The Umbilical Connection Between Language and Culture and its Implications for the Socio-Cultural Development of a Community: Time to Reverse the De-Centering of African Languages

Abstract

Essentially, in the human kingdom language is regarded not only as a medium of communication, but also as a carrier of culture. As a carrier of culture language is of paramount significance in that it controls the way a people, individually and collectively, perceive themselves in relation to other selves in the world, and initiate and sustain their creativity. Unfortunately, for European cultural hegemony language also became a mechanism for launching strategies of domination and alienation of the African personality. The psycho-social effect of the type of displacement that followed this action, as it is described in this article, especially by Biko (1978), Ngara (1985), Ngugi wa Thiongo (1986) and Pityana (1995), is such that the processes of subjugation and domination did not only have to do with the colonised having to inherit alien syntax or lexicology, but also the ways in which they ultimately perceive self and the world, and how to relate with Europeans in their assumed superior status. In this relation, the main aim of this article is to briefly reflect on the history of the use of language as a mechanism that was used to assert European cultural domination in the space of power relations and the disorientation and marginalization of African indigenous languages and cultural heritage, and ultimately the sabotaged the socio-economic development of the geo-south The article advocates for the reversal of the de-centering of African languages in ear of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.