By By Lasisi Olagunju
“You taught me language, and my profit on it / Is, I know how to curse” (William Shakespeare: ‘The Tempest’).
The Nigerian government and the Nigerian Academy of Letters are fighting over which language to use in training our kids.
In a recent decision, the government cancelled the language policy which said the first six years of a child’s schooling should be delivered in the language of their local environment. The government probably felt that English is the language of our masters, its owner, so, it cancelled the extant policy rooted in the mother-tongue. It has ordered that henceforth English is the sole language of instruction at all levels of education in the country.
William Shakespeare’s fecundity sows seeds in all fields. He has this passage of lamentation in Richard II:
“The language I have learnt these forty years, /My native English, now I must forgo; /And now my tongue’s use is to me no more/ Than an unstringed viol or a harp, /Or like a cunning instrument cased up /Or, being open, put into his hands /That knows no touch to tune the harmony.”
Above, Shakespeare’s character mourns the loss of his voice, his expression, his linguistic identity. His lines embody a metaphor for linguistic helplessness, for mental dislocation, and forced silence. He says the language he mastered as a youth now lies useless; he laments that his tongue is now a useless instrument, an “unstringed viol or a harp” incapable of producing music.
With permission from Shakespeare, I donate that quote to the children of Nigeria. Their “tongue’s use is to (them) no more.” The Nigerian Academy of Letters (NAL) issued a warning last Friday about the dangers of reversing the language policy of Nigeria. The language policy, recalled the academy, was carefully designed “to promote mother-tongue-based multilingual education by ensuring that children received instruction in the language of their immediate environment during their first six years of schooling.”
Grandfather of Linguistics, 96-year-old Noam Chomsky, in 2013 delivered a series of lectures on ‘What kind of creature are we?’ The first in the series he entitled ‘What is Language?’ To answer the question, he deploys words and clauses spread over 19 pages. I read him as he says that “language is not sound with meaning but meaning with sound.” More importantly, he draws our attention to the traditional conception of language as “an instrument of thought.” I flow with that.
How I think is how I write. Week after week here, I write what I think. Thinking in Yoruba and writing in English is a pleasant affliction that has been part of me since I learnt to put white chalk on black slate. There has never been a conflict; my early teachers taught me everything in the language I encountered at the dawn of my day. That is why my English speaks Yoruba with all its properties. I listen to it and I like the music – probably because it is my music.
If the government won’t do what is right, parents should brace up and save the future. Read Katherine Reid and her colleagues in their ‘Parents as the first teachers’ published in October 2025. They say “early lexical development predicts later vocabulary, critical literacy skills including reading comprehension and, in turn, academic success.” They add that “because parents are typically their children’s first teachers, some intentionally and actively teach their children new words, while others prefer to expose them to language through rich interactions with the world around them in their daily lives.”
In his ‘Language Learning’ published in February 1970, American philosopher of Language, Gilbert Harman, tells us that “the primary use of language is in thought. Knowing a language is being able to think in it.” Chomsky also writes on what he calls “the fundamental Cartesian insight that use of language has a creative character.” But, is it not true that you cannot innovate in a language you do not fully understand? Professor Babs Fafunwa, in his ‘History of Education in Nigeria’ (1974), says mother tongue is “the first language learnt in the home, the language of the child’s immediate environment, the language in which the child thinks and feels.” Before him and after him, there have been studies after studies which have found that “children who start learning in their mother tongue tend to perform better academically, even upon transitioning to another language later.” (Read ‘Language of Instruction Policy in Nigeria’ by Thelma Ebube Obiakor; read N. Hungi and F.W. Thuku’s ‘Differences in pupil achievement in Kenya: Implications for policy and practice’ (2010).
The Nigerian Academy of Letters, in its complaint signed by its President, Professor Andrew Haruna, condemned the government’s decision on the language policy. According to the academy, dismissing the policy “so glibly, without due regard for expert knowledge and public opinion, is utterly scornful of Nigerians and does not speak well of the government’s respect for evidence-based policymaking.”
