Love and lingo

 

Yes—erotic love can be a genuine part of love, but it is not the whole of love.

“Erotic love” refers to sexual/romantic desire, attraction, passion, and longing for intimate union. The ancient Greeks often associated this with eros.

A useful distinction is:

Eros: “I intensely desire you.”

Affection: “I enjoy being close to you.”

Commitment: “I choose you and remain faithful.”

Compassion: “Your well-being matters to me.”

Agape: “I seek your good even when it costs me.”

In a mature romantic relationship, these can overlap. Erotic desire can deepen love, and love can intensify erotic desire. But they aren't identical.

For example, someone can experience powerful sexual attraction without genuinely loving the person. Conversely, someone can deeply love a partner while experiencing little or temporarily no sexual desire.

So I would put it this way:

> Erotic love is love expressed through desire for intimate union, but desire alone does not necessarily constitute love.

From a Christian perspective, this distinction is especially important: sexual desire itself is not necessarily viewed as evil; rather, Christian ethics traditionally asks whether erotic desire is integrated with faithfulness, mutual self-giving, dignity, and commitment, rather than reducing another person to an object of gratification.

It can involve erotic desire, but I wouldn't automatically call it erotic love.

If someone wants sexual relationships with as many partners as possible indefinitely, the key question is what is actually being desired.

If the person desires the people themselves—their bodies, minds, personalities, intimacy, and mutual connection—there may be an erotic form of love involved.

If the person primarily desires sexual novelty, conquest, pleasure, or the experience of having many partners, that is better described as sexual desire/libido rather than love.

It can also be a mixture: genuine attraction and affection toward people combined with a strong desire for variety.

Love is the deep commitment to the good, well-being, and flourishing of another—not merely a feeling, but a way of seeing, choosing, and acting.

It can have several dimensions:

• ❤️ Affection: “I delight in you.”
• 🤝 Commitment: “I will remain faithful to you.”
• 🫂 Compassion: “Your pain matters to me.”
• 🎁 Self-giving: “I am willing to sacrifice for your good.”
• 🧠 Understanding: “I want to know you as you truly are.”
• 🔥 Desire: “I am drawn toward you.”
• 🌱 Patience: “I will give you room to grow.”
• ⚖️ Truth: “I will not pretend something is good when it harms you.”

In the Christian understanding, love reaches its highest expression in agape—love that gives without requiring the other person to earn it. That is why 1 Corinthians 13 describes love as patient, kind, not boastful, not self-seeking, and enduring.

Put very simply:

Love is when another person's good becomes important to you—not only because of what they can give you, but because they are valuable to you.

And perhaps the deepest form of love is this: to freely choose another's good even when doing so costs you something.

And importantly, love does not necessarily require exclusivity. Some people understand romantic/erotic relationships as consensually non-monogamous, while others understand sexual love as inherently exclusive. The ethical distinction isn't simply “one partner versus many”; it also involves consent, honesty, respect, responsibility, and whether the people involved are treated as persons rather than merely as sources of pleasure.

So, to your deeper question:

Erotic love is a type of love, but erotic desire is not necessarily love. Wanting many sexual partners—even forever—doesn't by itself tell us whether someone is loving or unloving. It tells us that they have a particular pattern of sexual desire. What makes that desire love depends on what they feel toward the people and how they relate to them.

Yes—with one important qualification.

Love has different meanings and perspectives for different people. What one person experiences as romantic love, another may understand as sexual love, committed love, friendship, family love, or spiritual love.

But “the end justifies the means” doesn't automatically apply to love. A loving goal does not necessarily make every method of achieving it loving. The means—consent, honesty, respect, freedom, and absence of exploitation—still matter.

So a stronger conclusion would be:

Love is understood differently by different people, but whatever form it takes, both the end and the means matter.

The English word “love” has a very old Germanic history.

Word history

Modern English love ← Middle English love / luve ← Old English lufu (noun) and lufian (verb).

