The Dying Nigerian Languages

Language Education: Rescue Mission for Dying Mother Tongues 

By Louis Okoro Ugbagha

In Nigeria, language education is now a disappearing act from the school curriculum. Languages themselves are seen as lackluster subjects that can only be offered if authorities force them down the throat of very reluctant students. That way, they make up their subjects selection with any language of their choice and may or may not write them in any examination.


Nigeria has not strengthened its institutions enough to rescue our waning mother tongues. For instance, the Coordinator and Head of Institute, National Institute for Nigerian Languages (NINLAN), Dr Azubuike Ikediashi recently told newsmen that the institute would be unable to meet its goals in 2014 because it was not captured in the 2014 national budget.


Dr Ikediashi lamented the general neglect the Institute suffers as a result of the ignorance of Nigerians on the importance of indigenous languages and their roles in education, democracy, business and self image. Indeed, we do not seem to care whether our language dies or lives.


Meanwhile, in Nigeria today, there are the French, Korea, Chinese and a host of other Cultural centres, including the German Goethe Institute rendering one form of service or the other, but surreptitiously indoctrinating our citizens on their culture and languages. The reason is because these ‘big friends’ want to rule wherever they can through their language and by registering their culture in the people’s sub-conscious.


They understand the power which language wields in establishing the exact identity of the people and the possible bargaining power they enjoy by asserting themselves through a well –protected language and culture.


And Dr Bukar Usman, in this timeless book, Language Disappearance and Cultural Diversity in Biu Emirate, neatly divided into seven chapters, draws our attention to a kind of global politicking that naturally dissociated into trickles of local politics, which are lethal to our local languages.


With the globally –accepted status of the world as a socio-political and economic village, anyone who reads the obvious implications should worry. This village has all the eccentricities of the one you know. It is like a jungle where the weak must die for the strong to live, including perceived weak languages that are devoid of economic or political catchment.


No wonder Chapter one of this book particularly, tells us the author’s view about the United Nations Organisation, UNO and their approach to this noble task of saving dying languages. The winner –takes-it –all posture the superpowers bends the rule in their favour and that of their allies.


That is precisely why their languages are preferred at this world stage and spoken at a huge cost to other members of the village. With this power play at such a level, other languages across the world have continued to evaporate like a volatile fluid.


The author frowns at the very menacing imperialist aspects of the UN, which has fostered so much discrimination against other smaller language groups, leaving them to chances. He also decried the ‘theory of dominant variety’ which places the perceived ‘powerless’ languages at the mercy of the dominant tongues and speakers of such threatened mother tongues now switching to the preferred ones just to belong.


Then he zeros his argument into his own Biu Emirate of Borno State, shedding light on the embryonic connectivity between the Bura and the Biu –Mandara local language groups and successfully indicated the place of the Bura language in the chronicle of spoken and written traditions of the Biu Emirate.


The author also reminds us that what is happening in the indigenous languages of the Biu Emirate and surrounding communities is the same among many speech communities around the world.


In Nigeria it is often said that there are three major languages – Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba. However, each of these major tongues is a fusion of many others, which further separate the various speech communities along the lines of their specific languages and traditional identity.


Again, the author, in chapter two of this great work, unearths the importance of language diversity, telling us that language is the most natural identity of its speakers. If adulterated by way of mixing up with others regarded as popular, or given up for any reason, a great question crops up about the true identification of the people.


We also understand in this chapter that it is by language the definition of a people’s habitat is derived. The implication, therefore, of losing a language is that the people can no longer be classified; they become ‘homeless’ and would be described in general terms without specification. Losing a language also implies losing touch with nature and its endowed efficacies in medicine, science and food security because every language tradition has its interpretation of life and existence within it.


Dr Usman, in chapter three, hits the spot on waves of historical events that led to migrations in the North – the Jihads, the obsession for conquest and occupation by the Jihad protagonist, the imperialists’ power play, were all man-made events that naturally forced the affected people to move from place to place. As different ethnic groups, bound by the same fate and faced with the same threat, intermingled as they move, they interacted linguistically. This, the author says, is the origin of the affinity between the Biu- Mandara group of the Chadic languages.


Chapter four opens up the linguistic situation of the Biu Emirate wherein the author gives a dossier of speech communities divided along the line of ethnic groupings, but with no clear distinction because the various groups blended into one another by a long period of coexistence. One such example as given by the author is the Bura Kokura and the Bura Misha, which form and ethno-linguistic mix, but are not clearly distinct from each other.


He concludes the chapter with a startling that of the over 80 languages classified under the Biu-Mandara language group of languages, only Higi (also called Kamwe) or Bura is currently spoken by up to 300,000 people. The rest have inadvertently lost their place in the language value chain. The present generation does not even know much about them, let alone crave to speak. They have gone with the wind of change.


In chapter five, this legendry storyteller, gives insight into the early classifications based on observed similarities in trado-cultural values. He admits his interest and curiosity in understanding whatever latent historical cord that binds different natives widely separated by distance and geographical location. The crocodile ‘cult’, seen as common among Pabir and Bura and also found in an ethnic group in far away South Africa and another in the Republic of Congo.
It is this cultural similarity that, indeed arouses the interest of elites like the author, who would want to dig out the mysteries behind these cultural similarities. He concludes the chapter by pointing out the importance of establishing generic relationship among language families based on scientific data.


Chapter six contains the crux of this whole discourse. It leads us into the endangered linguistic ecosystem. Comparing the country’s population and its constituent indigenous languages, the author brings to appreciating that the Biu Emirate alone is likely to have more speech communities than the country as a whole. Now, consider from the author’s estimation, where an average of 340,000 citizens speak one language, whereas in the Biu Emirate, 432,275 people speak eight languages!


He ends the chapter by calling on each of minority ethnic group of the Biu Emirate to rise to the task of strengthening the diverse linguistic ecosystem of the Emirate by initiating a cultural renaissance aimed at native language renewal and intergenerational transmission. Indeed, this is a call to all members of the different speech communities in Nigeria.


How then do we preserve and revitalize our various languages? That is what the writer tells us in Chapter Seven, the last Chapter. He introduces what he called, ‘the three-pronged approach’ to revitalizing and preserving the endangered languages which the minority languages of his Biu Emirate and other minority languages sharing the same fate can benefit from.


His three-point solution gleaned from the outcome of 2007 UNESCO’s meeting on endangered languages are socio-linguistic survey to determine the current state of the language and safeguarding measures to be adopted; data collection to study the phonology, morphology and syntax of the language, and preparation of the language materials (orthography, guides, reading and writing manuals, word list, etc).
Despite the foregoing long academic process, undertaken most often by those on conventional research the author ends the Chapter with a bottom-line prescription – speech communities should imbibe the culture of intergenerational transmission of their languages. Even at family levels, parents should communicate with children in their own language. We do not have to wait till language preservation and revitalisation enter the priority list of education policy makers. We can undertake this rescue mission individually and communally.

Source: Nigerian Pilot