A little introduction

I was having a conversation with my sister some time in February when we remembered none of us could speak our native language. It’s not exactly a new thing, many friends in the Gen-Z category in my country can’t either. I decided to check out why that is, and if there was a fix.

The goal

The goal is to make Koyata a language learning application that would leverage white hat gamification techniques to help young people learn Nigerian languages while also teaching them a thing or two about history.

I started making research

As someone personally faced with this problem, I had an idea of what the pain points were, but i needed to test my hypotheses with others to find out whether I was right. To do this, I used an online survey. The goal of this exercise was:

• What was the age range of people faced with this problem
• Why they can’t speak their native language
• What have been the drawbacks of not being able to speak their native language
• What they have done to fix it so far.

I also asked a couple of other questions I thought were important.

I put out the survey to friends and acquaintances, told them to share it with their friends and I closed it after I got 40 responses. Not to bore you with many figures, here are the results:

The results of my research

From the initial questions asked, I was able to find out that:

• Affected people are largely Genz
• Some had ethnically divided parents, others’ parents preferred to interact in English, and still, others didn’t want to learn their language