“Moedertaal” (Mother Tongue) tracks the words my 18-month-old daughter learned over 40 days, sorted by the moments she said them - play, routine, demand, connection - and marked against whether her day was spent at home, daycare, or sick.
Most are Afrikaans, her mother tongue, but some are English, learned at daycare. One is “haibo”, a Xhosa/Zulu word, loved far beyond either language.
But this is not an accurate record of her language. It is a record of my attention. The words she said in front of me, on the days I noticed, in whatever mood I happened to be in. She speaks English at daycare and Afrikaans at home, so even the balance of languages here maps where I stood, not what she knew. The gaps say more than the data does. Every word I didn’t witness is proof her language was never mine to give.
A mother tongue, it turns out, is assembled: from caregivers, from other kids, from a country’s worth of words that arrive before I can trace where they came from.

The materials carry the same argument as the data. The words are handwritten, the way they were first recorded, in a notebook at odd hours, in whatever hand I had left by the end of the day. The colours are my daughter’s own crayons, not a palette chosen to represent her from outside, but one borrowed from an object she already uses to make her own meaning. The paper is torn, the way her pages are, not smoothed into something clean, but
handled, lived-in, a little damaged, because that is what this record is. The graph uses textures from her toys, weaving in “learning through play,” showing what the data is made of.

Interactive website - https://moedertaal.jotolmay.co.za/#hero