What is a person without a mother tongue? Can you remember when you first started to read and write? I can’t somehow, unlike so many others first in my life. Literacy uneventfully wove itself into my experience; there are no certificates or snapshots to celebrate my starting to read or write. As far as I am concerned, I have always been literate, and it is something I take for granted. A flashback will show that, gradually I have gone from recognising individual letters and words to reading entire sentences and paragraphs, street sign and books.
Literacy brings words to life, as a result; a world of opportunity, of education, of instruction, of entertainment is opened up. Mother’s tongue ushered us to this unique world of discoveries and opportunities. Sadly, this is exactly opposite of many of the people when it comes to embracing Mother’s tongue. Language, especially the mother’s tongue is the fluid of the body into which thoughts run and out of which they grow and effectively survive. The second language can never exude that magic of emotions which our mother’s tongue can. The rhythm of our body is the same as the mother’s tongue.
Let us see that our children and the incoming generation are properly educated in the rudiments of their mother’s tongue, and let them proceed to the higher state of learning though the riches of the language.
It is a sorry situation, when language is lost because the language of a particular tribe is the pedigree of that people. It is the armoury of the human mind, it contains the trophies of the past and the weapon for future conquest. Nelson Mandela says “If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.”
Our hope in Myekeemedia.com is that we will recognise afresh the benefit of mother tongue and catch a vision for the need of people around us because mother’s tongue literacy is just too important to ever be taken for granted. A mother’s tongue education takes you into the domain of formal education. If you are an Igede person and you can’t read and write in Igede language, are you literate?
コメント