The death of language

"Vox audit perit, litera scripta manet"

I've been rather busy in recent times due to some personal events. That fact has not left me with enough time to service this blog. Hopefully normal service will resume very soon. I checked my mail this morning, and saw this article by a friend of mine. His name is Idemudia, and I always assumed that he is a Bini chap. I was wrong. I very clearly remember the conversation he alluded to, it occured in our fourth year of University, and my views from that day have not undergone any paradigm shift.

I believe that language is a living thing like any other, and like any other thing that has a life, it grows, matures, evolves, and those that cannot compete will die. This is my bluntly harsh assessment of Idemudia's own native tongue; it would be all but dead before then end of his life as those who spoke it most fluently belong to a generation before his own parents, and what is worse, they didn't write it down. Hence, the opening quote I appended is very correct.

It is funny this thing about indigenous speakers, because one thing I know for certain is this: my grandmother, born in 1918, knows that the Igbo word for spoon is ngaji, but the trend in my mother's generation is, 'Biko nyem spoon' (Please give me the spoon), i.e the word ngaji is slowly being overtaken by the word spoon and by the time my own generation is dead and buried, there will be precious few people who would know what ngaji is. How many Igbo speakers know what enyinya means?

In Nigeria, it is my opinion that of all our indigenous languages, Hausa would survive longest, and that is because of all of them it is the one that was most standardised before the colonists came around, thanks to the Ajami script. The Yoruba also had the Ajami as a result of Uthman dan Fodio's Jihad two centuries ago, but they promptly discarded it when Samuel Crowther transcribed their language with the Latin script half a century later. The Igbo had the Nsibidi script, and we weren't the only ones who used it. Unfortunately, like us, the Efik and Ibibio kept knowledge of Nsibidi within a very small elite, and mainly for religious purposes. When the British came around with their religion and a lot of our people converted, the people who had knowledge of Nsibidi became irrelevant and died. With them died a lot of knowledge that would have been very useful. Nowadays, even fluent speakers of both Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba would read and comprehend English a lot quicker than they would any of their own dialects.

Personally (and on these pages), I once wrote a few sentences (I can't in all good conscience call it an article) in Igbo, and felt slightly embarrassed when an Igbo friend of mine asked me to translate it. He simply couldn't get it. But my own dilemma (I learned Igbo at 17, and up until today my accent sucks) is increasingly reflected in kids all across Nigeria. But there isn't anything to worry about really. The entire process of our languages dying is as natural as the fact the we would all one day be dead.

When I had that conversation with Idemudia Abaku and Michael Okoto back in our 400 level, I was of the opinion that Hausa should be made compulsory in Nigerian schools since of all our local languages it has the best chance of survival (it is the most widely spoken). Michael pointed out that while it was a bit strange hearing that come from an Igbo man, he understood where I was coming from, but that we must realise that any such move would bring about a serious backlash in the Nigerian state as the ethnic jingoists amongst us would never see the bigger picture. All three of us agreed on that point. But there was something that we didn't talk about that day which has become clearer to me in the eight years that have passed since that day.

Pidgin English is becoming more the de facto official language in our country, and it is gradually assuming a life of its own. Words are borrowed from indigenous languages to 'funkify' a conversation, and suddenly those words supplant the original English word in Pidgin. The result is that 'fashi dat syd' now means the same thing anywhere in Nigeria and almost all Nigerians get what it means despite the fact that the root word 'fash' is of Yoruba origin. The English word leave has been dropped.

This seemingly little thing caught my attention the last time I was in Abuja. Jamiu, my favourite mi shai in Wuse II now understands perfectly what I meant in Pidgin, and I didn't have to speak Hausa to him. When he goes back to Kaura Namoda, he will take with him his knowledge of Pidgin, and with time, Pidgin would also begin to supplant Hausa as the language of trade, then ultimately as the language of choice in Northern Nigeria. An entirely natural process which means that a language that can truly be called Nigerian is slowly emerging from the corpses of our ethnic tongues.

My view: from this slow but certain event, we are witnessing the birth of a nation. Our local languages may just have to die so that Nigeria can live.

P.S: For the records, enyinya means horse in the Igbo language.

Idemudia's article:

My language is dying, and really it is not a funny matter. My speaking (or lack of ability to properly speak) my native tongue has never been a big worry for me, but matters have come to a head when I recently discovered that a lot of the youth from my hometown also have the same problem that I have. Without the current generation to take the language to the next generation, my language will soon be as dead as a dodo.

I come from a minority tribe in Edo state, an Ika speaking tribe: actually the name of my homestead is Ekpon (sorry to disappoint those who know me by my middle name Idemudia and concluded I was either Bini or Ishan). Population of 300,000 or more if you count those in Diaspora.

