Language, Orality and National Cohesion

Abstract

There are incidences of conflicts, mistrusts and dichotomies in multilingual countries but many of them find a common ground to coexist as a people. Language is an ethnic identifier and a unifying factor. It is primarily a means of communication by which humanity was made and constantly refashioned. Recent development in the academia tends to emphasize the supremacy of orality in regulating and organizing societies of varying complexity as a preferred mode of socialization and pedagogy. With technology providing many coded materials in verbal and non-written genres, approximately 80% of the world population are oral learners by necessity or by preference. This paper identifies the impact of orality (spoken, sung or chanted stories, proverbs, poems, songs, riddles etc) as a means of portraying social behaviours and national phenomenon, and as well navigates territories, and delineates the geographical, spiritual, social and historical contour of environments. Orality, also, shows how a rule-governed process generates linked variants. It discusses cultural, linguistics and political problems, and explores the ambiguities of gender, ideology and identity within society’s complex communities. This paper, therefore, makes case for orality as a means of national cohesion by creating and sustaining inter-ethnic harmony and development. It advocates an “orality movement” that should be academically sound, culturally sensitive and anthropologically based to take seriously, the cultural communication pattern and preference of all ethnicities of a nation such as Nigeria.