverbs that conveyed life lessons and lullabies that gave babies a sense of comfort.

Younger Somali parents in the U.S. struggle to raise fewer children, she said, and the cultural knowledge that knit the community together is disappearing.

Across the river in St. Paul, Abdisalam Adam, the principal of East African Elementary Magnet School, said the decline of Somali language and culture is a huge concern within the community.

“We not only want to preserve the Somali language, but there is a huge need for it in the diaspora,” he said. “We are seeing families who cannot communicate with their children, teachers who are having difficulties communicating with students, and health care workers who cannot communicate with their patients.”

He said the school recently started two seal of bilingual literacy classes with the goal of helping students get the certification by the time they graduate from high school. The seal is a certificate that districts award to students who demonstrate proficiency in the language they are learning.

“Our end goal is to preserve and spread the language to our larger community,” Adam said.

During the 1990s, Somali families who arrived said they wanted their kids to learn from English-speaking teachers. Back then, the Somali community was newly arriving and wanted their children be prepared for school and jobs.

But today, many Somali families are seeing their children lose the language that holds the community together, Adam said.

“It’s been a huge shift,” he said.

Deqa Muhidin, a former schoolteacher, children’s book author and Somali language heritage program coordinator at the Minneapolis Public Schools Multilingual Department, said the Sing-Again project would be a great addition to what was already in place.

The district’s Somali Heritage Language Program was launched in 2021 and has grown to 270 students in kindergarten through fourth grade.

The program is more than a language-learning program, she said, also teaching Somali culture.

The Somali language has its own cultural insights, which are only spoken by elders, and once they are no longer here, those insights will be lost, Muhidin said. For example, elders might use the phrase, “Look at something in your foot,” meaning run. Or a merchant may tell a customer, “I’m going to close my eyes,” meaning this is my final offer, she said.

According to many Somali academics, these words and phrases are the substance of the language, which is only spoken and understood by the previous generation of Somalis, Muhidin said.

Somali is the third-most common language spoken at home in Minnesota, after English and Spanish, according to data compiled by Minnesota Compass. But that is changing as young people grow up in an English-dominant environment.

“This is urgent for Somali people because they have not been here too long, and it is alarming to see the fast rate at which the language is disappearing,” Hassan said. “I feel especially urgent because our elders are the only ones who are the preservers of these kinds of oral traditions.”

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This story comes to you from Sahan Journal, a nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering Minnesota’s immigrants and communities of color. Sign up for a free newsletter to receive Sahan’s stories in your inbox.