THE ISSUE OF THE THREE MAJOR NIGERIAN LANGUAGES WORDS IN DICTIONARIES AND TRANSLATION IN GOOGLE AND OTHER WEBSITES
Aljanat S.
Writer at Medium and Academia|Social and Behavioral Scientist|Non-Fiction and Fiction Writer|Literary Critique|Author of TANGLED ROOTS: NAVIGATING FAMILY, HEALTH & RESILIENCE|Logophile|Polyglot|Cinephile|Poetess|Colorist
Languages have been evaluated in many articles penned down by the author of this article, but she would like to use this article to speak to having words in Nigerian three major languages in their own dictionaries which is known as Lexicography in the Linguistic school of thought and translating them efficiently on Google and other websites.?
Nigeria, as a country has 520 languages with three being the major ones (Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba). The Hausas/Fulanis are in the Northern Hemisphere of the nation, and their states are Adamawa, Bauchi, Kano, Kaduna, Sokoto, Zamfara, Jigawa and Katsina. The Eastern part of Nigeria makes up the Ibos and they are predominantly in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo states. Yorubas are the Western peoples of Nigeria and they are from Oyo, Ogun, Ondo, Ekiti, Lagos*, Osun and small portions are from Kwara, Edo/Benin and Kogi (known as Okun).?
One of Marcus Mosiah Garvey popularly known as Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican political activist and the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL, commonly known as UNIA) quotes says that “A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots”. This can be linked with this writeup because the apprehension of languages should be at the very early stage of a child’s upbringing where his/her parents should and would be communicating with him/her which was very common with our forefathers and this made it easy for them to be conversational with the languages that they rarely spoke English Language which is borrowed. Many children are prohibited from disseminating in their mother tongues by their parents as they are known as vernacular, even those in Nigeria. Back in the days of our parents, they were always penalized for speaking Yoruba in the elementary and secondary schools which to the author of this article is an archaic and exasperating ideology as these were the ways of passing information to each other before English Language came along. Yorubas have an idiom that one’s property would always be one. People should not discard their languages for another way of communication.
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Agreed that some parents are ignorant and silly to disallow their children to speak their mother tongues, some of these children are very stubborn that they do vice versa as they are linguaphiles like the author of this article is a part of the aforementioned individuals who learn their and other languages through their education, movies and books. Some even go ahead to study Linguistics or Nigerian Languages as that is what is being discussed in this article in the higher educational citadels just like the writer would like to learn Yoruba (though she is advanced at this language but needs to learn the tonations and more words) and Spanish Languages if the opportunity arises which is very good of them, and if this happens, when done with their Bachelors of Arts degree in Linguistics or Nigerian Languages, they should try to help the non-speakers or speakers who have difficulties with translation to put all the words in the languages in dictionary entries and Google searches and this is because people write every day and sometimes those writings need to be converted from a language to another, but when there are no authentic sources for such a thing, it would later become difficult and tiresome for the writers if need be. Additionally, sometimes movie subtitles are wrong that a non-speaker of that language would be confused as to what is being written and when a native speaker of the language is present seeing the wrong translations, they would be ashamed of the subtitler(s) or even the speaker of that language themselves would be ashamed and also find it worrisome if they are alone.?
Nigerian languages should not be set aside as no matter how less popular they are in the world, they are a part of a country’s culture.
Entrepreneur. Shoemaker, MSc Artificial intelligence and Cyber Security in view
1 年First the word Ibo is spelt as "IGBOS" and not how you wrote it. Some people from the east do get angry when it's spelt how you spelled it On the issue of google translation of languages. There's what we call "COMPILER" in programming, which is a program written to translate a language to another. So in essence the reason we have problem translating our language to English on google is because there are no good compiler to do the jobs. Normally it's the sepakers of the languages that will write the program and will get it across to google which will then be installed on their system. So in other words the problem is with us the language speakers and some of it you've always talked about when talking about the topic. And such problems gives rise to another which will also give rise to another. The reason why all these are so is because people are first not encouraged to speak the language and those that speak it are not speaking the original forms which also contributes to why we're losing many aspects of our cultures and traditions. So someone who doesn't understand the language won't be able to write a dictionary nor write a compiler program to translate it to English or any other language.