Home and School Based Issues Confronting the Development of West African Languages: Insights from Cases in Nigeria

Abstract

Different trends confront the development of West African languages (WALs henceforth) and accounts for the paucity of research on WALs. This study explores home and school based trends confronting the development of WALs, drawing evidence from Nigerian case. It is anchored on Skinner’s Operant Conditioning Theory (OCT), which considers environment as the cause of linguistic behaviour, and behavioural consequences as what determine possible repetition of behavioural dispositions, such as those against WALs. The primary data are obtained from observation and focus group discussion. The views of the forty (40) discussants are synthesised and presented descriptively, corroborating them with some scholarly views and findings of selected extant studies. The secondary data, obtained from library and internet, are subjected to systematic review and content and qualitative analyses. The analysis shows that the development of WALs is thwarted by systemic and pedagogic inadequacies, westernisation, linguistic imperialism, globalisation trends, and harmful linguistic behaviour or practices by parents and teachers causing engenderment and attrition of indigenous languages (ILs) that follow the substitution of English, Pidgin and Creole. The study concludes that the extent to which WALs would have been developed and their problem-solving potentials harnessed remains thwarted by the identified home and school based trends. The major recommendations include enactment of legislations promoting ILs, and wide sensitisation and reorientation by socialisation agents for attitudinal change.