Retooling Igbo language in era of digital pedagogy – Part 2

Continued from yesterday

The foregoing underscores the urgency of exploring technologies and their potential in enhancing the role of teachers in the teaching and learning of the Igbo language.

Herein lies the inescapable option of Igbo digital pedagogy if the language and its owners hope to escape the rampaging proboscis of globalisation currently gobbling up their rich tapestry of cultural heritage, and indeed all the valuable resources that are of strategic importance for preserving their unique modes of thinking and expression, identity construction, in-group integration, education and development.

The gloomy UNESCO report suggests that a language disappears every two weeks, taking with it an entire cultural and intellectual heritage’ with not less than 43 per cent of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world being endangered.

Regrettably, the Igbo language belongs to this hapless league of endangered languages, whether considered from the theoretical prism of Joshua Fishman’s (1991) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), which recognises the degree to which intergenerational transmission of the language remains intact as the key factor in gauging the relative safety of an endangered language or Lewis & Simons’ (2010) Expanded Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (EGIDS) that evaluates a language’s literacy acquisition status, identity function, state of intergenerational language transmission, vehicular and a societal profile of its generational use.

Going by the UNESCO’s template for global assessment of the state of world’s languages, Igbo falls within Level 7 of both Fishman’s GIDS and Lewis & Simons’ EGIDS and meets UNESCO’s criterion for fitting into an ‘endangered language’ frame, which states that “the child-bearing generation knows the language well enough to use it with their elders but it is not transmitting it to their children.”
 
It is in the light of the unfolding scenario in the global linguistic ecosystem that we have observed elsewhere that language endangerment is a serious social problem, which has elicited clarion calls from renowned language scholars for owners of such languages to develop renewed interests in their languages as one effective way of reversing the ugly trend.

In particular, foremost Nigerian linguists, Ayo Bamgbose (Professor Emeritus) and Professor Nọlue Emenanjọ (of blessed memory) had expressed a consensual view that “the fate of an endangered language may well lie in the hands of the owners of the language themselves and in their will to make it survive”.

As it concerns the Igbo language, Centre for Igbo Studies (CIS), University of Nigeria, has been in the vanguard spearheading fine-honed advocacy for reimagining Igbo studies. Its Igbo Ezue colloquium – a linguo-cultural renaissance featuring homecoming of Ndigbo in Homeland and the Diaspora cum maiden international conference – slated for the last quarter of the year 2022, represents one of such practical steps towards igniting emotional commitment in Ndigbo to promote, develop and sustain their language and cultural heritage.

Furthermore, we argue for the practical implementation of the mother tongue policy of UNESCO. As it concerns Igbo in our educational institutions, for instance, we call for the immediate formulation and implementation of a policy that makes Igbo language a compulsory subject in primary/secondary schools in Southeast states and a credit pass in Igbo as a precondition for admission into tertiary institutions in Igboland; mounting of Use of Igbo as a course in the General Studies programme of tertiary institutions in the Southeast region of Nigeria; reward system in form of scholarship schemes for students who elect to study Igbo in higher institutions and automatic employment on graduation.

Concluded

Agbedo is a Professor of Linguistics and Director, Centre for Igbo Studies, University of Nigeria, Nsukka