Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] So Mali is Not Enough By Yassef Hussain the interpreter was ready. The line was open. The caller was waiting. Then silence. Not a drop. Call. Two people talking past each other like strangers at a bus stop. The call was coded Somali. The interpreter was Somali, but the caller was speaking Mai Mai, a language different enough from standard Somali that you cannot rely on mutual understanding when the stakes are high.
[00:00:30] Ten minutes of confusion, then the slow, awkward truth. The system had failed before the conversation even began. Nobody did anything wrong, and that is the problem.
[00:00:42] The dialect we keep erasing.
[00:00:44] Mai Mai is not a Somali accent. It is the language of the Rahanwane people, spoken by about 2 million people across southern Somalia and diaspora communities worldwide. It has its own grammar and vocabulary. A Somali speaker and a Mai Mai speaker can greet each other, share tea, talk about the weather. They cannot safely discuss medication dosages or navigate a police interrogation. Yet in most industry databases, Mai Mai does not exist. It is folded into Somali, sometimes hidden under other, sometimes missing entirely. ISO639.1 and639.2 recognized Somali. They do not recognize Maimai.
[00:01:28] Language service providers build workflows around codes. Vendor managers search by codes. Interpreters are dispatched by codes. When the code is wrong, the human being on the other end pays the price. I have watched this happen with Nour and Dinka in refugee health clinics, with Afar in immigration courts, with Juba Arabic in resettlement interviews.
[00:01:51] The languages are rare. The dialects are invisible. The need is immediate, so close enough becomes the only option available.
[00:02:00] It is not close enough. What quality means without a certificate?
[00:02:05] The usual answer is certification.
[00:02:07] But certification needs infrastructure, testing bodies, standard curricula, government recognition. That simply does not exist for Mai Mai.
[00:02:17] It barely exists for Somali. It is absent for dozens of African languages our industry is now expected to provide.
[00:02:25] So what does quality look like when there is no certificate to check? It looks like screening for native fluency and dialect specificity, not just language family. It looks like training built from real calls, actual medical dosages, legal procedures, resettlement protocols instead of generic textbooks.
[00:02:44] It looks like giving interpreters the room to pause, clarify, and speak up when the speaker and the code do not match. That means vendor partners who trust the interpreter enough to listen when they say this is not the language you think it is. That trust is the hardest thing to build. It is also the only thing that works, a fix.
[00:03:04] I do not blame lsps that route these calls incorrectly. Most are doing their best with tools built for European languages, written, standardized, code friendly. Those tools were not built for oral traditions, for clan based identity for places where language and history cannot be separated. The industry needs specialist capacity for the dialects. Generic systems cannot handle Mai, Mai, Gar, Noor, Dinka, Juba, Arabic, Afar alongside the core languages they are often mistaken for.
[00:03:36] That capacity needs native expertise in the regions where these languages are actually spoken, not knowledge imported from a distance. The industry needs to stop assuming that Somali is enough. On the other end of that call is a person who has known their language their whole life. They are waiting to be heard in it. When we send the wrong interpreter, not from malice but from a gap in our codes, we tell them their voice does not fit the system. It is not their job to fit the system.
[00:04:05] Yusuf Hussain is the founder and CEO of Saudi Language Solutions, a Nairobi based language vendor specializing in rare African languages for language service companies.
[00:04:16] Originally published in Multilingual Magazine Issue 256 10-20-26.