My journey into discovering that my language would soon become extinct started from a quite unexpected source. My mom. My mom had begged, threatened, cajoled and pleaded with me to start going to the youth version of the Lagos chapter of my village weekly meeting. Being a very apolitical and introverted person by nature, I had naturally resisted most of her attempts. And I was suspicious that what she really wanted was for me to mingle more with members of the opposite sex from my tribe as the proverbial settling down period for her son was around the corner. But moms knowing their sons always know which button to press. So at last I agreed give the meeting a try.

I went to the youth meeting (and my mom was right, there were a lot of pretty damsels there, but that is a topic for another day). I had already been told that the official means of communication at this event was going to be in our local tongue. So I was a little bit wary, being a mono syllabic speaker and of my native tongue. But my mind was set a little bit at rest when I discovered that most of the individuals talking were freely exchanging words in English or Pidgin English. Then the chairman of the occasion cleared his throat before announcing as we were officially starting the meeting, all further communication was to be through the Ekpon language. No problem, the meeting was to start by someone leading the gathering in a prayer in my native language. I was about to get my introduction into how not to use a native language in prayer. The
clearly nervous individual that had been selected went to the centre of the gathering, pursed his lips and hesitantly told everyone to close their eyes, still all well and good, then he began to
pray/speak very very slowly, thinking each word out and continuously increasing the number of English words used in each sentence as the prayer went on. I dramatize his speech by using the Sign "+" to represent each word spoken in Ekpon, and use the Sign "—" to indicate each word spoken in English. To show how well he did in the first sentence, it would look like this:

+ + + + -- + + - + --+ + + + - - - + + + ++ + + ++ + + +

The second and third sentence which slowly deteriorated to speaking queens English would look this way:

+ + -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + + - + --+ + + + - - - + --
-- -- -- -- + + +.

+ -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- + -- - + --+ ---- + - - -
+ -- -- -- -- -- + ---- +.

The now clearly agitated reluctant native speaker prayer warrior finally licked his lips one last time, opened his mouth one last time but no native words could escape them, after a few more 'hmms', 'ems', he was mercifully put out of his misery by a more expert speaker taking over from him but not before rebuking him with, "Ghomo nu ke u, e ka la su Ekpon" ; roughly translating to, "Close your mouth, you still do not speak Ekpon".

I learnt later that the reluctant prayer leader was a first timer to the meeting like me (how lucky can I get). But it would seem coming to the youth meeting for the first time was not the only thing we shared.

After the comical relief given at the start of the meeting, I paid more attention to the choice of language used to communicate among the members of the youth meeting, and it led me to the damning conclusion that my native tongue was probably less than two generations away from dying out. Not that there were no fluent speakers present at the forum, infact there were quite a few of them who did justice to the language the way my grand-mother handles it. It was that those individuals were just not the majority. Most individuals present spoke a mixture of English and Ekpon mixed together which English seeming to dominate more depending on how well educated the individual was( fortunately I was not called out to speak other than acknowledging myself as a new member). A quick survey round and I discovered that most of the not too fluent
speakers were 2nd generation Ekpon people who had grown up predominantly outside the homestead- most had grown up in Lagos.

As the meeting flowed and ebbed around me, my thoughts wondered how we had ended up at this precarious situation. I wondered at my own lack of ability to learn properly the language of my ancestors, I had always typically attributed it to my lack of natural ability with languages (I do not speak Yoruba fluently, even though I lived in Lagos all my life), but on seeing so many other individuals from my tribe of my age group having the same problem I wondered if that was the real reason. I wondered on the influence on parents in this issue, my own parents both speak the native language to each other, so it follows that the child should have learnt the native tongue from the lap of the parents during childhood, but I wondered if the subtle approval a child feels from the parents when he confidently spews out the whiteman's words do not lead him down
the road to mastering the another man's tongue. I wondered on the influence on the society to this approaching tragedy, I had once had a discussion with Joppy's cousin, he had just come back from India and he had pointed out he had noticed that this particular trait of the youth not speaking the language of their parents is most prevalent among the minority tribes in the South and Niger Delta regions of Nigeria. I agreed with him. And I wondered if our society in propelling our children to acquire the wisdom of the whiteman had forgotten the wisdom retained by having future generations communicate in the local dialect.

I wondered about the future, if my mum does not get her wish and I do not settle down with one fluent members of the opposite sex in the village youth meeting, then of the gifts I would be passing on to my children, my native tongue would not be one of them, because you can only teach what you know. It had all so seemed academic when I was discussing with Cheta and Okoto at the back of DO4 years ago, we had all agreed (using the famed logic engineers are trained to use) that surely some languages would die out and that the process was irreversible. But seeing the reality of it steering me in the face was a rude awakening.

But surely a solution to this seeming intractable situation must exist. On my own I have resolved that if the gift of speech does not allow me to pass on my native language skills to the next generation, then I will teach them the next best thing: Pidgin English, abi it is also part of our shared cultural history!