Ethnicity and national integration in Nigeria: towards the use of indigenous language option for information dissemination at the grassroots

Abstract

The linguistic complexity of Nigeria and the affinity of the indigenous languages to the diverse ethnic nationalities have made the issue of national integration become very worrisome and seem unattainable in the country. The different ethnic nationalities have continued to live in mutual distrust of one another. Apart from the National Policy on Education, which recognises Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba as the majority languages and also encourages every child to learn one of them in addition to the child’s mother tongue, government is yet to boldly come up with an official national language policy for Nigeria. In this paper, the use of indigenous languages to disseminate information to Nigerians, in addition to English, which is the country’s official language, is considered another option towards solving the country’s problem of national integration. The paper anchors on the Relevance theory. Earlier views of scholars are reviewed from where this paper veered. It is concluded with a suggestion that government policies and programmes should be translated into the indigenous languages and widely circulated for better awareness, understanding and participation/contribution of Nigerians to national issues. This would engender effective grassroots mobilisation for national integration and national development.

Keywords: ethnicity, indigenous language and national integration