What our languages represent

And why we must keep them alive

Egyptian hieroglyphs

Language is one of, if not the most, fundamental elements of culture. It gives people a unique identity.

Africa is home to thousands of languages. Ghana alone is home to about eighty different languages.

The great number of languages coexisting in Africa is part of our heritage, our beauty, and pride as a people.

Today, right before our eyes, we are being dispossessed of our own languages. They are disappearing at an unprecedented rate.

But, in fact, the preservation of African languages is crucial for Africa, especially today.

In our time, African culture, as a whole, is being replaced quickly by Western culture.

Mistakes have been made, and the ways and wisdom of the forefathers have been made to seem unsophisticated or outright backward. Tradition is associated with a lack of education, a low level of intelligence, or primitiveness. Especially among urban youth, who have a choice, there is a near-utter disregard for African culture.

University-educated youth now pretend they don’t understand local dialects that they mightn’t have to speak them. Or worse, they really don’t understand them. Meanwhile, their British and French accents are near-perfect.

Parents don’t care that their children don’t understand or speak their native tongues; they don’t care to pass down their heritage. They only care that their children can speak English, French, Spanish, and so on. They don’t want their children to identify with their “village people” anyway.

Educators vernacularise local dialects and sanction students when they speak them outside the lesson periods assigned them, in the rare cases where they are taught in schools. The educational system puts no priority on fluency in the local languages. Making them a subject to be studied in schools is a mere formality, and students know it, hence its ineffectiveness.

The system we have established has made understanding English or French, or some other European language, of utmost importance, while making it increasingly irrelevant to learn local languages.

Today, we, as a people, are more inclined to give our children over to institutions to be westernized than we are to make them love to speak their own languages, or love their culture.

Akan Adinkra symbols

We keep justifying mistaken priorities. That is how we arrived at our present state.

And the situation will continue to worsen unless we WAKE UP AND THINK AND TAKE ACTION.

If we are apathetic to the decline of our languages and they do disappear, how could we stand proud as a people or race?

Our languages are veritable containers for our legacies as peoples.

It is said that when the last tree dies, the last man dies; I think that when the last speaker of any language dies, a whole people with identity and culture have been left to die.

A writing in Nsibidi of the ancient Igbo

Presently, the sophistication of some of the most sophisticated African languages with their own writing systems is being ascribed to Western influence. Sadly, no real proof is needed because such claims have been made easy to believe.

Do we want the children of our children to be seen only as imitations of the West? Do we want our histories to be further distorted than they are today? Do we want to be seen as a people incapable of civilization on their own?

I’m using language here only as a point of contact for the broader issue of cultural disavowal that has been going on since colonization, but especially since independence.

I close with a simple question: “What identity do we want for the children of our children?”