The importance of mother tongue as language of instruction in light of African experiences

الملخص EN

This paper explores the link between language and education and its role in development, while it traces back to the colonial history of education in Africa and how foreign languages contributed to the lack of establishing native languages as national official languages in many African countries, which created educational development setbacks.

The paper focuses on Tanzania and Somalia experiences regarding to mother tongue campaigns.

The paper also investigates the importance of mother tongue or first languages in the success of education.

In this paper, the author followed the analytical, descriptive method and collected the required data from different references.

The paper suggests that Somalia needs to reutilize its language in education, while not ignoring the practical obstacles impeding the use of Somali language in education.

However, as history teaches us, we can overcome these impediments as we did earlier