In February 1956, China tried doing almost the same thing our government has just done. China toyed with the idea of replacing its Chinese phono-semantic characters with a new thirty-letter Latin alphabet. Chinese nationalists bitterly denounced the initiative as “a declaration of war on China’s cultural heritage.” Read Tao-Tai Hsia’s ‘The Language Revolution in Communist China’ published in the Far Eastern Survey of October, 1956. The fact that the Chinese mandarin is still a language of symbols is proof that commonsense prevailed in 1956.
A child’s first language is the child’s life. When a child acquires the right language at the right age and stage, it develops cognitively well. That is what experts say. But it is not as if we fully obey what our policy says on the language of schooling. We mix, we switch and adapt and we are getting by. But to decree English, the language of our masters, as the sole vehicle of transport is to get the traveller stranded and marooned where footpaths of development meet.
In another piece today, I wrote about Dr Samuel Crowther’s Abeokuta contest of 1860. The man used science to defeat native doctors. The story has deeper implications than a fight over space, pots and plots. It is about props. In drama, prop is that ‘portable’ item which an actor interacts with. When a soldier holds a sword in a fight scene, he is holding a prop. The future belongs to those who master the right props, the real principles that frame the world. Crowther’s props were scientific instruments. His rivals’ props were charms. When Crowther’s controlled explosion roared, the self-proclaimed ‘medicine men’, adorned in costly garments and charms, fled in terror. In their terror and flight, we see loud display collapse before quiet science. The science and the drama and the resultant chaos demonstrate the superiority of calm knowledge over loud, ostentatious power. The moral is that knowledge-based education defeats performance-based traditions. The same principle underlies the National Language Policy: a child’s language of thought is their first prop in class; children must first understand in order to innovate.
With their mother tongues, China and Korea have established themselves as tech world powers. Could they have done that if they flip-flopped as Nigeria has just done with its own policy? A post on the website of the Korean Academy describes the Korean language, Hangugeo, as “a symbol of identity and innovation.” Go beyond websites as I did. Read ‘A History of Korean Science and Technology’ by Jeon Sang-woon, Robert Carrubba, and Lee Sung Kyu. I read in that book of history more than snippets on the “Sciences of Earth and Fire”; more than the chapter that says “Chemistry began with the human manipulation of fire.” It is a history of a people who knew (and know) the place of appropriate language in education and innovation.
French chemical engineer and writer, François Le Lionnais, writes in the January 1969 issue of the journal, ‘Leonardo’ that science is an art. He argues that “there should be a discipline of the aesthetics of science.” At the core of that ‘art’ is language. The drama of 165 years ago in Abeokuta between a doctor fresh from medical training in London, and the native “physicians” who challenged him to a contest of powers, is far more than a colourful historical anecdote. It is a parable about the power of scientific knowledge, the courage of innovation, and how societies either rise by embracing modern learning or stagnate by resisting it.
I earlier spoke about props. Because China got its language policy and education right, its props today are semiconductors, satellites, and supercomputers. Korea’s props are robotics, AI, and global electronics. These countries are cool tech giants because they carefully built their futures by teaching their children in languages that let them internalise principles. We enjoy the products of their sanity and clear-mindedness. We ride their fuel-efficient cars and flaunt their sleek electronics. They built their tech steeze and sense by not climbing their palm trees from the top. They made their children understand the world in their own languages. They standardised their scientific lexicons, they enabled their generations to think, debate, and innovate in their native tongues. Only after then did they introduce English. Check Dali Yang (1990)’s “State and Technological Innovation in China: A Historical Overview, 1949-89”. Check others.
Nigeria, by returning to English-only instruction, is choosing the rustic path where science is mystery. And, you know, a 21st century society where science remains a mystery is a society stranded in yesterday. Without apology to Martin Esslin, author of ‘The Theatre of the Absurd’, his title will be apt as the name of that society.
(Published in the Nigerian Tribune on Monday, 17 November, 2025).
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