It is related to words in other Germanic languages, for example:

Old Frisian: love

Old Saxon: lībo

Old High German: liubi

German: Liebe (“love”)

Dutch: liefde (“love”)

Swedish/Danish/Norwegian: kärlek/kærlighed/kjærlighet (different later formations, but expressing the same concept)

The deeper Proto-Germanic reconstruction is generally given as *lubō / *lubjaną, associated with love, desire, affection, or being pleasing/dear.

An interesting connection

The same Germanic root is connected with the idea of “dear” or “beloved.” English love therefore developed within a family of words expressing affection, desire, and being dear to someone.

It is not derived from the Latin amor. Latin amor instead gave English words such as amorous, amity (through a different Latin root), and Romance-language words such as French amour, Spanish amor, and Italian amore.

And this connects nicely to your earlier question about erotic love: ancient languages often had several different words for different dimensions of what English compresses into the single word “love.” For example, ancient Greek distinguished eros (passionate/sexual desire), philia (friendship/affection), and agapē (self-giving love).

So English “love” is historically a broad word, encompassing affection, attachment, desire, devotion, and sexual/romantic love rather than originally having one narrowly defined meaning.

Yes—desire is one of the deepest dimensions of love, especially in erotic or romantic love. But saying “love = desire” is a philosophical definition, not the complete meaning of the word.

You can frame it this way:

Love → desire → movement toward the beloved.

In erotic love, the desire may be for physical union, emotional closeness, possession, intimacy, reproduction, or simply the presence of the beloved.

But desire can exist without love. Hunger is desire for food; curiosity is desire for knowledge; sexual attraction can be desire for another person. So not every desire is love.

A more precise formulation would be:

Love is desire directed toward what—or whom—the lover experiences as valuable or worthy of union.

That also explains why the ancient concept of eros is so important: eros is love as longing, attraction, and desire for the beloved.

Yes. Within your definition, love becomes a very broad philosophical principle: love as connection, desire, and movement toward union.

Under that framework:

🍎 Eating is a form of union: something outside you becomes part of you.

❤️ Sexual intimacy is bodily union.

💍 Marriage is social, emotional, and often bodily union.

👨‍👩‍👧 Parenthood creates a continuing relational bond.

🤝 Friendship is union through shared life and affection.

🌍 Society is people connected through mutual dependence.

🌱 Ecology is connection between organisms and their environment.

🧠 Knowledge can be understood as a connection between the knower and the thing known.

In that philosophical sense, you could say:

> Love is the impulse toward connection, relationship, and union.

Then eros would be love as longing for union, while other forms of love could express union through friendship, family, compassion, devotion, or shared purpose.

There is also an interesting philosophical consequence to your definition: separation becomes the opposite of love, while connection becomes its fundamental expression.

I would only keep one distinction: connection itself isn't necessarily morally good. Two people can be connected through conflict, exploitation, or violence. So if you want love to mean more than mere connection, you might define it as a desire for meaningful or valued union, rather than connection alone.

That gives your idea considerable philosophical precision:

Love = desire for meaningful union.

Yes. I found several studies, and the evidence does suggest language shift among younger Kikuyus—especially urban youth—but it does not show that Kikuyu is disappearing among Kikuyus generally.

1. Direct study of Kikuyu youth — Nairobi, Kiambu and Thika

The strongest study I found is a sociolinguistic study specifically examining Kikuyu youth in Nairobi, Kiambu and Thika. It used questionnaires, focus-group discussions, and tests of speaking, reading and writing ability.

Its conclusion was quite striking: the researchers found negative attitudes toward Kikuyu and relatively low Kikuyu linguistic competence among the urban youth studied. They argued that English, Kiswahili and Sheng were increasingly dominating urban youth communication while Kikuyu was being sidelined.

The study specifically describes this as a possible threat to the ethnolinguistic vitality of Kikuyu in urban areas.

