It was the summer of 2008 in South Africa our first child had just started play school. Barely a year and half, she was learning to make simple sentences. Initially, we thought that the funny sounding words she sometimes spoke were  attempts at speaking Igbo. We eventually figured out that she was speaking bits of several South African languages...but not Igbo.

We had assumed that since we spoke Igbo at home that our children would naturally pick it up. This was not the case. In direct contr...