During Unity Club’s 28-year anniversary last week, President Kagame appealed to the audience to speak Kinyarwanda properly. He also told celebrities that speaking the language properly doesn’t stop one from being a star.

This timely call follows many others from the President himself, but also from institutions in charge and Kinyarwanda enthusiasts, whose efforts are not futile, but also not that much bearing tangible results.

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The former Rwandan Academy of Language and Culture (RALC) raised an alarm in 2018 about the language being in danger of extinction should current generations continue favoring foreign languages over their mother tongue.

Nevertheless, there is another problem that might be much bigger, and that is what the President raised: speaking the language properly. Although language decay may be natural and inevitable, there surely is something that can be done.

Due to Rwanda’s bitter past, Kinyarwanda doesn’t seem to hold much importance in research or even education. And if keenly observed, this is one of the reasons young people do not care if they have spoken or written the language properly or not.

Standard Kinyarwanda language forms are only known by those who dedicated their lives to preserving the language, and they are but only a few. Even the media and educators do not necessarily strive to eliminate linguistic errors, even when their contribution to the decay is tremendous.

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Investing in linguistic research, mass campaigns, and preserving the authenticity of Kinyarwanda in other different ways is a path to its decoloniality and gives Rwandans the right power and tools to speak and write it properly, and pass it on to future generations to come.

We also have to take ownership of Kinyarwanda as a community. Let’s not reserve the language for public events or weddings and take it upon ourselves to exchange ideas, express ourselves verbally or in writing, in Kinyarwanda. We are Rwandan after all.