2. Nairobi youth more generally

A 2018 study, “Nexus between Gender and Language Shift among the Youth in Nairobi County,” investigated language shift among young people in Nairobi. It specifically examined movement away from mother tongues toward other languages and identified urbanization, migration, multilingualism/bilingualism and language policy as important factors.

It wasn't exclusively a Kikuyu study, so I wouldn't use it to claim a precise percentage of Kikuyu youth losing Kikuyu. But it provides broader evidence for the mechanism affecting Kikuyu youth in Nairobi.

3. A newer study of indigenous languages among Nairobi youth

A more recent study examined 18–28-year-old Nairobi youth, including Kikuyu respondents, alongside other Kenyan ethnic communities. It collected information from both youth and parents concerning language proficiency, language use, attitudes toward language loss, cultural change and language maintenance.

This is particularly useful because it allows comparison between what young people speak and what their parents' generation speaks.

4. National surveys give us an important baseline

The national Afrobarometer data show that Kikuyu remains a substantial home language:

Survey	Kikuyu reported as home language
2019 Afrobarometer	11.6%
2024 Afrobarometer	11.1%

The 2019 survey had 2,400 respondents, with 279 reporting Kikuyu as their primary home language. The 2024 survey likewise found 266 of 2,400 respondents (11.1%) reporting Kikuyu as their home language.

So Kikuyu has not simply collapsed nationally. The stronger evidence for decline is concentrated among younger and particularly urban speakers.

What the evidence seems to say

I'd summarize the situation as:

Older/rural Kikuyu → stronger intergenerational transmission

⬇️

Urbanization + English + Kiswahili + Sheng

⬇️

Young urban Kikuyu → greater bilingualism/multilingualism

⬇️

Less frequent Kikuyu use → reduced proficiency for some young speakers

That is language shift, rather than necessarily language extinction.

And there's an important question we can investigate further: How much Kikuyu is actually being passed from Kikuyu parents to their children? That's probably the best measurable indicator of whether the language is genuinely declining from one generation to the next.

If you want, I can dig into the studies and calculate the percentage of young Kikuyus who speak Kikuyu fluently vs. their parents/grandparents, where the data allow it.

Yes. I dug further into the actual studies, and there is enough evidence to make a much sharper assessment—but not enough to produce a scientifically valid nationwide “X% of young Kikuyus have lost Kikuyu” figure.

What the strongest Kikuyu-specific study found

The most directly relevant study is Stephen Njihia Kamau's 2015 PhD thesis at Kenyatta University, which examined Kikuyu youth in Nairobi, Kiambu and Thika. It did something particularly useful: it didn't just ask whether young people identified as Kikuyu; it examined speaking, reading and writing competence, language attitudes, and where different languages were actually used. 

The thesis has dedicated sections measuring:

whether youth consider knowing Kikuyu important;

whether Kikuyu is used at home;

whether parents speak Kikuyu to their children;

what language young people use with parents;

what language parents use with them;

what language grandparents use;

what language children first learn;

and Kikuyu speaking, reading and writing competence. 

The overall result was low Kikuyu competence and relatively negative attitudes among the urban youth studied, with English, Kiswahili and Sheng increasingly occupying domains that previously belonged to mother tongues. The researcher described this as a new urban “triglossia” and warned that Kikuyu was being sidelined among some young urban speakers. 

But here's the important finding about generations

The study specifically compared language use across generations:

Grandparents → parents → young people → children

That is exactly the chain we need when asking whether Kikuyu is being lost.

The questionnaire included separate measures of:

> language young people use with their parents

language parents use with their children

language grandparents use with young people

and the language children first acquire. 

That makes the study much more informative than simply counting Kikuyu speakers.

Evidence from newer Nairobi research

A newer study of Nairobi youth aged 18–28 and their parents also found evidence of intergenerational language shift. The parents included a substantial Kikuyu subgroup (20.7% of the parent sample). The study reports that many young people acknowledged declining use of indigenous languages among their peers, while parents described their children increasingly answering them in English or Kiswahili. 

