‘Unless we develop our languages, there is no hope,’ says Kwesi Kwaa Prah.
The Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC) in collaboration with the South Africa based Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) recently organised an international workshop on the harmonisation of indigenous languages. The workshop, held on October 26 and 27 at the International Conference Centre, Abuja, brought participants from several African countries for the first phase of the project, with a focus on Hausa, Ijaw, Yoruba and Igbo languages.
Speaking at the opening of the Abuja workshop, Minister of Culture, Tourism and National Orientation, Abubakar Sadiq Muhammed said, “Despite Asia’s multiculturalism and multilingualism, they have been able to maintain their cultural and linguistic identities and have used them as springboard for socio-economic growth and development. The Asian countries have achieved a lot through the use and development of their indigenous languages.”
As linguists got to grips with the task in the different language clusters, Director of CASAS, Kwesi Kwaa Prah spoke about his work on the preservation of mother tongues.
Do the sheer variety of indigenous languages make it difficult to adopt them for wider use?
If you go to England, in East End of London - Whitechapel, West Ham, Stepney – they speak Cockney. Deep Cockney, you can hardly understand. If you go to Yorkshire, in the village, they have another. If somebody from North Yorkshire meets a man who is Cockney and they speak, you will think they’re speaking two different languages. But they read the same thing and speak it the way they speak. What is important is that the rules of writing the language should be the same. If you are Igbo from Onitsha and I’m Igbo from Awka… [we] should be able to read the same thing and write the same thing.
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