When Brenda Noweka moved to Australia from Uganda with her husband and started their own family, they noticed something was missing.
"We realised it would be very important for our children to be able to identify with where they come from," Ms Noweka said.
"And also, their grandparents do not speak English, so we did not want our children to feel out of place when they came to communicate with their grandparents.
"We have so many young families and most of our children within the community attend school and sometimes they find it a bit hard to identify with where they belong.
"Some of them are Australians, but they can't fully identify as Australians or Ugandans because they can't speak the language."
Earlier this year, they opened the Ugandan language school in West Croydon, which has already attracted a diverse range of students, from young children to adults.
Uganda has more than 40 local languages, but Luganda is one of the most widely spoken in the country and overseas.
Luganda is also the language spoken by the Baganda ethnic group from central Uganda, which is where the Noweka family is from.
Language creates belonging
Professor Ibrahima Diallo said language could help create a sense of belonging.
"To preserve [a] language is critical for the person's self-expression [and] for their identity," Professor Diallo said.
"And most importantly for socialisation, because you need to speak a language be part of a community."
Professor Diallo, who teaches Applied Linguistics at the University of South Australia, said language played a significant role in colonisation.
"Language was used as a tool to control and to frame the mind of the colonised people, it was used to influence and to, in a certain way, transform the people that were colonised in the eyes or in the ways the colonisers wanted," he said.
Uganda gained independence in 1962, and since then English remains the official language of Uganda, followed by Luganda and most recently, Swahili.
Mrs Noweka said that independence allowed Uganda to return to their own culture and identity.
"It's something that we are proud of, because we know that from the time we got independence, we started living life as we wanted and as we desired, so that means a lot to our culture as Ugandans," she said.
Professor Diallo said learning and expanding on local languages helped people create a sense of home in their new country after migration.
"You preserve the language to maintain and develop the identity that is not immediately available in the environment and therefore the diaspora [stays] in touch with their country or culture of origin," he said.
Local cultural preservation efforts
This week South Australia's Ugandan community is hosting their Pearl of Africa annual fundraising gala.
Community chairperson Jenifer Amuna said it was an event that gave back to the community.
"We are trying to raise funds to facilitate some of the initiatives in the community," she said.
"One of them is the language school, we do [also] have our soccer team, and youth in general, because youth are the future of tomorrow and our kids, they look up to the youth."
The language school is one of the community's initiatives that Ms Amuna said would help celebrate their identity and connect with family still living in Uganda.
"We have started a Luganda school that is really helping our little ones to embrace our culture, we don't want our kids to lose their identity," she said.
"One of the things is when our kids go home, we do have relatives that don't speak English. And they are so much into our culture. So, we want our kids to be able to relate to people back home."