One parent described the generational change essentially as:

parents' generation: mother tongue at home → children: English/Kiswahili

The study also identified urbanisation, education, media and employment/social mobility as major pressures. 

So how much is Kikuyu actually being lost?

Here's the scientifically honest answer:

Population What the evidence suggests

Older/rural Kikuyu Strongest retention

Urban parents Mixed—many still speak Kikuyu

Urban young adults Noticeable shift away from Kikuyu

Urban children Potentially the greatest vulnerability

Kikuyu nationally Not disappearing

Kikuyu in some urban families Clear evidence of intergenerational weakening

And there's another important piece of evidence: a 2018 Nairobi study specifically examining language shift among youth concluded that urbanisation, migration, multilingualism/bilingualism and language policy are important drivers of mother-tongue shift. It was not Kikuyu-only, but it reinforces the mechanism seen in the Kikuyu-specific research. 

One thing I would NOT claim

I would not say:

> “50% of young Kikuyus no longer speak Kikuyu.”

We don't have a sufficiently representative national dataset supporting that number.

Likewise, the fact that 11.1% of Afrobarometer respondents reported Kikuyu as their home language in 2024 does not tell us the percentage of Kikuyu youth who are fluent. It is a population-language measure, not an intergenerational transmission measure.

My overall assessment

The evidence points to something more nuanced than “Kikuyu is dying”:

Kikuyu remains a major Kenyan language, but its transmission is weakening in some urban Kikuyu families.

The critical danger isn't necessarily that today's Kikuyu adults suddenly stop speaking Kikuyu.

It is this:

Grandparent speaks Kikuyu → parent understands/speaks Kikuyu → child understands only partially → grandchild speaks English/Kiswahili.

If that chain becomes widespread, the number of ethnic Kikuyus could remain large while the number of fluent Kikuyu speakers falls sharply.

That is the classic pattern of language shift.

And interestingly, there are also anecdotal reports from Kikuyu people themselves describing precisely this phenomenon—parents speaking Kikuyu among themselves while their children respond in English or Kiswahili—but those reports should be treated as qualitative evidence rather than population statistics. 

So my conclusion: yes, younger urban Kikuyus are measurably more vulnerable to losing Kikuyu than their parents' and grandparents' generations, but Kikuyu as a whole is nowhere near disappearing.

If we want the actual percentage, the next step would be to extract the numerical tables from Kamau's 347-page thesis and reconstruct the Kikuyu youth language-use percentages by age, home, parents and grandparents. That would give us the closest thing available to a quantitative “Kikuyu generational loss” estimate.

absolutely. I went back to the actual Kikuyu-specific research rather than relying on general impressions.

The clearest quantitative conclusion

Stephen Njihia Kamau's 2015 PhD research is the most directly relevant dataset I found. It studied Kikuyu youth in Nairobi, Kiambu and Thika, specifically examining speaking, reading and writing competence and the effects of Kiswahili, English and Sheng. The university's repository summarizes the finding as negative attitudes and low Kikuyu proficiency among the urban youth studied.

However, I need to correct one thing from my previous answer: I cannot responsibly give you a percentage such as “X% of young Kikuyus have lost Kikuyu” from the available online material. The numerical tables from the thesis aren't exposed sufficiently clearly in the searchable record for me to reconstruct those percentages without risking inventing numbers.

What the evidence does establish

There is a clear generational pattern:

Grandparents → generally stronger Kikuyu use

Parents → many remain Kikuyu speakers, but increasingly use Kiswahili/English in urban households

Urban youth → substantially greater use of Kiswahili, English and Sheng, with weaker Kikuyu proficiency in the study population

Children → potentially the most vulnerable generation because the language may not be consistently transmitted at home.

That is precisely why Kamau describes a new “triglossic” urban arrangement of English + Kiswahili + Sheng, with Kikuyu increasingly pushed out of some domains.

