Emmanuel Aito

4 April 2007

“Democracy without Language? Lexical Creativity in a Nigerian Minority Language”

In every language, irrespective of the extent of its description or lexicon, an accessible, predictable and stable system of assigning names to places, objects and more abstract concepts ensures inter-comprehensibility. Communication is thus indispensable as a democratic polity organizes itself, determines roles, negotiates power and distributes resources; hence the fundamental role of language.

But have you ever wondered about the connections between a name (a word) and the object or concept it represents? Is there a logical, necessary or natural relationship in these associations? Does a name reveal, enhance or denigrate the nature, inherent identity and defining characteristics of its object? Is it tantamount to a window into the essence of what it symbolizes?

Denominative processes are eminently social, and entail the expression, description and communication of objects and concepts in a (linguistic) community. These processes therefore invariably engender the appropriation of a heritage. Similarly, they assist in adapting to new knowledge, skills and systems, in order to survive and thrive in times of change. Were a language to successfully integrate desirable alien scientific and cultural phenomena reaching it inexorably due to geography or globalizing factors, it would have mastered and harnessed its anthropological potential. Such capacity serves to mediate the tensions within socio-cultural communities seeking to preserve their cultural heritage in the face of pressures attributable to science, technology, economics, politics and novel models of social interaction.

Of particular note in this category are minority languages that confront the daunting task of overcoming perceived inadequacies in their denominative capacities to cope with novelty. Foreign to the lifespace of speakers of these endangered languages, vast unrelenting quantities of unfamiliar notions, along with their corresponding terms and complexities, pose enormous challenges to communities that harbour the desire to safeguard their heritage in their own idioms.

In the context of the intersections between language and democracy, we explored in this talk how a Nigerian minority language, to wit Esan, is coping with foreign concepts. In particular, we examined its lexical creativity mechanisms, as its speakers seek relevance in the ongoing democratization processes in Nigeria.

Dr. Emmanuel Aito is Associate Professor and Head of the French Department at the University of Regina. He teaches courses in French linguistics, lexical creativity, terminology and socioterminology. His primary research focus is on specialized language and terminology, with specific denominative interests in intellectualization and particularization processes. He demonstrates strong ancillary interests in language in society, in a nascent subfield conceptualized as glottopolitics. He is currently immersed in the polymorphic research phases of a SSHRC-funded project on language and democracy in Nigeria, an acutely multilingual polity in which language and culture often play divisive and polarizing roles in local and national spheres.