Data is the fuel on which the information economy runs; it has allowed businesses like Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and others to grow exponentially by providing their customers with customized content and tailored services.

Many companies now use data analytics and its derivatives, machine learning and AI, to understand their consumers’ behaviour patterns. They use those patterns to motivate brand loyalty and offer new products they know people are likely to consume.  Making these changes allows them to collect more data and observe other trends – starting the cycle again.

In this data-driven world the question must be asked – does the way we think and talk about this revolution affect those of us whose languages lack the words to describe the new world we live in?

Data is the term we commonly use in English to refer to all sorts of information we collect and store in computers for further processing or storage – yet the word data is a plural of another word – datum. Datum is a Latin word that means “a piece of information”.

This means that the concept of segmenting information must have been a common practice to the Romans; so common that they created a word for it. In other words, the Romans understood the concept of what would, 2,000+ years later, become the major foundations of our modern economy. Other languages, like our Kinyarwanda, were mostly used to describe the environment, the plants, the animals, and the feelings of the people who created the foundations of today’s Kinyarwanda. Over the years, our language has evolved from the interaction with other languages, through wars and trade.

Kinyarwanda has many words that you would not be able to find in English – words like ikibamba or umusengo are easily understood by Rwandans because we developed our words to describe our beautiful and cherished cows. However, these concepts have to be translated into more than one word when we need to explain their meaning to a culture where cattle love is not so common.

I must confess, that I am not a linguist, but I am a native Kinyarwanda speaker, an IT (information technology) expert by trade and experience, and a person who for the past 10 years or so has been engaged in developing regulations and policies that enable the uptake and development of these new and emerging technologies on the Rwandan market.

Language affects our ability to understand and communicate thoughts, ideas and emotions; this is still true in the modern world where technology is the leading social and economic development tool. In a nation where our government has decided to build a knowledge-based economy, we need a flexible language that describes our evolving world.

I say it’s long overdue that we start using words that all people can understand to describe the world they live in. This is especially important when one’s understanding of technology has a noticeable socioeconomic impact on your day-to-day life and is far more likely to affect your ability to develop financially and socially in the next couple of years.

What if we started using the word imbonwa to start describing data to our people? This will allow them to understand new concepts that we are always explaining in foreign languages. Yet not everyone was lucky enough to go to school and learn those foreign languages and even those who did sometimes still struggle with them. If it wasn’t for the technology and the dictionaries embedded in our devices, some of us would never be able to send emails, memos or invoices in foreign languages.

I think that increasingly using our own language to communicate complex topics will lead to more ownership of these new and emerging technologies because the discourse will no longer exclude people. Everyone’s questions can finally be answered, and all opinions are welcomed.

The only way we as a people can move forward in a digital world is to embrace not just the use, but the full ownership of newly invented words to describe it to all of us; like we did with our igitare (white) and ibihogo (brown),  not because we lacked words to describe colours, but because we wanted this to be deeply rooted in our language. In the same way, we have adopted words like murandasi (internet) and imbugankoranyambaga (social media), we need to add more words to our dictionary to describe the rest of the technological world.

We are in a powerful position where we get to make these decisions for ourselves, so, what new missing words would you add to the Kinyarwanda dictionary to describe digitalisation and tech innovations?  Or do you have any alternative words to describe data?

Ngo Intore ntiganya – Mureke twishakire ibisubizo.

This article was previously published on Igihe.