As English language gains more prominence in both official and private circles in the country, ominous signs stab Yoruba, Igbo and many other indigenous languages in the face as less and less people are able to achieve fluency in their mother tongues, thus exposing the local languages to dangers of extinction in not too distant future. Assistant Editor ADEKUNLE YUSUF reports
On the scale of integrity and other values that count, Chief Michael Ade-Ojo, chairman of Toyota Nigeria and founder of Elizade University, Ilara Mokin, is known as a man who is worth his weight in gold. Besides being a successful business icon, the auto mogul is a man who is not given to flippancies. Perhaps that is why his audience sighed and sighed like a people who have cavalierly lost an irreplaceable antique when the 75-year old man admonished them recently not to allow Yoruba language to die, an issue he considered as of utmost importance to the continued relevance and survival of the Yoruba people. The event was the Yoruba Assembly, convened by Alani Ipoola Akinrinade, retired general and civil war hero, which held on the floor of Oyo State House of Assembly in Ibadan, on August 30, 2012. But the popular auto merchant had justification for his disappointment, having observed to his chagrin and discomfiture that English language, the country’s lingua franca, was the medium of deliberation at the event in Ibadan, an occasion meant for and graced mainly by the crème de la crème of Yoruba elite – opinion leaders, past and serving political office holders across all political affiliations, accomplished professionals, and first-rate traditional rulers. Obviously oblivious of the import of their actions, speaker after speaker shamelessly craved the indulgence of the gathering to allow them speak in English, which they said would help them to better articulate their views with a view to making meaningful contributions. As for a few ones that mustered the courage to speak in their mother tongue, it was another show of shame as these Yoruba elders indulged in virtual code-switching throughout the day.
Although the gathering came into being because of the dire need for Yoruba leaders to ponder the future and “interrogate various issues that are affecting the race and find solutions to them accordingly,” Ade-Ojo, on mounting the dais, veered off political and economic issues that dominated the deliberations, seizing the moment to make a soulful appeal to his fellow Yoruba elders not to allow their language to die, insisting that paying lip service to cultural issues will spell doom for the future of the race.
Like the proprietor of Elizade University, all culturally-minded adults cannot but be appalled that about the distressing state of one of the world’s important languages. Going by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) latest predictions, most Nigerian languages, including Yoruba, are under the dangling axe of extinction. In other words, most of Nigerian languages may even be wiped out in the next fifty years if concrete steps are not taken to reverse the trend. In 2012, UNESCO warned that the number of speakers of these indigenous languages is dwindling by the day, overwhelmed by the bulldozing influence of foreign languages, especially English and French. Paraphrasing Olugboyega Adebanjo, lead translator at XML Language Services Limited, a language translation and preservation firm, Nigerians still speak in tongues, but no more in their mother tongues. No thanks to globalisation and its aftereffects, many Yoruba adults and young elements – wittingly or unwittingly – have declared a ceaseless war against their own language as if it is their common enemy, or a dreadful affliction that burdens them. From one urban center to another, many educated elites who are supposed to be the repository of their cultural heritage have reduced themselves to aliens in their own land – alien to their language, history and culture.
While the attitude of many Yoruba adults towards their culture is reprehensible, what is happening to the younger ones as far as mother tongue is concerned is both alarming and disquieting, for many children born and raised in the cities by elite Yoruba parents cannot even utter one word in their mother tongue. Nowadays, especially in homes of educated elites, it is increasingly becoming the norm for children to have their first tongue in English, the language of Nigeria’s former colonisers. In the Southwest states – from Lagos to Ogun, from Oyo to Osun, from Ondo to Ekiti, and parts of Kwara and Kogi – where Yoruba is spoken natively, ominous signs stab the mother tongue in the face. This is worsened by the fad of sending children to private primary and secondary schools where pupils are not taught in any of Nigeria’s languages, but in English, thus subtly conditioning the children to value foreign language above their mother tongue. Going by findings of discreet investigations carried out by this reporter through several visits to some elite private schools in Lagos and Ibadan, majority of pupils cannot even salute in Yoruba, for it a punishable offence in public and private schools to communicate within the school premises in a language ignorantly termed as vernacular.
