The language we adopted has left us almost ‘inorate’
Students of Daystar University at a career event at the institution in June 2016. PHOTO | NATION MEDIA GROUP
What you need to know:
- A nation without an effectively unifying language is a terrible contradiction in terms.
- In Kenya, English is a language only of the elite, an elite allegedly educated, but which, indeed, has no language of its own because, for official work, most members do not use their mother tongues for national social communication and have forgotten them.
In a page-4 write-up on careers, an insert in the Nation of June 30 had this: “If you are dilligent and reliable, you can earn an average of Sh50,000 a month”. It posed one serious question. Exactly what is it to be “dilligent”? I ask because, if that word is English, I don’t know it.
The word that I know is diligent, with only one “l” – an adjective which means “hardworking” or painstaking. Among the chief problems with English, then, is that the rules governing pronunciation and spelling are never consistent. If they were, then dilligent (with a double L) would be the legitimate spelling of that word. Yet diligent (with only one “l”) is the accepted spelling.
But, according to the same rules, diligent should be pronounced like dye-li-jent. However, diligent, a word spelt with only one “l”, is pronounced as dilly-gent would be if such a word existed. The first syllable of diligent rhymes with, for instance, bill chill, dill, fill, gill, hill, kill, mill, pill, rill, sill, till and will.
THEY RHYME
The third syllable rhymes with bent, cent, dent, lent, meant, pent, rent, sent, vent and went. Spelt with only one “l”, then, the adjective diligent means hardworking, painstaking. Even if we assumed that you are diligent, we would have to continue to demand that you tame English fully because it is the means that you have freely chosen as the medium of your entire life-career.
I say freely even though many of you were not yet born when our political forefathers were accepting from imperialist London certain extremely questionable conditions for our independence. Such conditions must include English itself because, as our nationwide failure to master that language shows, a nation without an effectively unifying language is a terrible contradiction in terms.
In Kenya, English is a language only of the elite, an elite allegedly educated, but which, indeed, has no language of its own because, for official work, most members do not use their mother tongues for national social communication and have forgotten them. The tragedy of the Third World’s ruling elites is that members have no real language.
ONLY SMATTERING
They have only a smattering of English or French or Portuguese, namely, only of the European languages they have adopted as their official tools. Africa’s masses have at best only a smattering of Dutch, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and others of the languages of the same Europeans who have recently bestridden our continent like colossi.
Among the problems that Europe colonially created in Africa by lumping all kinds of ethnic groups into single colonial “commonwealths” is that, in those states, there is no real communication between the elite and the mass, especially if, like among my own ethnic community, the mass be not only illiterate but also inorate in Kiswahili, the language alleged to be national.
Certain African intellectuals coined the word “inorate” in the 1960s as the speech counterpart of the word illiterate – to refer to those people from the Third World who still cannot communicate their real feelings orally.
Philip Ochieng is a retired journalist.
