The Umbilical Connection Between Language and Culture and its Implications for the Socio-Cultural Development of A Community : Time to Reverse the De-Centering of African Languages

Abstract

Essentially, in the human kingdom language is regarded not only as a medium of communication, but also as a carrier of culture. As a carrier of culture language is of paramount significance in that it controls the way a people, individually and collectively, perceive themselves in relation to other selves in the world, and initiate and sustain their creativity. Unfortunately, for European cultural hegemony language also became a mechanism for launching strategies of domination and alienation of the African personality. The psycho-social effect of the type of displacement that followed this action, as it is described in this article, especially by Biko (1978), Ngara (1985), Ngugi wa Thiongo (1986) and Pityana (1995), is such that the processes of subjugation and domination did not only have to do with the colonised having to inherit alien syntax or lexicology, but also the ways in which they ultimately perceive self and the world, and how to relate with Europeans in their assumed...