Kiwi start-up helps Iraqi children by translating nursery rhymes into Arabic
When Auckland-based Iraqi couple Ibtihal Al-Asadi? and Yaser Shakib? decided to have children, they knew they wanted them to know their Arabic mother tongue.
“We're both Iraqi, but I grew up in the UK and Yaser in New Zealand. We grew up speaking Arabic with our parents, but English was our first language,” Al-Asadi says.
“But when we had our daughter, it felt really weird to be speaking to her in English. Language is very important because it carries tradition, and we wanted to teach our child our mother tongue.”
Al-Asadi says many Iraqis have been displaced in recent decades, and it’s important the couple teach their culture to their children.
“The best way to teach these things to young people is via song and dance, but we struggled to find Arabic nursery rhymes online, specifically in the Iraqi dialect.”
Al-Asadi says there are multiple dialects of Arabic, and they all differ from each other.
“There are so many different dialects, It's almost like different languages. When we were looking at the content online, there was just absolutely nothing in our dialect of Arabic.”
The couple began to translate English nursery rhymes such as Twinkle Twinkle Little Star into their dialect of Arabic, singing the songs to their daughter. Read More…
