Nigeria: Saving the Local Languages
21 June 2010
editorial
Lagos — One of the strongest effects of western civilization is the gradual but steady erosion of the culture of the people, especially of former colonies. There is no where this has been demonstrated more than in the language of the people.Today, fewer and fewer people are able to speak, let alone write their native languages. If some indigenous languages have suffered poor orthographical development, that should not affect the ability to speak it. But modern day children, especially those in the urban centres now consider their mother tongue as a linguistic anathema.
According to Prof. Jibril, 45 per cent of the world's population speak only five languages: Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish and Russian, just as the top 100 languages of the world are spoken by 95 per cent of the world's people. The remaining five per cent speak over 6,000 languages, with some languages having just about 100 or even less speakers. This, to say the least, is worrisome.
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This is achievable even before the children attain school age. Conscious efforts must be made by parents to speak their native languages to their children, who in turn will grow to cherish the language and pass same on to their children, thereby sustaining the life of the languages. The regulated exposure of the children to Language lessons in the school is not enough to achieve the resuscitation of Nigerian languages. Parents must embrace the habit of speaking the local languages to the children. And the time is now.
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