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Language and Humanity
No two speakers speak the same language and no speaker produces the same sound twice. In the same vein, no person or group of persons own a language. A language is owned by those who speak the language. These assertions underscore the reality of linguistic autonomy, variation and change in any given individual or society. This is so because language, by its nature, is in a perpetual state of flux just as the human person who produces language as well as the language apparatus including the human mind which helps the human person to produce language is relatively unstable. Simply put, each language and each speaker of a given language is uniquely distinctive in spite of commonalities which all human languages and human beings share. This understanding is critical in order to appreciate why languages are different and why languages have varieties and variations and why claims of any form of linguistic superiority in linguistic varieties and the distinctions of ‘nativenness’ and ‘non-nativeness’ in a given language are essentially matters of linguistic ideology constructed through perceptions and prejudices. It is therefore safe to say that since people’s attitudes and behavior are unpredictable, linguistic developments are ultimately unpredictable as well.
Language, and indeed any language, exists with the people, is of the people and for the people. The history of a people cannot be satisfactorily told without the language which is the social construct of the people; a means by which the people identify and define who they are in time and space. In other words, the history of a language is a function of the history of its speakers (Thomason & Kaufman, 1988). So, as the people move and transform their being and experiences, so does the language accompany them in their journey gradually transforming the people and itself being transformed in the dynamic process of life, learning and living.
It is this nature of language that makes it so difficult to provide a satisfactory and an all encompassing definition of what is language on one hand, and to define and delineate a particular language say English on the other. Depending on what people think of language and what they do with language, language can be seen as a RIGHT; a PROBLEM; a RESOURCE; or language can be seen from the sense of DOMINATION; DIVERSITY; ACCESS; DESIGN and so on. So, language becomes the proverbial large elephant that many blind persons define and describe as their perceptions dictate. For others, language is power: power to create or curse, to convince or confuse, to conjure or connive, to coerce or control, to conquer and colonize, and to liberate or domesticate the mind. For others, language is a weapon of manipulation and a shield from such manipulation; a veritable tool used to love and to hate. Language comes with its sweet and bitter histories and memories. Language is a carrier of a people’s memory and culture; and yet, for others, language is used to mark identify, to include and to exclude. These are the many myriad faces and functions of language. For these reasons, language pervades every human activity and distinctly distinguishes human species from other creatures. Human societies therefore symbiotically exist with language and language shapes and it is shaped by society. This lecture therefore identifies one language, English for discourse, in spite of the pleasant and not too pleasant memories we may have about the language; in spite of the arguments for and against English as a colonial language; in spite of nationalistic and patriotic fervor for our indigenous languages; and in spite of the global murderous march of English and the charges and accusations of linguicide leveled against English as being responsible for the endangerment and death of some languages in the world. As Schneider (2003, p. 233) puts it, “English …has been damned as a ‘killer language’, responsible for the extinction of innumerable indigenous languages, dialects, and cultures around the globe.” Whether English is culpable of these charges is contestable (see Crystal, 2003). But, this is not the focus of this lecture.
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