HISTORICAL PICTURE

Today, in Nigeria, there are six geopolitical zones, superimposed on the old North-
South concept: Northwest , Northeast, North-Central, Southeast, Southwest and
South-South. Hausa dominates the Northwest Zone mainly as a native language. It
also dominates the Northeast Zone and most parts of the North-Central Zone as a
lingua franca. Hausa overlaps with Yoruba as a lingua franca in parts of the North-
Central Zone. In addition, Yoruba dominates the southern areas in the western part
of the North-Central Zone. It dominates the Southwest Zone generally as a native
language (through its dialects and as a lingua franca)
Hausa dominates the Northwest Zone mainly as a native language. It also dominates
the Northeast Zone and most parts of North-Central Zone as a lingua franca. Hausa
overlaps with Yoruba as a lingua franca in parts of North-Central Zone. Yoruba
dominates the southern areas in the western part of the North-Central Zone. It
dominates the Southwest Zone generally as a native language and also parts of
South-South mainly as a lingua franca. Igbo dominates the Southeast Zone fully and
parts of South-South where it is also a native language.
As a discipline, linguistics invariably goes in tandem with language, which is its
subject. Hence, especially in Nigeria, we get Departments of Linguistics and
African/Nigerian Languages. The issue raised by this situation is not lost on
anyone: European and languages of other countries or continents also need
linguistics. Linguistics as a discipline is attuned to the needs of languages that
have not been developed. English and other European languages are well developed. A
developed language would have a writing system (orthography), primary reading
materials for literacy, post literacy or secondary reading materials, dictionaries
and grammars. In 1960, few indigenous languages of Nigeria had this luxury. It is
in this area, therefore that this course (LIN 104) will start the examination of
language and linguistic studies in Nigeria since independence.
2. Language development in pre-independent Nigeria
We must not do the colonialists the injustice of suggesting that there was no
language development activity before independence and before the arrival of
linguistics. The descriptive grammars of Ajayi-Crowther are well known. So are the
grammars of Kanuri by Koelle and of Hausa by Schoen. Abrahams dictionaries of
Yoruba and Hausa remain attractive, just as is Banfields of Nupe. Ida Wards works
on Igbo, Efik, etc., are of the calibre of modern linguistic works.
What is obvious is that anyone looking at linguistic work in Nigeria before
independence will do well to look at two periods: the period between 1800 and 1890
as delineated by Hair 1967 and the period from 1900 to 1960. What they will find is
that, apart from the case of Ajayi-Crowther, pre-independence language development
research in both periods was undertaken by foreigners. In the 19th century,
Christian religious groups undertook extensive research in Nigerian languages as
part of their efforts at making the Christian message to reach Nigerians. Not
surprisingly, publications of this period contained vocabularies as well as the
dictionaries, grammars and other literature, especially translations of the Bible
into Nigerian languages. In the first part of the 20th century before Nigerian
independence, academic linguistic work undertaken by university-related scholars
emerged. Thus we had dictionaries of Hausa and Yoruba by Abrahams (19.. ) and 19..
respectively. We also have works outside the major languages such as Banfields
dictionary of Nupe in 1914/16, Adams 1952/53 for Efik. European linguists began to
bring more modern linguistic practices into the study of Nigerian languages.
Professor Ida Ward of the University of London undertook a number of phonological
studies of Nigerian languages. She published phonological notes of Efik, Igbo, and
Yoruba. Melzians 1937 study of Bini (i.e. Edo) in A dictionary of Bini was an
exciting piece of phonetic and lexical investigation.
Banfield, A.W. (1914/16). Dictionary of the Nupe Language. 2 vols.Shonga:the Niger
Press.Reprint. Gregg Press,1969.
Banfield, A.W. and Macintyre (1915). A Grammar of the Nupe Language. London: SPCK.
As might be expected, some ideas that are not acceptable in modern linguistics were
planted right from the 19th century and endured into the post independence study of
Nigerian languages. Two such ideas are the characterisation of African languages as
dialects. In this practice, the African language is not a full-fledged language.
The second misconception is the reference to Nigerian languages as vernaculars. A
good example of this second one is in the Stokes-Phelps Commission Report of 1925.
We shall have cause to return to this below.

