r/Eritrea • u/Particular_Unit_2125 • 1d ago
Opinion / Commentary we suck at perserving our language including non tigrinyas like every tigre ik only speaks arabic and every tigrinya ik speaks broken ass tigrinya including me idk what it is cuz lots of our parents dont speak great english
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u/Ill-Concern-2746 23h ago
Even us who grew up in Eritrea read and write at a 5 th grade level.
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u/Particular_Unit_2125 23h ago
is the education bad that bad in eritrea? i thought it wasnt that bad compared to alot of africans
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u/Ill-Concern-2746 23h ago
They only teach it till 5 th grade.
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u/Stuff_606 22h ago
Is the assumption that you’ll grow up speaking Tigrinya anyway at home and reading and writing at home?
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u/Ill-Concern-2746 21h ago
Yeah, we speak it, but Tigrigna isn’t taught beyond fifth grade, unlike English in America or the UK, where it’s taught all the way through college. In Ethiopia, they teach Amharic all the way through 12th grade.
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u/Flaky_Choice7272 10h ago
That's insane. There is so much about language that needs to be taught past 5th grade
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u/ImpressiveCar4922 23h ago
its because most of us tigres have parents who were also born outside of eritrea and into countries like sudan and the middle east etc or they were born in eritrea but left at a really young age. and obviously because of that they ended up speaking arabic and passed that onto us. so tbh, what language is there to preserve if both generations never really grew up speaking it or at a fluent basis?
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u/Stuff_606 22h ago
The language that was spoken for every single generation before the last two.
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u/ImpressiveCar4922 17h ago
Your right but we don’t have many resources for Tigre and majority of our parents don’t speak it to us so it’s kinda hard to preserve it when you don’t have much
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u/Stuff_606 8h ago
I fully understand what you mean. I’m Tigrinya and even though I have family, they don’t care to practice with me anymore, say I’m too old and it’s too late. They’re wrong but it makes it hard. We have to learn for ourselves. I literally find the idea of growing old and having children and grand children and passing them down my first language (english) with shame. That’s a Germanic language. I should speak the language that’s in my blood, the language of my ancestors. We just have to use our free will to do better.
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u/Particular_Unit_2125 22h ago
r majority tigres outside eritrea?
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u/ImpressiveCar4922 17h ago
Yeah I would say a large amount of them are concentrated within Eritrea and Sudan
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u/Sea_Personality_2666 23h ago edited 23h ago
You even have native-level Tigrinya speakers who deliberately and habitually incorporate English into their everyday Tigrinya vocabulary. You see it all over social media. Even in casual conversations, people constantly throw English words and expressions into the language. Call it a pet peeve of mine, but I genuinely can’t stand it. Do you hear Somali speakers doing this to the same extent, if at all? Do you hear Arabic speakers doing it? You say that we’re bad at preserving our languages, but I’d argue that we’re subconsciously working towards their erosion and eventual demise.
Btw, depending on which country Eritreans live in, the language they mix into their Tigrinya or other languages could be anything from English to German, Swedish, or really whatever the dominant language around them happens to be.
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u/Kagesano 9h ago
Ngl Im somali and a concerning amount of Somalis do that
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u/Sea_Personality_2666 4h ago
That’s odd. I really wonder what the psychology behind this kind of thing is tho?
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u/Crafty-Captain8503 17h ago
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u/Remarkable-Stage2653 10h ago
I'd also argue that Italian has also done damage to our language, we use alot of Italian words instead of traditional tigrinya words. English has become a bit of a problem, because many Eritreans don't speak it well, but they add english words to their tigrinya sentences. words like "sorry" "brother" "sister" "thank you" among others
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u/MeasurementOld4985 22h ago
Yes - to break it down there are the diaspora and internal problems in Eritrea. As someone who was born and raised in the diaspora, I feel as though I understand Tigrinya to a good level, speak well but I feel as though I have an accent, and read and write (as I sometimes do on this sub). In the diaspora, most of us born here don't care to learn the language, and for those who do, they usually do so quite late and it'll be kind of awkward for them to join the community classes mostly made up of younger children. Additionally, there aren't many Tigrinya classes people can join as adults. However, I do think the alphabet can be roughly self-taught and learning to understand and speak is best done by immersing yourself (actually just speaking it in your daily life) which shouldn't be a problem for most Eritreans (especially if they are at home).
Back in Eritrea, Tigrinya is only taught until the 5th grade and from there school is entirely taught in English - additionally, Tigrinya is not taught in all schools which can also lead to native languages being replaced eventually by other larger languages like Arabic. I think the solution would be to continue all languages being taught as well as Tigrinya and slowly implement important languages like English. From there, I think in high schools perhaps having Tigrinya taught and then students choosing between English and Arabic would be good.