But it is not only Yoruba that faces the threat of extinction among Nigeria’s multitude of languages. Like the Yoruba, the number of speakers of Igbo language is fast thinning down. Apart from the pressure imposed by pidgin, which is a popular medium of communication among the teeming masses, the use of English has forced many native speakers of Igbo to water down the essence of the language through code-switching. From Anambra to Imo, from Abia to Ebonyi and Enugu states, Igbo adults now seek knowledge, not in their mother tongue but in another man’s language – thus inadvertently relegating their language to secondary status. Affirming the report of UNESCO that Igbo is among the beleaguered league of Nigeria’s endangered languages, Prof Chinyere Ohiri-Aniche of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), who is the President of Linguistics Association of Nigeria, said it may not even take up to fifty years before the Igbo and other Nigerian languages may be dead, hinging her position on a plethora of empirical studies she and her colleagues in the linguistics world have conducted to gauge competency level of native speakers.
According to the findings of a study carried out in 2007 in Imo and Lagos states to test Igbo competency level of three age groups, aged 1-5, 6-11, and adults, a grim picture awaits the language: seventy percent of children between 6-11 years and ninety percent of children aged five years and below were unable to speak Igbo language. In another study conducted the same year, fifty percent of Igbo parents in Imo State and eighty percent in Lagos State spoke mostly English or a mixture of English and Igbo with their children. Many other studies measuring indigenous language competencies among children in Igbo land and beyond established that alarming number of children could not speak their mother tongue.
However, the endangerment staring Yoruba and Igbo – languages spoken by two of the country’s three major tribes – in the face pales when compared with more debilitating fate befalling languages spoken by ethnic minorities in the country. In the seminal work of Dr. Uwe Seibert of the Department of Languages and Linguistics, University of Jos, Nigeria, there are a total of 646 languages in Nigeria, most of which are spoken by ethnic minorities in a country of 160 million people (see box). Most of the languages are endangered. According to the findings of a survey conducted in 2011 in all the six geo-political zones of Nigeria by a team of linguists led by Prof. Ahmed Amfani, on the average, twenty-five percent of Nigerian children of nursery and primary school ages (that is, 11 years and below) do not speak their parents’ language!
According to Prof. Kola Owolabi of the University of Ibadan, many parents who have stopped talking to their children and wards in their mother tongue ignorantly believe that it is both primitive and uncivilised for their children not to be able to speak good English. Although some Nigerian languages, Igbo and Yoruba, still have millions of adult speakers, they are nevertheless ranked in the category of endangered languages compiled by UNESCO. This is so because many Nigerian parents are not handing over their language to their children. What this means, says Prof. Ohiri-Aniche, is that the present Nigerian children will not be able to bequeath their parents’ languages to their own children.
And this will not take eons to materialize. In about two to three generations (around 50 to 75 years’ time), Prof. Ohiri-Aniche said most Nigerian languages would have slipped into extinction, dead and buried forever. As portentous as this may sound, it is not a mere prediction; it is premised on findings of empirical studies. This explains why the subject of language endangerment, an unfolding phenomenon in Nigeria, is causing experts in the linguistic circle great sadness. Said Prof. Ohiri-Aniche: “We know that most Nigerians are ignorant of the subject and of its horrendous consequences for us in the country – loss of identity, loss of valuable means of communication and storage and preservation of cultural wealth, disintegration and disappearance of communities, etc. Out of the estimated 400 existing Nigerian languages, about 152 have less than five thousand speakers, making them fall under the UNESCO description of endangered languages. In fact, some of the country’s languages have as few as ten speakers left, while one language has only one surviving speaker.” And Nigerian parents and authorities fail to address the issue of language endangerment, there will be very few Nigerian languages left by the time Nigeria celebrates the next centenary in January 2114, she warns.
