On Language and National Integration/Development (IV)

Over three decades ago, pondering on the language question in national development, the frontline Nigerian linguist, Professor Ayo Bamgbose, made certain significant recommendations, which today remain largely ignored or at best partly noticed. Many of those suggestions for centralizing language in the national development project remain valid today as when they were first made in […]

Over three decades ago, pondering on the language question in national development, the frontline Nigerian linguist, Professor Ayo Bamgbose, made certain significant recommendations, which today remain largely ignored or at best partly noticed. Many of those suggestions for centralizing language in the national development project remain valid today as when they were first made in the early eighties. They include for the purpose of recall; a) setting up a Presidential Commission to examine the role of language in the nation’s life; b) the need for the Federal Ministry of Education to undertake a language survey exercise to be conducted by linguists drawn from the universities; c) ensuring that undergraduate students , especially students of Education, spend time on adult literacy and learn also, while in the school, the dominant language of their university community—among other invaluable proposals.

There is even the problem of the grave decline in the standard of the spoken and written English at every level of our educational system. This is rather tragic, coming at a time when many of our middle class homes, where the parents still speak their own mother tongues, the children have become mono-lingual; they speak only English. And the English they speak is semi-literate, hardly intelligible and with questionable competence.

Indeed, this amounts to a gradual encroachment of a zero language situation among the up-coming generation—where they have no mother tongue at all and they are hardly intelligible or competent in the English, which is the first language situation in which they find themselves. What kind of a nation shall we inherit from people who do not understand the mother tongue of their parents and yet cannot stand their own in their acquired first tongue, foreign tongue? The prophesy of Ali Mazrui, which we quoted earlier ; that English may become the native tongue of many black nations may be fast becoming a painful reality after all. Yet, the question remains, even in that sad situation; what English or what level of English? This is why, either as a structured and systematic educational process or a conscious political decision, the question of evolving an indigenous language into a national language remains the most attractive, if difficult-to-achieve option, in our over-all national interest.

It is also important to state at this juncture that, as many of our prominent language scholars and linguistic purists have established, our indigenous languages are not as distant from one another as politicians have, in self-interests, proclaimed them to be. Outcome of research into the Nigeria’s linguistic landscape confirms that the state of our ethnic diversity, vortexed on our linguistic plurality, is over-magnified. Many years ago, Professor Ben Elugbe deployed available language classifications of Nigerian languages to propose that language being a sustained artifact of culture, people’s history can be traced to or reconstructed from their language ancestry. This is due to the fact that ‘language changes in a patterned way over time and space. One language begets dialects in space, and then time makes them separate languages. In this way, one original language can become hundreds’. The import of this deduction from language behavior is that Nigerian languages may not be as numerous, or as far away from one another, as they seem to have become. Thus, the ethnic groups may similarly be less bewildering than they appear on the surface. Indeed, Elugbe further quotes the classification of Nigerian languages as embarked upon by Greenberg in 1963 to buttress the point of the close affinities of the Nigerian peoples, fewer ethnic groups and their languages than the picture politically reveals. Greenberg classified the languages of Africa into only four, three of which are represented in Nigeria. He observed that ‘within Nigeria, the majority of the languages belong to the Niger- Kordofanian phylum, though there are substantial numbers of languages belonging to the Afro-asiatic phylum’ and some of the languages belong to ‘Nile-Saharan’. Thus, without going into ponderous linguistic science, what the above reveals is that most Nigerian languages are inter-related in the final analysis, and they ought really not to provide a basic reason for ethnic fractionalization and disunity. In fact, Nigerian language experts deduce that most of the Southern Nigerian languages belong to the Kwa  group and that there are relatively close similarities among these languages. With rigorous and systematic study, backed by strong political will, it is possible to bring the indigenous languages closer to themselves for national deployment/development as I have argued at the beginning of this series.

More importantly, and in consideration of national integration, is the fact that unity or disunity among peoples and segments is not solely caused by language relationships or disparities. The case of the political unity and long-standing block affinity (some have called it hegemony) between the Hausa and the Fulani (often erroneously tagged as Hausa-Fulani as if they are a cultural and linguistic block, is not founded on linguistic oneness. As Elugbe established, the ‘Fulani speak (Fulfulde) a language of the Niger-Congo family, more related to Wolof and Serer in Senegal than to any other Nigerian language…it is, by virtue of its membership of the Niger-Congo family, more related to such languages as Yoruba, Igbo, Efik, Edo, Kambari and Tiv than Hausa’. Distinct from this assertion , even though the Yoruba and the Igbo are proved to be linguistically related, yet the two are the most antagonistic in Nigeria- a factor which has been found in the political gymnastics of power play in the country to have strengthened the Hausa – Fulani hegemony in the past. As it were, the antagonism is not rooted in linguistic difference but in political and economic calculus. Let me stretch this closer to my own geo-politics to say that the Okun- Yoruba and the Igala people of Kogi state have a very touch-ably close linguistic affinity. Indeed, over eighty per cent of Igala lexicon and vocabulary are Yoruboid, Yet, politicians have drawn a frightening wedge between these two people, two linguistic and cultural brethren! The summary of this position is that multi-lingualism or language diversity as a vehicle of cultural diversity is not irreversibly responsible for (or is an impediment to) dys/functional development of a nation.

Let me cut this short story long by stating that language can and play(s) an important role in national development. If development refers, as it does, to the upward growth of a nation, in terms of integration, education, health, democratic and political participation and engagement, the issue of accessibility to power, then it should be unhindered by linguistic and other barriers. In examining the national question—which devolves on issues of national essence, national integration and nation-building—language as a means of communication, cultural and political expression, the functions of official languages, lingua franca, national language are of crucial significance. Hence, what to do with our multi-lingual nation remains unanswered. What will never be in contention is the power of language in the politics of nation-building and national integration and national development.

CONCLUDED.