Africa’s mother tongues are finding new life as youth connect with roots and relatives

HARARE, Zimbabwe -- A television game show in Nigeria’s commercial hub of Lagos has an unforgiving rule: Speak English and you lose. For a U.S.-born millennial in the audience and a student of her parents' mother tongue, the high-stakes setting is a perfect classroom.Meanwhile, a 15-year-old Canadian speaks to a teacher about 13,000 kilometers (8,000 miles) away in Zimbabwe, learning a language her parents feared she would never speak.“Mhoroi,” Nyashadzashe Machingura says cheerfully with a pronounced Canadian accent while greeting in Zimbabwe's vernacular Shona.The scenes capture a new generation of interest and entrepreneurship around African languages once pushed to the margins by decades of colonialism. Often seen as secondary to English, French and Portuguese, they are enjoying a renaissance that is also creating business opportunities.Africa is home to over 1 billion people speaking roughly a third of the world’s languages, with between 1,500 and 3,000 across 54 countries, according to UNESCO.Experts say the revival in some of them is driven partly by second- and third-generation Africans in the diaspora finding it easier to reconnect with their roots and communicate with old...