Engligbo

Ha. Igbo Kwenu!!

"ENGLIGBO"

I'm not sure how many of you dear readers are familiar with this popular bridged term. I first heard it  in secondary school from a teacher, reprimanding my "generation" for watering down the purity of the igbo language with blobs of English words bubbling around between our igbo sentences.

"A nyerem ya yesterday"

"A sim come here!"

"Gbafuo nga before m kuwa gi aka nti"

Though it was common, it never got so bad to be rubbish like;

"Gini is this?"

Is that supposed to be my language you're speaking?

"Aham is....."

Wait....Are you even igbo at all?

"Who you bu?"

...This is because they gave you no fufu in life

Honestly, such phrases like these three directly above are linguistic terrors. I can only imagine the facial expressions of the poor igbo fluent personality who has the misfortune of ever hearing such mutated phrases.

While it seems that there is nothing really wrong in  mixing languages - which, having had an insidious upstart from years ago, is now common place. It all depends on how deep you look. I remember being told by my Philosophy lecturer when I was in 100 level, that linguistic scientists predicted the igbo language would be extinct in 2015.

Well it's 2016 now. Ma m ka na-ekwu okwu igbo m.

He had asked the igbo students how many of us there knew how to actually speak our language well, and then how many of us actually regularly speak it. The turnout for that question was poor - I'm sure you can guess.

Number of hands raised that day seemed like...

But you see, it's not just igbo language. Yoruba, Hausa, and even non-African languages such as Chinese or Italian suffer the same fate. If it's not because you're displaced from an area where there is a strong presence of the language, it's usually either because there's a belief that the language makes one "local" or simply because we were not raised with it.

In a world where we are spreading our branches towards what we see as "brighter lands", as everyone yearns to reach oversea and international borders, we have forgotten or lost understanding of our roots. I fear that without our grounding foundations - though we think ourselves trees, we will float as leaves in the air; blowing whichever the gusted winds lead us.

These thoughts struck me while I was in the hospital ward,s on the Friday of this past week, as we were asked to clerk an aged igbo woman, of which I struggled to understand a lot of what she spoke - irregardless of the fact that she used a different states' dialect. I can only imagine if it had been an emergency, and I was the only one around and asked to translate for her.

I've also discovered that the greatest test for fluency in a language you think you know, is being able to pray in it/ Can you pray in your native tongue? In French? In Spanish?

Igbo is beautiful. Yoruba is beautiful. Hausa is beautiful. Japanese is beautiful. English is beautiful. And, while I would like to say that things like Engligbo are caused by our attempts at the mixing of two beauties, the truth is that sometimes we are just lazy, or ignorant or misconceptually ashamed. There are still other reasons too (sometimes we have good ones) But still. Love your language. Learn it. Use it. It is a thing even more precious than gold. 

But if you can't learn, or don't like, your native language; know this - you can always learn the best one --> Igbo. Everyone's doing it these days...

My fellow Nigerians... Igbo Kwenu!!

(Do you have any comments about disagreements on this articles? Any similar experiences? Corrections or additions? Tell us in the comment section below!!)

(Watch Chris Abanis Ted Talk on the importance of language here ---> TED TALK)

Let's Be Legendary

Love, Stars and Asusu Anyi