In his book ‘’Things Fall Apart the legendary novelist Professor Chinua Achebe lamented the consequences of colonization an its effects on our mother tongue. In that classic he notes that ‘the white man came with a sharp knife cut the tape that bind us together an we are now falling apart the centre could no longer hold, the falcon cannot hear the falconer’ Similarly Dare Babarinsa noted the impact colonialism on our mother tongue pointing out that ‘…language is a vehicle of culture and civilization an that when a language dies the person it represents also perishes.’
According to linguists,’ language is a code system of human communication. It is a medium through which individuals interact with one another in a community. Therefore, language is an agent of cultural transmission, a means by which behaviours are conveyed from one generation to another It is also has the capability of forming and regulating behaviour. Hence, the mother tongue is a child’s first language as well as the lingua franca of his environment. In developing countries like Nigeria much of what we study and know today may not be available for future generations because our mother tongues have been endangered an gradually on the path of extinction as the cultural heritage of many people in Africa an Nigeria in particular is crumbling an fast degenerating into oblivion. If this continues, linguistic pluralism and cultural diversity among our people will become moribund.
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Ironically, research have shown that all scholars an linguistics who have been concern about the erosion of mother tongues pointed accusing fingers to African governments for their lip service to their educational policies especially in the area of the mother tongue At a lecture delivered in June 2001 at the Founders Day anniversary celebration of Vale College, Ibadan, Dare Babanrisa argued that ‘or children are victims of a tripartite conspiracy involving teachers parents an priests against the future of Nigeria nationalities’. In his lecture titled ‘How Mama lost her tongues’, Babarinsa opined that without a proper grounding of the mother tongue, education in Nigeria is impaired and subverted’ noting that ‘the process of cognition and erudition is incomplete without a proper foundation of language and thought’.
However as bad as the situation is today in Nigeria and other parts of Africa, Babarinsa still believes that the problem at hand is redeemable. In his words as bad as things are I know they are not irredeemable. I would appeal to teachers, priests and parents to know that they consciously encourage them to eschewed of their own background and language. According to linguists and researchers, at present, 50 per cent of the world languages are losing speakers and 95 per cent of them are spoken by six per cent of people worldwide. Only 37 languages, about 5 per cent of the total are spoken by more than a million people’. And if the trend continues, in the nearest future, more than human languages could disappear. As an attestation to this fear anthropologist an ethno-botanist Wade Davis in an academic essay published in the Adventure Magazine of the June 2001 edition pointed out that ‘the process of the mother tongue disappearance is simple when children stop being taught their native tongue in favour of the dominant language, they learn in school…every two weeks, the final native speaker of a language passes on carrying with him or her unique world view that the language describe’.
Perhaps Ralp Waldo Emerson puts it better when he lamented that ‘when we actively discard our own language, we commit ‘linguicide’. We kill off or dismember our memories because erasure of memory is a prerequisite for successful assimilation, the burial of African languages by Africans themselves has ensured the process of assimilation into colonial culture. To Babarinsa the culture of inferiority complex of our mother tongue should by now disappear because no language is superior to the other.
In Nigeria today all the other 250 ethnic languages have been relegated to the background as not many children from these communities can actually speak their mother tongues correctly or fluently because of total neglect by parents to teach their children their mother tongues What a shame. To arrest this ugly trend, parents, teachers, linguists and the government at various levels should wake up from their slumber and fight this monster before or mother tongue is completely wiped out. This calls for national rebirth because the way things are going now in the next 50 years or less there may be nothing like mother tongue again in Nigeria as these languages would have disappeared completely into oblivion. And if this happens then the assertion by Dare Babarinsa that ‘…when a language dies, the person it represents perishes ’would have come to pass and all of us as stakeholders would be held culpable an posterity would not forgive us.