There is also newer evidence

A recent Nairobi study of 18–28-year-olds compared youth with parents and included a significant Kikuyu component: 20.7% of the parent respondents identified Kikuyu as their native language. It examined proficiency, actual language use, attitudes toward language loss and cultural change.

The study describes English and Kiswahili as increasingly dominant in urban environments and identifies urbanisation and the perceived economic value of dominant languages as important drivers of indigenous-language decline.

An especially revealing real-world pattern

There are also contemporary accounts of precisely the phenomenon we're trying to measure: parents speaking Kikuyu to each other while their children answer in English or Kiswahili—or don't understand Kikuyu well. These are anecdotal rather than representative surveys, so I wouldn't turn them into percentages, but they illustrate the intergenerational mechanism identified by the academic research.

Interestingly, there are signs of renewed interest among some younger Kenyans. A 2026 report describes Gen Z Kenyans deliberately returning to mother tongues through social media and cultural content, suggesting that language shift isn't necessarily irreversible.

My best assessment

So if we construct a generational language-retention scale, the evidence points approximately like this:

Generation	Kikuyu retention
Grandparents	🟢 High
Parents	🟢/🟡 High–moderate
Urban young adults	🟡/🟠 Moderate–low
Urban children	🟠 Potentially low
Rural Kikuyu communities	🟢 Much stronger

The crucial point is that ethnic identity is not disappearing at the same rate as language ability. Someone can remain completely Kikuyu culturally while becoming unable to speak Kikuyu fluently.

And that is arguably the biggest danger: not the disappearance of Kikuyu people, but the separation of Kikuyu identity from Kikuyu language.

Kamau's research explicitly identifies this as a question of language vitality, maintenance and possible language death, particularly in the urban youth population.

If you want the next step, I can go one level deeper and , rather than giving you a qualitative assessment.

Yes. We can build an empirical “Language Retention Index” for Kenya—but the data suggest we should be a little more precise than saying Kikuyu are definitively #1.

A workable index

The best nationally comparable data I found are from Afrobarometer Kenya 2024, which asks both:

1. Which ethnic/cultural group do you identify with?
2. What language do you speak at home?

That lets us construct a simple proxy:

Language Retention Index = % identifying with group who report that group's language as their home language ÷ 100

So, for example, if 17.1% identify as Kikuyu but 11.1% report Kikuyu as their home language:

11.1 ÷ 17.1 × 100 = 64.9

This is not a formal linguistic-vitality index, but it is a useful first approximation of how strongly ethnic identity and home-language use remain connected.

2024 Kenya comparison

Community	Ethnic/cultural identification	Home language	Retention proxy
Kikuyu	17.1%	11.1%	64.9
Luo	10.7%	7.1%	66.4
Luhya	15.4%	6.2%	40.3
Kamba	9.9%	7.3%	73.7
Kalenjin	10.1%	7.3%	72.3
Kisii	5.6%	4.5%	80.4
Meru/Embu	5.7%	4.1%	71.9
Maasai/Samburu	4.1%	3.3%	80.5
Mijikenda	6.0%	2.3%	38.3
Somali	5.0%	4.5%	90.0
Pokot	1.1%	1.0%	90.9
Turkana	2.3%	1.4%	60.9

The underlying Afrobarometer sample has 2,400 respondents, and Afrobarometer explicitly warns that the raw percentages should not be interpreted as population estimates.

So where does Kikuyu stand?

Kikuyu scores about 65/100 on this particular proxy.

That's quite strong, but it isn't the highest. Several communities—particularly Somali, Pokot, Maasai/Samburu and Kisii—score higher on this crude ethnic-identity/home-language measure.

However, there's an important problem with interpreting this as “who retains their language best.”

For example, Kikuyu is a very large, highly urbanized community. That makes its language more exposed to English, Kiswahili and Sheng. Smaller, more geographically concentrated or more rural communities can have much higher language-retention ratios.

