Growth in Somali culture programs aims to address second-generation language loss

Salom Abdulle is worried her 13-year-old daughter won’t speak Somali, potentially straining her family relationships. “I don’t have any problem understanding my daughter, but my parents do,” she said.

Abdulle’s biggest worry, she said, is that the less her daughter knows about the language, the more disconnected she will be from the rest of her family and community.

Three decades after Somalis began emigrating to the United States in large numbers, many parents worry their American-born children are losing a connection to the language. It’s led to a growing number of programs to teach Somali, including programs in the Minneapolis and St. Cloud public schools and at the University of Minnesota.

Last fall, St. Paul Public Schools launched its East African Elementary Magnet School to reverse a slide in families leaving for charter schools where most students speak Somali. The K-5 school now has more than 200 students.

“As a person who comes from a strong cultural background, one of my biggest fears for my family and in the Somali community as a whole, is losing our language, traditions and culture,” Abdulle said.

More than 86,000 people of Somali descent live in Minnesota, according to an estimate by Minnesota Compass based on U.S. census data. The survey found that Somali is the second most common non-English language spoken at home in Minnesota, after Spanish.

Irina Zaykovskaya, an instructor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in second language acquisition, said the shift to English by some Somali youth doesn’t mean they lose their home language entirely. However, multilingual children typically are prompted to learn English in U.S. schools so they can do well and prepare for career opportunities. As a result, their native language declines.

“Peer pressure is also another factor, where youth feel the need to fit in and, as a result, they focus on using more English in order to be part of the mainstream culture,” Zaykovskaya said.

Sana Mohammed, a junior in computer science and a Somali language student at the U, said she was born and raised in Minnesota and struggles to fully speak, read and write in Somali. When her parents took her to Somalia on vacation, she said she found herself among many people who didn’t speak a word of English.

“The relatives that I met were very nice and conversational, but I felt there was a huge language barrier and it was pretty isolating,” she said.

Children in many immigrant communities are known as receptive bilinguals, meaning they can understand their native language but can’t speak it, Zaykovskaya said. Some multilingual people develop a system called ethnolect, a mix of their native and new languages, she said.

But many immigrant children go back to learn their native language when they grow up. Muna Yusuf, 43, of Brooklyn Park, said she spoke Somali when she was 7 and her family moved from Somalia to Germany; after a few years in Germany, she replaced Somali with fluent German. When she moved to the U.S. at 17, she went to English. But she has relearned Somali and now speaks it fluently.

“I’m a mother now, and my children don’t speak the Somali language, but I hope someday they will learn their heritage language,” she said.

When Minneapolis Public Schools launched its Somali Heritage Language Program in 2021, about 4,000 of the district’s students identified as Somali. Deqa Muhidin, a former classroom teacher and one of the founders of the MPS program, saw firsthand how Somali children struggle to retain their native language.

So Muhidin proposed the program to her boss Muhidin Warfa, the district’s executive director of multilingual and magnet programs. Warfa incorporated Somali into the school’s curriculum, and since then the language has been approved for grades K-12.

The Somali Heritage Language Program launched with about 70 kindergarten and first-grade students. In its second year, the program added second- and third-graders, and now has about 162 students.

Some community members worry that losing the language also means losing a connection to Islamic spiritual practices. Mohamet Ali, the executive director of Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, said the mosque offers Qur’anic lessons, interpretations for Qur’anic verses and Friday sermons in both English and Somali.

“Even though we make it easier for the youth to understand the Somali language and the Qur’anic verses by providing interpretations, we also heavily encourage them to pay close attention to their language and cultural heritage,” Ali said.

Abdulle said she makes an extra effort to speak Somali with her daughter at home.

“I always speak Somali with my daughter, but because she spends most of her waking hours with English-speaking people, it’s harder for her to speak or retain the Somali that I spoke with her at home,” she said. “We love and welcome American culture, but we also want to make sure we don’t lose what we had.”

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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.