By Abdullahi Mohamed Kheire - Dean of the Faculty of Education and Humanities at Baidoa International University (BIU).
“Constitutional recognition means little if Maay-speaking children still enter classrooms where their own mother tongue remains absent from education.” Abdullahi Mohamed Kheire
Introduction#
Article 5 of Somalia’s Provisional Federal Constitution is unambiguous: the official language of the Federal Republic of Somalia is Somali — Maay and Maxaa-tiri, named side by side, with equal legal standing. One dialect is not elevated as the national language while the other is tolerated as a footnote. Both are named in the founding law of the land.
Yet more than a decade after the Constitution was adopted, Maay is not taught in a single school in Somalia. Not nationally. Not even in Southwest State — the one Federal Member State that officially recognizes Af-Maay alongside Maxaa-tiri, and the very region where the overwhelming majority of native Maay speakers, the Digil and Mirifle (Reeweng/Rahanweyn) communities, actually live.
A child growing up in Baidoa or the Huddur countryside speaks Maay at home, then enters school and is handed a national curriculum, textbooks and national examinations entirely in a dialect that is not their mother tongue.
This article examines why that gap matters, what has and has not been done to close it, and what a credible path forward could look like.
1. A Language With Constitutional Status, but No Classroom Presence#
The historical marginalization of Maay in formal domains — education, governance and official documentation — traces back to patterns of linguistic centralization that made Maxaa-tiri the default language of the state long before the 2012 Constitution was drafted.
When the Constitution named both dialects as co-equal official languages, it created a legal obligation that public institutions have simply not followed through on.
The practical result today is clear:
● No national Maay curriculum exists. The Ministry of Education’s curriculum and examination departments operate exclusively in Maxaa-tiri.
● No Federal Member State teaches Maay in schools, including Southwest State, where Maay speakers are the demographic majority in most districts.
● National examinations are set only in Maxaa-tiri, meaning Maay-speaking students are assessed in a dialect that is effectively a second language for them from their first day of formal schooling.
This is the central contradiction: a Constitution that names Maay as an official language of the Republic and an education system that has never taught it.
2. What Has Been Built — and Where It Stops Short#
It would be inaccurate to say that nothing has happened. Maay-speaking communities and advocates have built real institutional infrastructure over the past few years:
● November 2023 — Elif Maay script inaugurated in Baidoa. This was a genuine milestone: a standardized writing system for Maay, developed specifically so Maay-speaking children could eventually be taught to read and write in their own language. But the inauguration took place at the Southwest State level only. It was never adopted or endorsed as a national standard by the Federal Government or Federal Ministry of Education.
● 2025 — National Academy of Maay Culture and Sciences officially launched. This gave the language, for the first time, a dedicated institutional home for research, standardization and curriculum development — the kind of body that, in principle, could produce Maay textbooks, teacher-training materials and examination frameworks.
Here is the uncomfortable part: despite both developments, Maay is still not taught in a single classroom — including in Southwest State districts where it is the native language of the majority of students.
A script exists. An academy exists. What does not exist is the actual decision, funding and rollout required to put Maay in front of a child sitting at a desk.
This is the gap between symbolic recognition and functional inclusion — and it is where the issue currently stands.
3. Why Mother-Tongue Exclusion Is Not a Minor Administrative Gap#
The consequences of teaching children in a language that is not their mother tongue are well documented internationally, and they are not small:
● India: Districts where the official language of instruction did not match the local language showed literacy rates roughly 19 percentage points lower and college graduation rates roughly 28 percentage points lower than linguistically matched districts. When Indian states were reorganized along linguistic lines in 1956, educational outcomes in previously mismatched districts recovered.
● South Africa: The Bantu Education Act’s mandate of mother-tongue instruction was associated with improved educational attainment and higher long-term wages, with the strongest gains among women.
● Somalia specifically: A separate analysis of language barriers in Somali healthcare found that Maxaa-tiri’s institutional dominance in official communication already marginalizes Maay speakers and limits their access to services — a dynamic that plays out with even higher stakes in the classroom, where a child’s foundational literacy is on the line.
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The pattern across contexts is consistent: a mismatch between the language of instruction and a child’s mother tongue does not simply slow learning. It compounds into lower literacy, lower graduation rates and reduced lifetime economic opportunities, with the consequences falling hardest on communities already on the margins.
4. The Practical Barriers Nobody Should Pretend Don’t Exist#
An honest assessment of this issue must acknowledge the real obstacles to implementation — not as excuses for further delay, but as the actual to-do list:
● Scarcity of standardized teaching materials. Comprehensive Maay textbooks, glossaries and graded readers largely do not yet exist at the scale required for a national or even state-level rollout.
● Limited digital and linguistic infrastructure. Somali as a whole remains a low-resource language in digital and natural language processing terms, and Maay is even further behind, meaning fewer annotated datasets, fewer corpora and a weaker foundation for modern teaching tools.
● Teacher-training gap. Even where willingness exists, there is currently no pipeline of teachers trained to teach standardized Maay using the Elif Maay script.
● Traditional, low-interactivity teaching models. Where Somali-medium instruction generally relies on lecture-based “talk and chalk” methods with little interactive or digital support, introducing Maay instruction on top of that weak base compounds the challenge.
None of these are reasons to keep Maay out of schools indefinitely. They are specific, solvable problems that a funded and coordinated rollout plan would need to address.
5. Community Advocacy: Where the Pressure Is Already Coming From#
This is not a demand invented from outside. Maay-speaking communities and their institutions have already been explicit about what they are asking for:
● Formal calls for the Federal Ministry of Education to incorporate Maay into the National Curriculum and National Examination.
● Calls for a Parliamentary Secretariat to produce official documents in both Maay and Maxaa-tiri, in fulfilment of Article 5 of the Constitution.
● Community-driven development of the Elif Maay script itself — a bottom-up achievement that state and federal institutions have yet to formally adopt.
International and comparative evidence supports the case these communities are making: education delivered in a child’s mother tongue tends to increase enrolment and reduce dropout rates, particularly among children who would otherwise struggle in a non-native language of instruction from their first day of school.
6. Next Steps and Recommendations#
Recognition without implementation is not inclusion — it is a promise deferred. The following steps would move Maay from constitutional language to classroom reality:
I. Southwest State should move first. Since Southwest State already officially recognizes Af-Maay and is home to the majority of native speakers, it is the logical starting point for a pilot Maay-medium curriculum, beginning with early primary grades in districts where Maay is the dominant home language.
II. The Federal Ministry of Education should formally adopt the Elif Maay script as a national standard, rather than leaving its recognition confined to the state level, and establish the Maay Language Committee that community advocates have already called for.
III. Fund the National Academy of Maay Culture and Sciences to produce curriculum materials, not simply conduct research — specifically graded textbooks and teacher guides in Maay, using the existing Elif Maay script as the foundation.
IV. Invest in a Maay teacher-training pipeline, paired with in-service training for existing Maxaa-tiri-medium teachers in Maay-speaking districts, so implementation is not bottlenecked by staffing.
V. Set a public timeline with accountability. A constitutional obligation that has gone unmet for more than a decade needs a concrete, published implementation timeline from the Ministry of Education — not another symbolic milestone that stops short of the classroom.
The Constitution has already spoken. The script exists. The Academy exists. What remains is the decision to teach — starting where the need is most obvious: in Southwest State classrooms, where Maay is a name on paper but remains absent from the blackboard.
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Abdullahi Mohamed Kheire is the Dean of the Faculty of Education and Humanities at Baidoa International University (BIU).
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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Dawan Africa.