When a living language dies alive!

Summary:

It is often said that languages are repositories of knowledge, culture and identities. Yet each
day, we hear of many languages that are declared ‘dead’ when the last living person that speaks
that language dies. This article postulates that they are many languages gradually dying even
though they are still many people alive that either speak or should speak these languages. This
article will suggest ways of preserving alive one of these languages – ‘Bette’! The suggestions
herein may be applied to the preservation of any other language for that matter!

Introduction:

Before I proceed further, let me acknowledge that I may have taken on a herculean task,
perhaps an even controversial one at that since some in my own social-cultural milieu may
disagree with the ideas expressed here-in and may even consider me presumptuous to make
these suggestions (we are a proud mountain nation and rightly so!) being that some of these
people may very well be better versed in my beloved ‘better’ than I am; also considering that I
am necessarily biased as one that has lived a large part of his formative years outside of the
better community and would therefore suffer a necessary ‘disconnect’ with my early days!
Nevertheless, I believe that the sentiments expressed herein hold true not only for me but for
millions of other people all over the world! Now lets begin!

The diversity that the living God bestowed upon all humanity is easily expressed in the
multitudes of tongues and languages spoken all over the world. A language serves as a powerful
means of communication; a language is an easy identification of a ethnically unique nationality,
a people. A language serves as a power expression of cultural affinity, knowledge and an
expression of ‘universal truths’ and the sanctity of life! It is a common repository of knowledge
in areas of history, national antecedents, medical treatment, family associations, and lineal
descents of a society! Where I come from (Ogbudu), it is when people get together ‘under the
neem tree’ (Cameron Duodo and New African Please let me borrow your Phrase) that you will
hear tales of heroic deeds of generations past. Friends will tell jokes rich in meaning (but which
may not come out well when translated into another language).

This article has been inspired by my realization that today, the average better person cannot (or
will not) make a full sentence in the Bette without interjecting a foreign word, usually English! I
have just committed the first presumptuous outrage…but nevertheless, let us continue!

The thing with Languages:

At some point, a language either dies or transforms into something else; something new. History
is replete with examples of many languages that have either died out or ‘changed into another’.
One strong example here in Ethiopia where I live is epitomized by the Geez language and script.
Geez as language is no longer widely spoken (now being used only in the Orthodox Church as its
liturgical language) but two widely spoken languages in Ethiopia – Amharic and Trigrignya are
descended from Geez and still use Geez alphabets/characters as the cornerstone of their
written scripts. For those of you in the Western world, Latin perhaps will quickly come to mind
(used now mainly within the Catholic Church) but descended by Italian, Spanish and Portugues!
So the process of a language dying out or being corrupted (as in the case of Latin) to the extent
where the original is no longer spoken is not new!

The death of a language (especially a written language) is most especially very painful since it
renders so many documents (such as written historical accounts) unreadable to the majority.
One example would be the thousands of Clay tablets unearthed in the area of ancient Kamet
and the pyramids and burial mounds of the Sudan, which now scholars have still been unable to
decipher because the language is dead, lost to posterity!

How do languages die or change? The English Language which most of us use today has
borrowed so many words from different languages that if ‘old English’ were spoken to us today,
we would perhaps not recognize that it were English. Today, many languages are dying out very
fast including mine – Bette; even though many Bette speakers still live and thrive! – (AA)

Why this article?

So why the need for this article? The need for this article arose when I realized that my language
(my mother tongue) was ‘dying alive’! Another presumptuous outrage right? The thought first
occurred to me that my language was dying when I returned to Ogbudu after 81/2 years and
realized that my Better language skills were not very fluent anymore! At the same time I noticed
in conversations with family and friends that no one made a sentence in Bette without
interjecting with a foreign language word; usually English. Over the years I could not also help
noticing that as many people from Ogbudu migrated abroad or to other areas of Nigeria in
search of greener pastures; and usually stayed for stretches at a time, their Bette language skills
tended to become less fluent most especially for those like me who have had no one to practice
the language with!