3. Linguistic studies in Nigeria at the dawn of

In the decades before 1960, the year of Nigerias independence from colonial rule,
there was a growing intensity in the study of Nigerian languages by foreign
linguists. The core areas of linguistics as a discipline had resolved themselves as
comparative and historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, syntax and
semantics, with morphology as a bridge between these last two, leading to the
recognition of a middle ground of morphophonology. The recognition of morphosyntax
today is a throwback to the dispute over the status of morphology as the meeting
ground of grammar and phonology or, better, of sound and structure. The richness
of the Nigerian linguistic field in virgin languages untouched by any linguistic
study continued to draw scholars to Nigeria. This impetus carried into the post-
independence era.
Students of the history of modern linguistics know that it developed in Europe,
feeding on the large Indo-European family which extends from the British Isles all
the way to India. It was not until the 20th century that linguistics took shape in
America and it began to feed on the languages of the Americas(23 countries), which
are about as numerous as those of Africa. Anthropologists and ethnologists quickly
saw the value of the new discipline to their own lines of research. The linguistic
Society of America (LSA) was founded at the beginning of the 1920s and the journal
LANGUAGE was established as its organ. It is, today, arguably the most prestigious
journal of linguistics in the world. The ranks of the LSA were quickly swelled by
refugee linguists such as Roman Jakobson, formally of the Prague School of Europe.
The direction of American linguistics would be determined by what the linguists
then saw as the task of linguistics primarily to document, analyse, and develop
the Amerindian languages. The arguments about the definition of the phoneme and
what considerations may inform the setting up of it in a given set of data arose
from this view of the task of linguistics in America. The dominant view was
structuralist and thought that phonetic considerations and free variation were
enough for setting up the phonemes of a language. It was openly stated that
phonemics or phonology would be unnecessarily abstract that is unscientific if
grammatical and other factors were brought into phonemic analysis. Thus, the line
between phonology and grammar must be clear and there must be no circularity. This
rather narrow or concrete view of the phoneme quickened the process of reducing
Amerindian languages to writing.(Native American languages:Navajo,the most spoken
Ameriacn native language, Yupik spoken Alaska,etc)
This course has undertaken this essay into the philosophy of early
phonology/linguistics in America because of its similarities to what happened here
later.
The establishment of a College of the University of London at Ibadan provided a
base for linguists to teach and do research in the rich language fields of Nigeria.
Irrespective of their field of specialisation, the Nigerian linguist, usually a
foreigner in the early sixties, had to be a phonetician and a phonologist in
addition. For example, although Ayo Bamgbose returned from Edinburgh University in
Scotland with a PhD in linguistics awarded for a thesis on Yoruba grammar, his
first most notable work was an application of his newly acquired expertise in the
area of Yoruba orthography (1965). Kay Williamsons exertions with the Rivers
Readers Project (RRP) were basically in orthography, reducing languages to writing
and teaching people to use the writing systems.
The importance of this aspect of language development is seen in the fact that
while Hausa has a writing system based on the standard Kano dialect, Igbo is still
labouring under the burden of instability in the standard form which is in fact
nonexistent. This situation impacts the stability and acceptability of the writing
system. The problems of Igbo orthography are as old as the 19th century and it
serves to show that the practice of linguistics can and is frequently vitiated by
non-linguistic interventions. While the Yoruba accepted an orthography based
largely on the Oyo dialect, and Hausa orthography based on the Kano dialect has
caused no internal strife, the Igbo as a nation continue to bicker and sink deeper
into the quicksand of irreconcilable and non-linguistic based battle lines. And
yet, a similar situation in the case of Efik-Ibibio is being resolved in a
different way. The early missionaries first contacted Efik and reduced it to
writing. Subsequently, the more numerous Ibibio, with a very impressive generation
of linguists, has been moving to promote Ibibio without obstructing the progress of
Efik. If Ibibio replaces Efik as the main form of Efik-Ibibio, it will be done in a
quiet, civilised way.

The role of phonetics and phonology in the development of Nigerian languages was
apparently early understood by the pioneer Department of Linguistics at Ibadan.
Fully aware of the fact that linguistics was not yet well known, the Department
started a postgraduate diploma programme that attracted people who had obtained
degrees in subjects other than linguistics. The projects in this programme as
well as the Long Essays of the Bachelor of Arts programme in linguistics were, in
the early stages, phonology-based. Kay Williamson supervised essays on Igbo
dialects, while Carl Hoffmann supervised those on Plateau and Cross-River
languages. As the student population of the Department increased, more hands were
recruited and various undeveloped languages of Nigeria were described at the
phonological and morphological levels. The intensity of this approach can be
understood with the pioneering effort of Professor Ben Elugbe when he joined the
Department. Elugbe took a conscious decision to deliver a new Edoid language every
year to the process of data collection and analysis. In less than two decades, the
Department of Linguistics, University of Ibadan had covered most of the languages
except some in the very complex Northwestern Edoid group. This approach was adopted
by the Departments of Linguistics that emerged from the establishment of more and
more universities, such as Benin, Ilorin, Maiduguri, Nigeria, and Port Harcourt.
The Ilorin programme was aimed at covering all the languages of the then Kwara
State, now Kwara and Kogi States.

Two points must be made at this point. First is that linguistic studies were not in
the hands of Nigerian linguists only: foreign linguists based in universities
abroad continued to work on Nigerian languages. Second is that by the seventies,
the products of Bachelors and Postgraduate Diploma programmes began to feed into
Masters and doctoral programmes.
The implication of this was that descriptions of Nigerian languages became more
and more sophisticated and the languages began to make a contribution to the
development and fine-tuning of linguistic theory.