And this actually makes your hypothesis interesting:

Kikuyu may be one of Kenya's strongest language-retaining large communities despite experiencing unusually strong urbanization and multilingual pressure.

That is a much more defensible proposition than simply saying “Kikuyu are #1.”

There is another piece of evidence in Kikuyu's favor

The 2016 Afrobarometer survey had Kikuyu as the largest reported mother-tongue group in its sample: 18.3%, compared with Luo 11.4%, Luhya 13.6%, Kamba 11.6% and Kalenjin 9.6%.

And in 2024, Kikuyu remained the largest individual indigenous home-language category, at 11.1%, ahead of Kamba and Kalenjin at 7.3% each and Luo at 7.1%.

So we have two different things:

Absolute strength: Kikuyu is clearly one of Kenya's strongest indigenous languages.

Retention relative to ethnic population: Kikuyu is strong, but the available 2024 proxy does not put it first.

I would therefore give Kikuyu this preliminary score

Kikuyu Language Retention Index: ~65/100

Absolute national strength: 9/10

Intergenerational/urban vulnerability: moderate

Overall linguistic vitality: HIGH

And if we want to test your original claim properly, I think we can do something much better than the 65/100 index: construct a Kenyan Indigenous Language Vitality Index using several variables—home-language use, ethnic-language identification, urban/rural retention, youth use, intergenerational transmission, and change between 2016–2024—and then rank the major Kenyan communities from #1 downward.

That would tell us whether Kikuyu really are Kenya's strongest large-community language retainers rather than relying on one statistic.

es—and this is where the Luo case becomes especially interesting.

If by “the Luo are very mixed” you mean high intermarriage, migration, and interaction with other communities, then we should not judge Luo language retention simply by the percentage of ethnic Luo who speak Dholuo at home.

There is evidence that Dholuo can remain remarkably strong even under substantial language contact. For example, research on the Abasuba shows that sustained intermarriage and contact with Luo communities actually resulted in many Suba people adopting Dholuo, rather than the Luo abandoning Dholuo. 

And a 2025 study of Luo immigrants in Kisii found that Dholuo remained sufficiently vital among a minority Luo community surrounded by Ekegusii to warrant a study specifically on its native-language retention. 

This changes our index

The earlier 65/100 Kikuyu figure was too simplistic if we're trying to measure cultural language resilience. A better index should account for:

1. Intermarriage

2. Urbanization

3. Geographical dispersion

4. Use of the language at home

5. Transmission to children

6. Ability to maintain the language outside the traditional homeland

7. Whether outsiders adopt the language

That last one is particularly interesting for Luo.

The 2024 Afrobarometer data show 7.1% of the 2,400 respondents reported Luo as their home language, compared with 11.1% for Kikuyu. But that doesn't measure the strength of the language among Luo people.

Indeed, the 2014 KDHS data show 10.1% of household members reporting Luo as their native language, while Kikuyu was 13.9%. 

So I would distinguish two concepts

Kikuyu: exceptionally strong large-population language retention.

Luo/Dholuo: potentially exceptionally strong language resilience under mixing and geographic dispersion.

And there is a fascinating phenomenon here:

> A language can survive not because a population is unmixed, but because the population has a strong cultural mechanism for transmitting the language despite mixing.

That may actually make Luo vs. Kikuyu a much more interesting comparison than simply asking which group has the higher percentage of home-language speakers.

One particularly striking piece of evidence is that in the 2021/2022 Afrobarometer data, 34.6% of interviewers' home languages were Luo, while Luo respondents in the general sample reported Luo as their home language at 7.5%. That illustrates how heavily the survey's interviewer pool was concentrated in Luo-speaking areas, rather than measuring national Luo retention—but it also shows the continuing strength of Luo as a working/community language in some regions. 

**So yes: I would revise the earlier conclusion. I would not confidently rank Kikuyu #1 until we construct an index that controls for mixing, urbanization and geographic dispersion. Luo could perform surprisingly well on that broader “language resilience” measure.**