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The rate at which nation’s local languages are gradually being subsumed by the influence of western cultures cannot be quantified. Many parents just cannot find a simple reason why they should bequeath to their children their native language as a cultural heritage.

In education sector, Nigeria has a mother-tongue policy, which requires that every child be taught in a mother tongue at the pre-primary school level and during the first three years of primary school.

The policy states that where the mother tongue cannot be used, the language of the immediate environment, i.e. the dominant language of the community which the child already speaks, is recommended.

In some regions of Nigeria, especially the South-South, Pidgin English has acquired a mother-tongue status, such that many youths are unable to communicate in the local languages any more. Language experts or educationists in time past had advocated for the usage of Nigerian Pidgin English in teaching, especially in this area. This was the thinking of the National Commission for Mass Literacy, Adult and Non-Formal Education in 1992set out to produce literacy materials in Nigerian Pidgin. Unfortunately the project has since been suspended.

It is not uncommon to find parents teaching or communicating in English with their children without recourse to the necessity of first bequeathing the native languages to them. This “imported city practice” has spread colossally to different parts of Nigeria, especially in the South-East and the South-South areas.

This practice is quite becoming an acceptable norm for majority of the people, though it should not be condemned in its totality. But the parents must ensure that the child as a matter of priority understands the mother tongue and speaks it, before they (may) decide to change the code and educate him or her in another language. Civilization does not presuppose the abandonment of culture or one’s language, rather it promotes an integrative approach in which such local languages are developed via the instrumentally of communication in our day-to-day existence.

In our society today, thousands of our youths are unable to speak their native languages, and for this group, it is most likely that their lineage(s) will be affected seriously because they cannot bequeath to the generations to come what they don’t know.

That is why many foreigners who are resident in Nigeria and who are not of the English stock, such as Indians, Chinese, French, Japanese etc. appreciate the importance of their mother-tongue and bequeath it to their children through the process of cultural transmission, before allowing them to speak any other language. This attitude shows that Nigerian parents have got it wrong from the start, either due to ignorance of the workings of civilization as it relates to local languages or a clear show of apathy due to personal ego and pride or, put succinctly, they suffer inferiority complexes.

They need to be educated on the disastrous consequences this portends for the future of their native language(s) then, they will come to terms with the need for re-orientation for both the parents and the youths who have ignorantly accepted this practice as a norm and view local languages as a vice to be done away with.

The intimacy between a language and the people who speaks it is deep because a language lives only so long as there are people who speak and use it as their mother tongue, and its greatness is only to the extent given to it by the people.

That is why classical Latin is a dead language because it’ has not evolved or change is and not used as a language of public communication. This practice might have accounted for the death of many local languages in the South-South today and in no distant future the South-East will suffer the same fate if the people do not evolve an attitudinal change towards their culture.

A language is important because those who speak it are important politically, economically, culturally. English, French and German are great and important languages because they are the languages of great and important people.

If the native or local languages are not bequeathed to our children; how can our language(s) evolve over time from this present state of complexities to a process of progressive simplification in line with modernization if we don’t bequeath it to our children for easy understanding and usage? How can it become -the language of great and important people? How can it preserve our cultural heritage? Greek for instance is studied in its classical form because of the great civilization which its literature preserves.

Information and culture are not matters of leisure. They are life and death issues in the world of today. We have to defend the culture of the people, because once the mind is conquered, the body will follow. If we allow outsiders to colonize us mentally, intellectually and culturally, then we are just slaves.

This doesn’t mean that English language is not important, it is an international language, a language of law, commerce politics, administration, and of education and most importantly our lingua-Franca, hence, must be learnt, but not to be used as a substitute for our local languages. That is why schools as agents of socialization offers this opportunity for a child to be educated in English while his or her mental facilities are still alert to language acquisition.

Research and observations have shown that a child is capable of speaking as many as different languages; the onus now is on the parents to maximize these potentialities inherent in the child as it relates to language acquisition. But by refusing to culturally transmit these local (native) languages to their wards at their prime in preference to English alone, it becomes very difficult for these youths to acquire these native languages when they become adolescents thus the child is unequipped to communicate using other mediums in a dynamic and multilingual environment like ours, thus, preparing the native languages for imminent death.

J. Oswald Sanders once said that “the eyes that look are common, the eyes that see are rare. It is neither a mark of wisdom nor of greater knowledge and understanding for the parents and the youths to continue this practice. We must begin to see the fate about to befall our local languages. Our youths are fast losing their cultural heritage due to neglect of indigenous languages and if nothing is urgently done to reverse this trend, Nigeria’s culturally heritage and linguistic diversity would be lost and the nation’s personality subsumed by other cultural influences.

FILIMON LYOCK GAIYA is of Mass Communication Department Kaduna Polytechnic, Kaduna

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