About Chidigo
Chidigo is a language revitalisation initiative for Chidigo, the Bantu language of the Digo people of coastal Kenya and Tanzania. We build reference works, digital platforms, cultural content, and transmission tools — everything the Digo community needs to keep its language alive for the next generation.
“My parents understand Chidigo when their grandmother speaks. They reply in Swahili. My children don’t understand at all.”
This pattern — passive parents, peer-only transmission, screen lives in Swahili and English — is a cliff, not a slope.
Linguists call it the missing transmission generation: when parents stop speaking the language to their children, the language collapses in two generations even with hundreds of thousands of nominal speakers.
Languages don’t die alone. Without Chidigo, you lose the vocabulary of the kayas, of fishing and palm-wine tapping, of chakacha and sengenya and mwanzele, of healing traditions and ritual life — hundreds of culturally specific concepts with no Swahili equivalent. When mphakusa dies, you don’t translate it. You lose the concept.
Tools — the monolingual dictionary, thesaurus, and proverbs collection. Free at the front door. Mobile-first, offline-capable. Audio as a first-class citizen.
Content — stories, music annotations, audio archive, and cultural documentation. Making the language feel living, not preserved.
Platforms — the online dictionary, search, community contributions, and daily-word features. The infrastructure that brings reference work to people.
Digo has unusually strong assets for a language at this stage: a complete published dictionary (Mgombato 2004), a full New Testament translation (2007), documented phonology, 349 collected proverbs, a stable internet-connected community, and visibly alive cultural practices. The window to act is 10–15 years, not generational. These assets make Digo a case where intervention can actually work.