Why many Bakiga and Banyankore write their mother tongue poorly and resist correction

There is a quiet but deeply significant crisis unfolding among Abakiga and Abanyankore of southwestern Uganda. Despite being inheritors of rich oral traditions, vibrant proverbs, and centuries of linguistic heritage in Runyankore-Rukiga, many members of these communities speak and write their language poorly. More troublingly, many resist or ignore correction and guidance from those who are most qualified to help.

This paradox is not a matter of intelligence or capability. It is a matter of psychology. A constellation of deeply embedded mental attitudes, historical wounds, and social pressures conspires to produce this painful contradiction: people who love their culture yet undermine its language in speech and writing, and who turn away the very experts who could restore its dignity.

The roots of this problem reach back to colonialism. When British missionaries and administrators arrived in Ankole and Kigyezi, they carried with them an implicit — and often explicit — message: English was the language of education, advancement, and civilization. Runyankore-Rukiga was repositioned in the cultural imagination as a “village language” — useful for the home but unsuitable for serious intellectual work. Generations of Bakiga and Banyankore were educated in systems that rewarded fluency in English and penalized attachment to the mother tongue.

Colonial school taught us English and everything British that would “save” us from our traditions and history. In the process, we learnt that our language, our personal names, our songs, our dances, our stories, our architecture, our furnishings, our medicines, our creativity, and our marriage ceremonies were heathen, backward, and uncivilized. Furthermore, one did not need school to have functional knowledge of them. So, they were not worthy of effort. They deserved no respect. Upholding them, and celebrating them was, at best, a fun thing, not a serious vocation at par with learning English literature or European classical music.

The psychological consequence of this sustained message is what scholars call “internalized linguistic shame”. Many people absorbed the colonial verdict so deeply that it became their own belief. That is why the larger public did not give much attention to the outstanding work of Festo Karwemera ka Karagare, Lazaro Kakorwa Tabaaro, Benedicto Kyatuuka Mubangizi, George Nathan Patrick Kirindi, Rev. Father Vincent Kanyonza, and other pioneers in the study and writing of our language. That is why Karwemera’s generous offer of his books for study in Kigyezi schools was declined by district education officials.

Even today, six decades after independence, a significant number of Bakiga and Banyankore seem to feel, at some level, that writing carefully in Runyankore-Rukiga is a step backward — a mark of limited education rather than cultural mastery. The person who struggles to write in English but writes beautifully in Runyankore-Rukiga may still feel inferior to one who writes broken English with confidence. This inverted pride is a direct psychological inheritance of colonialism.

A second and equally powerful psychological force is what psychologists call the Dunning-Kruger effect — the tendency for people with limited knowledge in a domain to overestimate their competence. Because Runyankore-Rukiga is a mother tongue, many speakers assume that fluency in speech automatically confers correctness in writing. The logic, felt if not articulated, is: “What is there to learn, even from an expert, about a language I have used since preschool?” Many are protected from the truth of their inadequacy because, unlike English and other foreign languages, they are not subjected to formal consequential examination in Runyankore-Rukiga.

This illusion of competence is particularly stubborn in indigenous languages because there are fewer formal institutions to challenge it. A person who writes poor English is quickly corrected by teachers, employers, and editors. But a person who writes poor Runyankore-Rukiga may go unchallenged for years, because the written form is less scrutinized, and because social norms discourage overt correction among peers. The absence of correction reinforces the false confidence, making the speaker less open to expert guidance over time. So, many people delude themselves that they are experts in our mother tongue.

When academic language experts step forward to correct someone’s writing, it is not always received as a gift. Worse is when such correction is offered by non-experts that are simply passionate about the preservation of our language. Psychologically, a gentle correction can feel like a threat. This is because language is not merely a tool of communication. It is a vessel of identity. For many Bakiga and Banyankore, how they speak and write in their mother tongue is bound up with who they are as a person, a family member, and a community representative. To be told that one’s Runyankore-Rukiga writing or speech is incorrect can feel less like an academic correction and more like a judgment of one’s personhood.

This may explain the seemingly irrational defensiveness that one often encounters. The defensive person is not simply being stubborn; they are protecting something that feels existential. Psychologists describe this as “identity-protective cognition” — the brain’s tendency to reject information that threatens a cherished self-image. The more attached a person is to being “a true Mukiga” or “a true Munyankore,” the more painful and therefore the more resisted the expert’s correction becomes.

There is also a social dimension to this problem. In many communities, the person who takes their mother tongue’s written form too seriously risks being mocked or dismissed as pretentious or unnecessarily rigid. The community’s informal verdict can be swift and cutting: “Who do you think you are?” or “It is just our language, not English! Stop being so serious.”

This dynamic creates a chilling effect. People who know better often stay silent to preserve social harmony. And those who write poorly receive no correction from their peers, reinforcing the notion that their writing is acceptable. The result is a self-sealing system that perpetuates poor written and spoken standards while keeping help at arm’s length.

Social media has added new urgency to the crisis. Runyankore-Rukiga has found new life in digital spaces — but largely in unregulated, orthographically inconsistent forms. People write phonetically, mix in English words haphazardly, perpetuate errors of distortion, and abandon standardized spelling that is recorded in the official Runyankore-Rukiga Orthography that was agreed in 1954. Because social media writing receives likes and engagement, it is positively reinforced. The expert’s correct form, by contrast, may seem stiff or elitist in comparison. Young people especially internalize the social media standard as the real language and view formal orthography as academic irrelevance.

Restoring pride in written Runyankore-Rukiga requires more than linguistic instruction. It requires psychological rehabilitation — a gentle but persistent reframing of what it means to write well in one’s mother tongue. Experts and passionate protectors of our language must position themselves not as correctors of ignorance but as allies in cultural preservation. Communities must be helped to see that writing their language correctly is an act of dignity, self-respect, resistance, and love — not an act of arrogance or a return to days gone by.

The Bakiga and Banyankore have never lacked pride in their culture. What they need is for that pride to be re-extended, fully and consciously, to the written and spoken word.