The Importance Of Ibo Language

Obi is proud of his language, when he was in England “nothing gave him greater pleasure than to find another Ibo-speaking student in a London bus.” So he can speak in his mother tongue; asserting his identity in front of the others, and “when he had to speak English with a Nigerian student from another tribe he lowered his voice”; because of the shame speaking to one’s countryman in the colonizer’s language brings. (Ibid, p.39) Language thus here is not only a source of pride but also a tool of identification and resilience to one’s stature and culture. A wave of foreign signals however has penetrated into the purity of the native Ibo language. In Nigeria, it seems like language too has undergone corruption mainly in the urban place. The …show more content…
This switch or psychic travel from one language to another is manifest through many scenes in the novel. Only to expose the deficit of linguistic data one suffers from in his own language and his dependency on the colonizers’ language to survive, and from there to remind people of the importance of language in asserting identity. In linguistic hybridity we have the example of Obi when he hears the songs of the traders on the wagon at his graduation ceremony. Obi has heard these songs many times in his life before, but never understood its meaning. Surprisingly when he translates it into English he realizes the meaning. Achebe here hints to the fact that the colonised requires the language of the coloniser to decipher signs of his own language. As if to say that the natives’ language can no longer stand by its own which is a shame. Indeed the mother tongue has been neglected by the educated man; who when trying to make a coherent speech in Ibo falls in the English language all of a sudden. This was his case during one moving speech, he addressed to his kinsmen. Another case of him with Clara testifies his poor Ibo linguistic