Of tongue, mouth and how to call a local language

The tongue, as we know, is the essential organ of speech. According to certain European languages, the word for “language” has something etymological to do with the word for the tongue. In French, indeed, the word for a language is langue, which is also the name of the physical “tongue”.

The English word language is borrowed from across the English Channel. The word language comes, namely, from the French words langue (“tongue”) and langage (no “u”), a vernacular, namely, an activity of the local tongue. 

GENITIVE

But, although many people may question the assumption, the mouth is the bodily organ with which any normal human being speaks a language and communicates with another human being. That, at any rate, is how my people, the Luo, do consider the matter. That is why, in my mother tongue, a language is known simply as dhok (“mouth”). It is thus that my mother tongue is called Dholuo (“mouth of the Luo”).

In other words, according to the Luo, a language is simply a mouth (dhok) or, in genitive terms, dho (“mouth of”). As anybody can see, dhok (“mouth”) is the word which, when combined with the ethnic term luo, becomes Dholuo, namely, literally, “mouth of the Luo” (the k having been sacrificed in the process of combination).

BANTU

In my mother tongue, then, I reiterate, dhok (mouth) is also the word for any language. That is why the word dholuo itself translates literally as “mouth of the Luo”. Contrariwise, however, a language is not known as a mouth in any of the European languages with which I am familiar. In English, for instance, a language is known, rather, as a “tongue”.

But even the Luo would not consider you wrong if you called your language a tongue. Why not? For, clearly, it is in the mouth that the tongue itself is so squarely embedded. It is noteworthy that, in Dholuo, the word for both the verb to write and the noun writing is ndiko.  But even this is a borrowing from certain neighbouring Bantu languages.

KISWAHILI

For, although the Luo are among Eastern Africa’s most populous and most highly educated ethnic communities, the Luo became generally literate only relatively recently. Quite clearly, even ndiko is a development from the verb kuandika, which belongs to Kiswahili, the queen of all of Eastern Africa‘s Bantu languages.

If you do not know it, Luo is the name of a large inter-lacustrine Eastern African community of Nilotic vintage in terms of blood, language and culture, a people which spreads all over  Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, the Congo and the Sudan, a people whose individuals occupy important situations in  the government and Kenya’s other official organisations.

RECTIFY

Numerically second only to the Kikuyu, the Luo preponderate over the civil services of all  those  independent former European colonies,  though, of course,  in a situation where conscious tribalism is so active, official Kenya must do something to rectify  it so as both to ensure national stability and to catalyse development in all aspects of society.

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