When children were born to sons and daughters of Bette land in the diaspora, these children
tended to learn English as a first language as a result of which most neither understand the
language not speak the Mother tongue and I do have a firsthand experience of this with some of
my own relatives! Back in Ogbudu itself, children are encouraged to learn to read and write
English (and rightly so) in order to have future job opportunities…no one I know encourages
their children to read or write Bette!

As I continued to contemplate these state of affairs, I came to the realization that slowly, a very
pure form of the Bette language may still exist only with a very few people…a few ‘oldies’ in the
village who may have never had the opportunity to live in ‘Ogbudu Urban’ as we call our ‘town’
or who have never been opportune to Migrate out of town to other parts of the country. This
understanding dawned on me with the realization that it is easy for the average Bette man to
invent a new word for something that does not exist in the Bette language by simply appending
a ‘U’ in front of the corresponding English word for the item. As an example, the English word
‘School’ simply becomes ‘USchool’ in the Bette or the English word ‘Shop’ simply becomes
‘UShop’ in the Bette and so on. I came to realize that my generation never really spoke a pure
form of the Bette language even during our early years. If you will doubt it, then consider the
many Bette names today whose meanings are now lost to the current generation! Imagine
names such as Ugbe, Agbo, etc. Perhaps a few may live who still know what these names mean
but for the majority of us in the current generation, we know these words as ‘names’ but if you
were to ask someone the meaning of these words, no one would be able to tell you that ‘Ugar’
means this or ‘Ushie’ means that!

Why are so many languages dying alive?

Why are so many languages on the verge of extinction at least in their purest form? As noted
earlier, some contributing factors is the need to gain an education (usually in some foreign
written language) so as to have future prospects. Another reason is the rapid migration and
relocation that has occurred in recent years by people in search of greener pastures and the
resulting high number of children born in the Diaspora (i.e outside of their communities). These
children would usually grow up outside their community, practice the foreign language in the
community in which they grow up and seldom practice their mother tongue!

However the biggest factor in all this is usually ‘foreign language imperialism’ – a situation in
which former colonial powers (most especially Great Britain and France) and other wealth
industrialized ‘power houses’ usually setup ‘cultural centers’ for the promotion of culture that
are usually more than ill-disguised attempts to promote skills in the host country in the reading
and writing of their respective languages as well as practice of their ‘civilized cultures’! These
countries have setup many attractive structures to achieve these goals!

Here in Ethiopia where I live, you have the British Council (which is where you usually have a
wide variety of English books and films to borrow) or the French Cultural Center that sponsors
institutions like the Alliance Ethio Fraciase where students are encouraged to perform well so
that the best performing students will receive a Visa to France and an opportunity to study in
France. Then we also have a similar Russian Center for Culture and Science, an Italian Cultural
Center to name but a few! Foreign language imperialism promotes the view that unless you are
able to speak some foreign tongue (usually European), you are uncivilized and uneducated and
without prospects; thus, people usually don’t want to be seen as ‘uneducated’ or ‘uncivilized’ so
they strive to be able to speak a foreign language of some sort! In West Africa, we can see
clearly how this effort gave birth to ‘pidgin English’, ‘broken Engligh’ or ‘Croel’.

While it is true that throughout the ages, people have had to sometimes learn several languages
in order to be able to communicate (picture trade in the days of the Pharaohs), and it is also true
that the dominant power in every historical epoch has sought to spread their tongue, culture
and writing to conquered peoples, it has never been as vicious as today’s Foreign Language
imperialism that seeks to obtain by means of language what they have relinquished politically!
Our languages are dying because even amongst we ourselves, we now hold the view that lack of
ability to speak some European language somehow denotes an inferior intellect. I vividly recall a
Nigerian friend of mine pronouncing an Ethiopian ‘unintelligent’ and uneducated because he
could neither speak nor write in English. But this Ethiopian man could speak and write in
Amharic, his mother tongue! I was thus forced to correct my friend, to point out that the
Ethiopian man was not uneducated; he could in fact read and write…only not in English!

Languages that have survived!