One World, Many Tongues
Although the exact num
ber of world languages is
not known, owing partly to the difficulties of delineating languages from dialects in many countries where there is a mingling of the two, there are estimates which linguists and other cultural experts have often chosen to work with. According to latest figures from the database of UNESCO, there are currently 6, 912 languages in the world. Out of this figure, Africa has 2,092 languages, representing 30.3 percent of the world’s languages, while Asia, which is the world’s most populous continent, has 2,269 languages, or 32.8 percent of the world’s languages. According to language experts, at least 3,000 of the world’s languages, representing about fifty percent, are about to be lost, unless serious efforts are made to stem the tide. As is often the case, Africa has a high share of these endangered mother tongues.
As the tempest of globalisation increasingly burrows into the fabric of human activities, it leaves minority languages more vulnerable and moribund, as people now prefer to conduct business and communicate in widely-used languages such as English and French. For a variety of reasons, speakers of languages in minority tribes have unconsciously stopped using their first language, resorting to other languages that enjoy more patronages. In other words, linguists say speakers of lesser-known languages are facing increasing pressure to adopt other languages they think can help them enact their communication mission more easily. Without the requisite resources to maintain their own languages, those who should know say it means the locals in many climes risk losing touch with their cultural heritage. Due to neocolonialism, economically powerful languages dominate the less commonly spoken languages, accelerating the rate of disappearance for less commonly spoken languages. And when parents use only a second language to communicate with their children and wards, linguists insist that intergenerational transmission of the mother tongue decreases and may even cease outright. While other languages are spoken by fewer than 10,000 speakers, the top twenty languages in the world are spoken by fifty percent of the world’s population, with each spoken by more than fifty million speakers.
Although there is no definite threshold for measuring language endangerment, most categorizations employed fairly uniform criteria: the number and age of current speakers of the language, and whether or not the youngest generations are acquiring fluency in it. However, the UNESCO operates with four levels of endangerment based on intergeneration transfer: vulnerable (not spoken by children outside the home), definitely endangered (children not speaking), severely endangered (only spoken by the oldest generations), critically endangered (spoken by few members of the oldest generations, often semi-speakers). As a matter of fact, the affliction of language endangerment torments all indigenous languages in Nigeria, with most of the languages now oscillating between vulnerable and definitely endangered, or even worse in some cases. Dr. Seibert reported that Holma (a language spoken in north of Sorau of Adamawa state); Bete and Fali of Baissa (languages spoken in Takun LGA and Falinga Pleateau region of Taraba state) are dying out. Lere, Shau and Ziriya (languages spoken in Toro LGA of Bauchi state); and Sheni (a language spoken in Saminaka LGA) are near extinction. Ajawa, Gamo-Ningi, Kubi and Mawa (languages once spoken in Bauchi state); and Jigwa state’s Auyokawa and Teshenawa are now extinct.
Other Nigerian languages on Dr Siebert’s exhaustive list are classified as vulnerable (any language spoken by less than 20,000 speakers), threatened (a language spoken by less than 10,000 speakers), endangered (any language spoken by less than 5,000 speakers) and severely endangered (a language spoken by less than 1,000 speakers). Some of these languages include: Dulbu (a language spoken in southeast of Bauchi LGA of Bauchi state); Hasha (a language spoken in Akwanga LGA of Nassarawa state); Kami (a language spoken in Lapai LGA of Niger state); Kulung (a language spoken in Karim Lamido and Wukari LGAs of Taraba state); Labir (a language spoken in Bauchi and Alkaleri LGAs of Bauchi state); Mak (a language spoken in Karim Lamido LGA of Taraba state); and Shiki (a language spoken in Bauchi LGA of Bauchi state). Dulbu is severely endangered as it had just 100 native speakers as at 1993. Hasha, as at 1999 had 3,000 speakers, but the number of native speakers is currently put at 400. Kami had just 5,000 speakers as at 1992. Kulung and Labir had 15,000 and 13,000 native speakers worldwide as at 1973 and 2006 respectively. Mak is being spoken by 5,690, and Shiki by 1,000 native speakers.
Why it matters
Lamenting the alarming rate at which Africans are abandoning their indigenous languages in preference for foreign languages, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, renowned Kenyan novelist, said this trend is tantamount to self-enslavement which is dangerous for the sustenance of Africans and their traditions. He noted that Africans who have the mastery of other people’s languages at the expense of their own indigenous languages have subjected themselves to “second slavery,” albeit an unforced one. “For me, enslavement is when you know all the languages of the world but you don’t know your own language. Empowerment is when you know your own language and you add other languages to it,” he said.
