Many Nigerian languages are in danger of extinction because those who speak them are getting fewer and fewer

Agnes Omoche is a 24-year- old Idoma lady born in Lagos. From birth, her parents communicated with her in English and she rarely visited her village. Now Omoche blushes and shies away each time someone says “A ba ho le” meaning “how are you?” in Idoma. It doesn’t make sense to her. “My Idoma is pathetic. When I speak, I get nervous and I blank out. So when I begin a sentence in Idoma, I end it in English. It’s especially embarrassing when some members of my family from Benue come to Lagos and I cannot discuss with them in Idoma. But I’m trying to learn,” she said.

Rosemary Ogundipe, 15, said she cannot speak Yoruba, her mother tongue. “It bothers me, especially, when I am with other Yoruba people. I try my best to speak but I stutter with the words and it’s very annoying. My friends call what I speak Yoglish, that is Yoruba and English mixed together,” she said.

Omoche and Ogundipe are not alone. There are millions of Nigerians who feel exactly the same way. Many young Nigerians don’t speak their mother tongue. Among those who speak their mother tongue, there are not many who can write in it. There is also a decline in the number of those who study their native languages in school.

For this reason, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, UNESCO, proclaimed February 21, as International Mother Language Day to promote linguistic and cultural diversity.  Exactly 10 years ago, the UN set aside the day to encourage people to maintain their knowledge of their mother language while learning and using more than one language because languages form part of the identity of individuals and are also key to the Education for All and Millennium Development Goals.

But little has been done to promote the indigenous languages here in Nigeria. Instead, the study of the languages in schools are deteriorating every year. And fewer people are enrolling for these courses.

Asoonye Uba-Mgbemena, a lecturer at the University of Lagos, who studied French and Classics in Europe, blamed the various homes for the declining use of some of the Nigerian languages. “Very many parents don’t understand the necessity to have a cultural background. They pride themselves with the expression-'my son doesn’t speak the Nigerian language.' That’s a serious problem because such people grow up without a cultural base which they can fall back on,” he said.

He said it is particularly painful because parents don’t see anything wrong with the trend. “Today, a Nigerian is neither a Nigerian nor a foreigner because he is caught in a web of confusion. Before you claim to know another person, you should first know yourself. The exploration of knowledge should begin with yourself and your own society,” he said.

Oladipo Ajiboye, another linguistics don at the University of Lagos, shared Uba-Mgbemena’s opinion, but he blamed the government for the decline in the use of native languages in the country. In Nigeria, the domination of a language is connected to the status of the speakers. It is political in nature because language and politics walk hand in hand. Nobody cares about a language going into extinction if the speakers don’t have an influential or political presence. Those languages dominating today are not unconnected with the status of the speakers.

 “Some weeks ago, we went to the Lagos State House of Assembly for a workshop on the use of Yoruba language in the State House of Assembly, and we raised the issue of languages going into extinction. Compare some of the languages in Nigeria to some of those in the West, you would find out that languages spoken by less than 30,000 people are accorded national status. Here, we have languages whose speakers are more than that and nobody is giving them any recognition,” he said.

Ajiboye said the institutions are putting in efforts to preserve these ailing languages but there is little they can do on their own because they are under the umbrella of the government.  But when there are no funding and assistance from the government, saving a language is not achievable. “If we have adequate funding, each language department will have a curriculum and research outline where we can document and create awareness of endangered languages. We would go to the fields and get to the roots of the issue and proffer a solution,” he said.

In the University of Lagos, students who come to study indigenous languages every session have not increased for some reasons. For one, the perception of the larger society of someone studying native language is not positive. “We have cases of parents who would do anything to prevent their wards from studying local languages. They come to you and say that my child cannot speak Yoruba and they convey the message to you in Yoruba, but they don’t feel it’s necessary to teach their children the language. They feel it’s elegant and sophisticated to drop your language and speak only English,” Ajiboye said.

Many don’t want to study the local languages because they ask what they would do with it. Most of the time, after four years of studying local language, students would proceed to study French because they don’t have faith they can make it with studying a local language.  So, now students of the University of Lagos are given a degree in linguistics and a Nigerian language to help dignify their qualifications.

Another reason studying local languages is unpopular is because of government policy on the number of people to be admitted for a course in a department in the university. It is a 40:50 ratio for Arts and Science courses, and local language departments take the least share. There is a quota and this limits the number of people the indigenous language department can take each session bearing in mind that only the three major languages, that is, Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba, are offered in any institution in the country. So, even for students who are willing to study one of these Nigerian languages, they are turned away because of the quota.

The number of languages currently estimated and catalogued in Nigeria is 521. This number includes 510 living languages, two second languages without native speakers and nine extinct languages. Even though most ethnic groups prefer to communicate in their own languages, English, being the official language, is widely used for education, business transactions and for official purposes. English, however, remains an exclusive preserve of a small minority of the country’s urban elite, and is not spoken in rural areas. With approximately 75 percent of Nigeria’s populace in the rural areas, the major languages of communication in the country remain tribal languages, with the most widely spoken being Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba.

There have been suggestions in the past to change the Nigerian lingua franca from English to a native patois, but the task of deciding which one of our 521 languages has hushed the debate over time. Uba-Mgbemena believes there is a way Nigeria can adopt one local language as lingua franca. “Take any Nigerian language, preferably a well developed one or amiable to development and give it a neutral name. Then enrich it abundantly with expressions from as many languages from Nigeria as possible. The English language we speak is a combination of hundreds of languages from around the world,” he said.

But Ajiboye disagreed with that concept. “That problem has been raised times without number and because of the complexity and multi-lingual nature of Nigeria, it is not possible.  It would not work, we tried out WAZOBIA, but language can never develop like that,” he said.

Ajiboye believes government has a great role to play because they can agree to start from somewhere. “In East Africa, Swahili is more or less a bilateral language, which is not localised to a particular country but every school child in East Africa is able to speak Swahili. In our educational system, the policy of the 6-3-3-4 as it regards the mother tongue states that the language of the immediate environment of a child would be the language that he would be taught in and English would be taught as a subject. From primary four to six, the English language should be used as a medium of instruction in all subjects other than the mother tongue and mother tongue should be taught as a subject.

“In the first three years of education at the secondary school level, a child learns his mother tongue and one of other Nigerian languages. It is also required that a student writes a Nigerian language other than his own language for his final senior exams. Very few schools follow this policy. Everything goes back to the shortcoming from the government. Even teachers that will teach these languages are not available. The government would not release the funds to implement these policies and ironically they can’t cope with the languages of their immediate environment, yet they want to introduce French as a second national language. What is the need?” he asked.

The government also defended its position. It spoke through the Nigerian Educational Research and Development Council, NERDEC, which has begun developing languages such as Igala and Nupe through orthography. This method teaches people how to write in their languages so they can document the language and preserve history.  It would also teach people to learn to read what has been recorded.

Languages are the most powerful instruments of preserving and developing tangible and intangible heritage. The promotion of mother tongue will serve not only to encourage linguistic diversity and multilingual education, but also to develop fuller awareness of linguistic and cultural traditions throughout the world and to inspire solidarity based on understanding, tolerance and dialogue.