Preserving indigenous languages

Audrey Mbogho is from the Wadawida community of about 400,000 people in South-Eastern Kenya, who speak the language of Kidawida.  

Audrey recalls being punished in school for speaking her mother tongue – Kidawida. Teachers thought that speaking native languages in school was a ‘terrible vice’ that interfered with learning English. 

Audrey’s parents were both teachers and they encouraged Audrey to be multilingual. She grew up perfecting three languages: Kidawida, English and Swahili, and developed a passion for languages.  

Now, decades later, because of the size of the Wadawida community and the discouragement of younger people from speaking Kidawida, the language is at risk of extinction.

Audrey is currently the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Pwani University in Kilifi Kenya. In June 2018, Audrey visited Oxford for two months as an AfOx-TORCH Visiting Fellow.

She used the Fellowship opportunity to create a web-based platform called “Ngano”, the Kidawida word for “Stories”. Ngano will use crowdsourcing technologies to allow Kidawida speakers to contribute short stories and audio recordings in their language. Ngano allows Kidawida speakers to contribute children’s stories, news articles, recipes, songs and other fictional and non-fictional writings to preserve the language and culture of the Wadawida.

Audrey created the platform in collaboration with colleagues from The Faculty of Linguistics, Philology & Phonetics at Oxford University.