I discovered I was linguistically naked in a matatu. It was 7.12am, the matatu conductor was doing his usual chant (“Tao tao tao! Haraka, haraka!”), and an elderly woman next to me leaned in and asked me something in Kikuyu.

I smiled with the confidence of someone who had watched enough TikToks to think I was multilingual. Then my brain blue-screened. I caught maybe three words. I nodded like a bobblehead.

She stared at me the way you look at a phone that’s buffering on 3G. Finally, she sighed, switched to Kiswahili, and I felt my soul get gently roasted at 180 degrees.

I understand my mother tongue, I just don’t speak it well. There’s a difference. And in Kenya, that difference can feel like standing outside your own house, keys jangling in the pocket, door stubbornly locked.

I grew up in Nairobi, baptised by cartoons, Kiswahili homework and ‘Speak proper English’ being treated like a life skill. My shosho spoke to me in Kikuyu, I answered in Kiswahili. It became our family’s bilingual standoff: She offered language, I returned subtitles.

Now here’s the twist: Gen Zs in Kenya are making mother tongue cool again. Cool like vinyl records. Cool like speaking your grandmother’s language on TikTok and getting 40K views because you said “come eat” with the exact accent of someone who grew up hearing it shouted across a rural compound.

Our generation, raised on global content and American slang, is suddenly looking back home and saying, “Actually, this slaps.”

You see it everywhere. On TikTok, there are skits in Dholuo about Nairobi dating culture. On X, jokes in Sheng blend seamlessly with Kikuyu, Kamba and Luhya phrases. At family functions, my cousins are suddenly flexing phrases like they are rare Pokémon. “Unajua kusema ndî mwega?” they’ll ask. And I’m like, Yes, but only realistically in my brain.

There’s a serious reason behind the trend, though. Linguists warn that many African languages are under pressure as urbanisation and schooling systems prioritise English and Kiswahili. Unesco has flagged language loss as a cultural emergency because when a language fades, a whole way of seeing the world fades with it. Proverbs, jokes, insults that hit different, recipes with instructions you can’t translate properly. My shosho’s Kikuyu proverbs are so sharp they could cut glass, but try translating them into English and they become motivational posters from 2012.

Gen Zs I talk to aren’t romanticising language in a vacuum. They are responding to something real — a hunger for roots in a globalised world that can feel like a copy-paste culture.

“When I started learning Kamba properly, I stopped feeling like a visitor in my own family,” Grace Mwende, 19, says. “Before, I’d laugh along at jokes I didn’t fully get. Now I get the joke — and sometimes I am the joke.”That’s growth.

But not everyone is sold on the mother tongue revival. Brian Wekesa, 25, a software developer I met at a co-working space in Westlands, rolled his eyes when I brought it up. “I get the culture thing, but realistically, English and Kiswahili pay the bills,” he said. “I’m not trying to negotiate a salary in Luhya.”

He’s not wrong. Language is also currency. In Kenya’s job market, English is still the suit and tie you wear to be taken seriously. The tension is real: How do you honour where you’re from without kneecapping where you’re going?

For me, the struggle is personal and awkwardly funny. I can understand family gossip in Kikuyu at Olympic-level listening speeds, but when it’s my turn to contribute, my mouth files for leave. I’ve tried practising with my mum, but she corrects my tones like a strict music teacher. One wrong inflection and suddenly I’ve called someone a goat instead of saying they’re tired. Language, it turns out, is a contact sport.

Still, I’m not opposed to learning. I’m tired of nodding in matatus like a dashboard ornament. I’m tired of feeling like my cultural membership card is provisional. Learning my mother tongue isn’t about being ‘authentically Kenyan’ in some performative way. It’s about intimacy, about being able to joke with my shosho in the language that shaped her humour, to understand the emotional weight of words that don’t have clean English equivalents, to hear elders speak and not miss the poetry between the lines.

Zoom out and this Gen Z language revival connects to bigger themes: decolonisation of the mind, cultural confidence and resisting the idea that modernity must sound foreign. We’re remixing tradition with WiFi. We’re proof that you can code in English, joke in Sheng, flirt in Kiswahili and still want to learn the language that rocked you to sleep as a baby.

So yeah, I’m the person who understands my mother tongue but struggles to speak it. I stumble. I mispronounce. I get lovingly roasted by aunties. But I’m learning, slowly, clumsily, sincerely.

And if Gen Zs are turning mother tongues into something you can wear proudly, like a thrifted jacket with a story stitched into the lining, then sign me up. I’ll be the one in the matatu, practising under my breath, hoping the next time an elder speaks to me, my reply doesn’t come with subtitles.