Even though some old or ancient languages have died, some have inexorably survived. Those
that have survived or transformed themselves were those that have had a capacity for accurate
expression; those that have adopted themselves, thus; even after Rome extinguished the last
outposts of the Greek world power (Ptolemaic Egypt) in about 30 BC and became the
undisputed world power, Greek continued to be widely spoken and used as a writing medium
and the Gospels and Greek scriptures of the New Testament of the bible bear witness to this! Of
course over the millennia, Greek has not remained the same but it has survived!

How a language can survive!

How can a language live? How can a language ‘survive’ and not ‘die’ given the current climate of
vicious foreign language imperialism? Again, we will have to borrow a leaf from the so-called
established languages! As an example, for many years, subjects such as Engineering and
Chemistry were taught only in German, thus it can be assumed that many new words were
invented to represent many new things and new devices and concepts as these were created.
The English language has done something similar by borrowing heavily from Latin, Greek,
German and then inventing a few new words.

But I think again that the greatest example for Africa that we will have will be that of Ethiopia
where a committee was formed to invent new words in the Amharic for new devices and
concepts in the IT and sciences field so that these fields could be properly taught in the Amharic.
In Ethiopian schools, most schools teach the same subject twice! For example, students get to
learn Math in Amharic and also Math in English; Physics in English and then Physics in Amharic
and so on!

This actuality then implies that for a language to survive in its purest form in the modern
context, new words need to be invented for new concepts and devices based on the existing
language (i.e. its existing pool of words), divorced from the foreign language from which the
new idea is borrowed. This concept should work if we assume that people usually have words in
their language only for things and concepts that they have known and are familiar with; and also
importantly if we agree that every language has a capacity for enriching itself! Thus as new
concepts become familiar, new words or phrases could be coined from the existing language for
those new concepts! Another factor would be to encourage learning and writing in that
language as a subject learned in school (I am not suggesting a substitute for English after all we
must all live with English as the leading Global language and just about everyone that wants to
participate in the Global Village today must learn this language just as Jesus’s apostles wrote
most of the Gospels in Greek – the Global language of their day)!

A committee could be established (perhaps with backing and authority of the Paramount Chief
and his fellow members in the council of Chiefs) to create a dictionary of the words of the
language, coin new words, standardize spelling and create a proper lexicon that helps the
language enrich and renew itself! For those African languages where we have lost all knowledge
of a written script or perhaps one has never been developed a necessary ‘evil’ to achieve this
goal may be to adopt the ‘Latin script’ (i.e. its alphabet) as a necessary building block!

Before I conclude, I will acknowledge that they may be some that may not see the need to
preserve what may be termed a ‘tribal language’ at the expense of learning a modern global
language such as English (and I am advocating no such thing for I will acknowledge that I owe my
ability to set down my thoughts in this document to the fact that I learnt to speak and write in
English from an early age)! Nevertheless, to those ones, I will repeat what I said at the outset of
this article viz ‘a language is a repository of knowledge, history, culture, identity and origins of a
people, a nation no matter how small’ thus this fact alone justifies the need to preserve our
languages, to teach it to our children after us, to create and preserve our commonwealth, our
spoken tongue! Why should our heritage, our identity, our traditions, our knowledge be simply
lost, subsumed in the constant barrage and non-stop assault of European languages and their
constant quest to ‘Europeanize the rest of the world’? Why can’t we have the best of both
worlds?

This article is just food for thought! I can already imagine those who are asking the question:
“After so many words what will you do about your beloved Bette language?” Well! I propose to
setup a Bette Language web site to bring Bette speakers together…it will be a forum for the
preservation of Bette language and culture. It will be a place where articles can be published in
Bette, where Bette speakers can keep a blog (in Bette only of course). It will be a means for
Bette speakers to form an online committee of elders to promote the language by coining new
words and terms to meet modern needs, create a Bette language Dictionary, collect and store
‘tales and stories’; sayings and proverbs, food recopies, traditional medicinal recopies, etc. Also
a committee could help produce material to enable study of Bette in our schools and above all
to articulate and promote Obudu interests nationally.

To begin with, I propose a revision from the name ‘Obudu’, back to ‘Ogbudu’, the way we
always knew and pronounced it! Does anyone oppose this motion? Please leave your
comments! Andokie! I know you will be more than willing to contrinbute one and I am looking
forward to reading it!