Raising a bilingual child takes deliberate, daily effort — not a curriculum. Here’s a practical, realistic guide to teaching Somali at home, drawn from raising four children and years working as an EAL teacher in UK schools.
Every parent raising a child outside Somalia or Somaliland asks some version of the same question: how do I make this work? Not in theory — in the middle of a normal week, with school, homework, screens, and a child who finds it easier to just answer you in English.
There’s no perfect formula, and it’s worth saying that upfront. But there are things that genuinely help, and things that quietly undermine the effort without anyone noticing. This guide pulls together what actually works, drawn from raising four children through exactly this situation, and from years spent on the other side of the classroom — supporting children with a home language other than English, and watching, firsthand, which families managed to keep their mother tongue alive and which didn’t. (By the way I didn’t have the problem of screens – thank goodness)
Start by dropping the idea of “lessons”
The biggest mental shift for most parents is realising that raising a bilingual child isn’t about teaching a subject. It’s about making Somali a normal, present part of daily life — not a topic that gets its own slot, like homework.
Children pick up language through exposure and use, not instruction. A child who hears Somali at breakfast, during the school run, at bedtime, and during a phone call with a grandparent is absorbing far more than a child who does 20 minutes of “Somali lessons” once a week and speaks English the rest of the time. If Somali only ever shows up as a formal lesson, it starts to feel like schoolwork rather than a living language — and children, understandably, resist that. I tried this – hard work for little reward!
The environment matters more than any single method
This is something that becomes obvious quickly when you look across different households: the parents whose children stay strongest in Somali are almost never doing anything exotic. They’ve simply arranged their home environment, so Somali has real space in it.
A few things that make a measurable difference:
– Speak Somali to your child consistently, even when they answer in English.
This is one of the hardest habits to hold onto, especially as children get older and default to English more. But a parent who keeps speaking Somali, even to a child replying in English, keeps the input flowing. The moment a parent also switches to English “to make things easier,” that input disappears. Guilty as charged especially when you are a working parent and bring your work home. It is disheartening when you feel you are not making any headway but don’t give up!
– Limit how much English television and content fills the gaps. This isn’t about cutting out screens — screens can genuinely help, which I’ll come back to — but about being aware that hours of English-language cartoons and shows are hours where Somali isn’t being reinforced at all.
– Let siblings hear you use Somali with each other, not just with them. Children pick up enormously from overheard adult conversation, not just from language directed straight at them. Great if your siblings also speak Somali. Same goes for other relatives.
What if the parent doesn’t speak Somali? This does happen. Then see it as an opportunity for some family learning. Look for basic lessons online, videos and books that you can work together on. It could be fun!
Reading together does more work than people expect
This is the part of the strategy I believe in most, because it’s exactly what led me to start writing bilingual books in the first place. A short story read aloud, a few times a week, does something a spoken conversation alone doesn’t: it introduces vocabulary in a structured, repeatable way, and it gives a child a chance to hear words they might not encounter in daily conversation at all.
It doesn’t need to be long. Ten minutes of a bilingual story, read together rather than assigned as homework, builds vocabulary steadily over weeks and months. And because the books are bilingual, a parent who isn’t fully confident in written Somali themselves can still follow along using the English side, without the activity depending entirely on the parent’s own fluency. I wish bilingual books had been around when I was reading my children bedtime stories. They loved being read to, in English of course. That was a missed opportunity for me. It never crossed my mind to write bilingual books myself at that time.
Use screens on purpose, not by accident
Somali-language content for children is still much harder to find than English content, so screens tend to default to English purely because that’s what’s easily available. But this can be flipped: if you deliberately seek out Somali-language videos, songs and lessons — the same way you’d choose a book — screen time becomes an ally rather than something working against the goal.
Free video series built specifically for this (like session-based lessons covering letters, numbers, colours, family words and more) are worth building into a weekly routine the same way you might build in a bedtime story. The key difference is ‘intention’ — screens chosen for Somali content, rather than screens that just happen to default to English.
Get the sounds right early
One area that’s easy to underestimate: Somali has a small number of sounds that don’t exist in English at all — the sounds behind the letters C, X, J, Kh and Dh. If a child grows up mostly speaking English, these sounds are the ones most likely to get flattened into their nearest English equivalent, which can make spoken Somali sound slightly “off” even when vocabulary and grammar are otherwise strong.
The good news is that Somali is entirely phonetic — once a child knows the sounds, they can read almost anything, since there’s none of the irregular spelling English has. It’s worth spending real time on these five sounds specifically, ideally with audio rather than written description alone, since hearing them repeated matters more than reading about how they’re made.
Don’t underestimate extended family
Grandparents, aunts, uncles and family friends who speak Somali fluently are one of the most valuable resources available, and it’s easy to overlook this because it doesn’t feel like “teaching.” A regular video call where a child is expected to speak some Somali, even briefly, gives them real, unscripted practice with a fluent speaker — something no book or app can fully replicate. Back in the day my parents would make us record messages for our relatives back in Somaliland. I truly hated doing that but now I can see how I benefitted from that and being translator for family and friends. It helped me become truly bilingual and good at French and German at school too.
It also helps a child see Somali as a living language used by real people they love, rather than an abstract subject that only exists at home with mum or dad.
Expect it to be uneven, and don’t give up
If there’s one thing I’d want every parent to hear clearly, it’s this: progress with a second language rarely looks like steady, visible improvement. There will be periods where your child seems to regress, phases where they resist speaking Somali altogether, and stretches where nothing feels like it’s working. This is completely normal, not a sign of failure.
Consistency matters more than intensity. A family that keeps a modest amount of Somali present every single day, for years, will get further than a family that does an intense push for a few months and then stops. Children pick up on what’s treated as a permanent, unremarkable part of life versus what’s treated as a temporary project — and they respond accordingly.
Where to start this week
If you’re beginning from scratch, or restarting after feeling like things have slipped:
- Pick one daily moment — breakfast, the car, or bedtime — and commit to using only Somali during it, even if it’s just a few phrases at first.
- Add one bilingual book to a regular reading routine, a few times a week rather than daily, so it’s sustainable.
- Find one piece of Somali-language video content your child enjoys and let it replace one piece of English content they currently watch.
- Set up one recurring family video call where speaking some Somali is simply expected, not requested.
None of these are dramatic changes. That’s rather the point — the families who succeed at this aren’t doing anything heroic, they’re doing something small and consistent, for a very long time.
You can find bilingual books for every stage on the Bilingual Books page (https://ashaalinoor.com/bilingual-books/) , and free videos and worksheets covering letters, numbers, colours and more on the Learning page (https://ashaalinoor.com/learn-somali/ ).