Like humans, languages are born. Languages grow, they become aged, weak or decay and die. Language is so much part of our lives that the orator - Cicero - thought that the cultivation of the power of speech was the essence of the citizen’s duty while for others, it was the essence of deception and distortion.

In their life time, however, languages are active in several areas. Languages function in small talks, education, politics, economy, religion, identity, romance, and so on. For example, Yoruba names are not only structured in terms of their morphology and syntax, they are also repositories of history and culture. Languages are used to steer people’s thought and beliefs. In politics, languages are used to persuade others, as well as promote one’s positions.

In the roles that languages play, however, they face structural and social stresses which imbue them with the capacity to vary and change. The changes we note in language are motivated by such large scale factors as history, migration, politics, colonialism and war, as well as micro structures as age, gender, social class, ethnicity, the community of practice and social networks, among others. For example, the impact of globalisation on Yoruba identity can be seen in its naming practice (onomastics ) as names such as Olulana, Jesuleye, Olutula and Olusina are now replacing Ogunlana, Awoleye, Fatula and Fasina respectively.

In English language use in Nigeria today, there is a growing variation in the use of the glottal sound /h/ as in /happy/ in words where it will normally not occur. This is why we have pronunciations such as /hegg/ for /egg/ and /hais/ for /eyes/. This pronunciation may be due to the level of education, mother tongue influence or the influence of social networks.

In Nigeria, the need to make education available to more citizens motivated the mother education policy, as it has been observed, from several studies, that the mother tongue makes access to education easier for the child.  Although it is a laudable policy, it has not only met with varying degrees of success in different parts of the country, its implementation is also slow and haphazard. Teachers are known to vary regularly between bilingual instruction and code-switching.

Furthermore, in order to promote the evolution of a national language, the government also introduced the policy of learning one of Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba at the Junior Secondary School. The ultimate goal is to forge a nation on the basis of a shared language. The question is: is such a nation possible when Nigeria’s constituent parts do not share a common history? Is such a nation plausible where its people have different world views as encoded in their languages? In other words, is a Nigerian nation plausible in the linguistic sense when its diverse people do not seem to have a common conception of a Nigerian nation?

It must be stressed that there is nothing inherently wrong or illegitimate about Nigeria being a state constituted by multilingual and multiethnic nationalities except when ethnicity is deployed for anti-democratic ends. The linguistic diversity in Nigeria should not be seen as a disease or an ailment from which the ‘nation’ must not suffer.

The diversity must be preserved to keep alive the thoughts of the hundreds of the different people inhabiting the country. The fear is palpable that Nigeria might lose many of its heritage mother tongues due, in particular, to the forces of globalisation.

What we need, therefore, is to design policies that will protect cultural and linguistic heritages on the one hand, and on the other hand, promote the role of language in inter-linguistic and intercultural communication, opinion formation and the process of information dissemination.

Salami is professor of Linguistics at the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, and he delivered The Life and Times of Language during his inaugural lecture recently.