By Dr. Abimbola Ayobami
When a child in Lagos answers their grandmother in English and calls Yoruba "vernacular," we are not witnessing modernity. We are witnessing erasure.
Language is not just words. It is memory, worldview, medicine, law, and prayer. And in Nigeria today, that memory is fading fast.
The Crisis: Facts and Statistics
Nigeria has over 500 living languages, the second highest in Africa. Yet UNESCO already classifies 20 Nigerian languages as "endangered" and 7 as "critically endangered".
For Yoruba, one of our 3 major languages with over 50 million speakers globally, the decline is happening at home:
1. Home transmission is collapsing: A 2023 survey by the Yoruba Language Center showed only 28% of Yoruba children in urban areas speak fluent Yoruba with their parents. In Lagos and Abuja, that number drops below 15%.
2. School data: The Federal Ministry of Education reports that less than 35% of primary schools in Southwest Nigeria actually teach Yoruba beyond the 30 minutes a week mandated in policy. At secondary and tertiary levels, it is treated as an elective, not a core subject.
3. Attitude problem: In a 2022 NOI Polls study, 61% of Nigerian parents said they prefer their children to "speak English first" to get ahead. The word "vernacular" is now used by children to mean "backward" or "local."
At this rate, linguists project that by 2070, over 50 Nigerian languages will have no child speakers left. Yoruba will not disappear, but the deep, proverb-rich, dialect-diverse Yoruba of our elders will.
The Irony: The World is Studying What We Are Abandoning
While we call our mother tongue "vernacular," foreign institutions are building careers on it.
- United States & Europe: Over 60 universities including Harvard, SOAS London, and University of Ibadan’s foreign partners now offer Yoruba as a degree, diploma, or research language. The US Defense Language Institute teaches Yoruba to diplomats and military officers.
- Brazil & Cuba: Due to the transatlantic slave trade, Yoruba religious and linguistic studies are part of national cultural heritage programs. Thousands of Afro-Brazilians study Yoruba to reconnect with ancestry.
- Research funding: Major grants from European and American foundations now go to documenting Nigerian oral literature, proverbs, and medicinal plant names in Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba , knowledge our own children cannot access because they don’t speak the language.
We are exporting our intellectual property while importing shame for it.
What China, Japan, and India Are Doing Right
These nations faced the same pressure of globalisation. They chose a different path: they taught the world in their language, not the other way around.
- China: Mandarin is the compulsory medium of instruction from nursery to university. All textbooks, science, and technology terms are translated and standardised in Mandarin. As a result,over 1 billion people speak it, and China now exports its language through over 400 Confucius Institutes worldwide.
- Japan: Japanese is used to teach everything including medicine and engineering. Despite being a global economic power, Japan insists children master kanji, history, and ethics in Japanese first. English is taught as a second language, not a replacement.
- India: The 2020 National Education Policy mandates mother tongue or regional language as the medium of instruction until at least Grade 5, and preferably till Grade 8. IITs now teach technical courses in Hindi and 11 other Indian languages to widen access.
The result? High literacy, cultural pride, and global influence without losing identity.
The Legislative Duty: What Our Lawmakers Must Do Now
If we wait another generation, we will be archiving Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa in museums instead of speaking them in homes.
I call on the National Assembly and State Houses of Assembly to urgently sponsor and pass a National Indigenous Languages and History Education Bill with these mandates:
1. Compulsory Instruction: Indigenous language must be a compulsory subject and medium of instruction from Nursery to Primary 3. From Primary 4 to SS3, it must be taught daily as a core subject, like Mathematics and English.
2. Tertiary Requirement: All universities, polytechnics, and colleges of education must offer at least one Nigerian language and Nigerian history course as a general studies requirement for graduation.
3. Teacher Training & Materials: Federal and State governments must fund the development of textbooks, digital content, and teacher training in all major and minority languages.
4. Public Sector Incentive: Make proficiency in one indigenous language, aside from English, an added requirement for entry into civil service and teaching jobs.
This is not anti-English. It is pro-Nigeria. Children can be bilingual. In fact, research shows children who learn in their mother tongue first perform better in English and STEM later.
Conclusion
A people without language is a people without a future. When we lose Yoruba, we lose the proverbs that settle disputes. When we lose Igbo, we lose the names that carry history. When we lose Hausa, we lose the poetry that moves a nation.
Foreign nationals are studying us because they know what we have forgotten: that language is power.
The time for conferences is over. The time for bills, budgets, and bold classroom action is now.
Let us not be the generation that explained to our grandchildren what "vernacular" meant, only to realise we meant "us."
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