According to Prof. Femi Osofisan, renowned playwright who has seen many generations of students who never got it right due to their apathy towards their mother tongue, it has generally been noted that students perform poorly in most subjects in tertiary institutions due to their disinterest in what is their own.
Said Prof. Osofisan: “It is so annoying that these students come least prepared to face the academic rigours. In the first place, they don’t have the appropriate background to fit into the academic world. They are not only too lazy to read, they do not also know how to speak either their local languages or the English language. This becomes worrisome because you discover you are teaching people who are deficient in their language of communication. And language, as you know, is the tool for learning. If you do not know it, then of what use are you to yourself and to the academic world.”
So, does humanity lose anything if a language dies? According to language activists and professionals working to preserve mother tongues, the demise of any language, no matter how few the speakers are, signifies the loss of gargantuan goldmine of information that cannot be replaced.
Dr Ayo Oyebode, who is the Head of Department of Communication and Language Arts at the University of Ibadan, says a language’s death means the loss of everything humanity requires to continue to stay afloat. When a language dies, he adds, what is lost is more than a set of meaningful sounds. “What is lost includes life, meaning, knowledge, science and technology. What is lost indeed is a significant part of humanity, so significant that the living are incomplete forever,” Dr. Oyebode explained. The loss of a language, adds Adebanjo, the boss of XML Language Services Limited, is not only the loss of a generation but of a world. He explained that direct consequences of language extinction mean the loss of a people and their world, history, cultural heritage, their understanding and testimonial of the world and the loss of scientific, botanical and medical knowledge, adding that “all human souls lost since creation cannot equate the loss of a language because it takes a language to tell the story of their death.” Prof Owolabi says because language is a people’s identity, culture and existence, such things are what humanity loses if a language slumps into extinction. “If we lose our language, it means we have lost our culture and everything that we are associated with from God. It means we have lost out. Our race is gone because we will be living in another person’s race. Your pride is gone as a member of human race when you lose your language. What else is left if you lose your mother tongue? It is your identity card. If you lose it, you have lost your existence. You cannot be a foreigner in your own land. If you say everybody should be speaking English language and we don’t have our language any more, it means we have written off ourselves from the global map,” the erudite professor warned.
The way forward
Ngugi wa Thiong’o, one of Africa’s pragmatic language activists who is walking the talk to arrest the tumbling fortune of African languages, urges all African parents to start speaking in mother tongue to their children at home, and this must not be watered down through code-switching. “We should promote our languages. We should encourage our children to speak our own language. I stopped writing in English language 10 years ago because Africa is our base and we must not lose our base and our indigenous languages. Since then I have been writing in Gikuyu language and I later do translation myself or I look for somebody to do it for me,” he said. While advocating that all parents and guardians to Africanise their children and wards, Prof Tunde Babawale of the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC), admonished parents that they owe it a duty to ensure that their children are taught in the local languages right from the moment when they are born. “It has to start from their kindergarten year. If this is done over time, they will develop this habit to be able to read these languages on their own. If they continue to read all these foreign novels, they will not develop that habit. Children who speak their local languages very well are known to be more proficient in other foreign languages. And they can communicate better. This has been proved to be true over the years. It is because we have neglected our duty to train the children and show them how and where to go that we are in this mess we are in today,” urged Babawale. As for Prof Akinwumi Ishola, one of Nigeria’s language and culture icons, who blamed neo-Pentecostalism, globalisation, and lack of sincerity of African elites as the root causes of crisis hitting her indigenous languages, all Nigerian authorities need to do is to take a cue from China.
“China has never lost its culture. The language of instruction from pre-primary to university level has been Chinese. The child understands better when taught in the mother tongue. China therefore has made enormous progress in science and technology and they are selling this to the world. Nigeria, on the contrary, has been using a foreign language as medium of instruction from the pre-primary to university level.”
This, he insists, must change before Nigeria’s indigenous languages can enjoy a better lease of life in an age where English language rules. Is anyone lending a listening ear?