Take, for example, the case of Michael and Anna, who experience marginalization, stigmatization, and ostracization at their various workplaces due to an indigenization policy that promotes office promotion based on mother tongue. The duo finds themselves in a community that refuses to recognize them because of the entwined nature of their identities. Not that they are ‘less than humans,’ but they are harangued for refusing to use ‘language’ as a pillar for communication. Language has become somewhat of a cliché of classicism and binary appropriation. Wolfgang Butzkamn’s postulation implies that a language is something that is learned once.
This is one case among many stories we have heard on how language, seen from the prism of superficiality, obstructs the way to the “situated-knowledge” of the human person — mother tongue as the major player in the hierarchy of social being, father tongue as a favored language that grant access to economic and political power, and the posture of “power” meandering within the inclusion/exclusion titillation. In this suspicion, equality is eliminated to give room for people who are “unequally created.” Suffice it to say that language, as a medium of communication, contributes to factors of inclusion and exclusion.
We deal with a case of language detriment against people due to the ability to speak in certain ways, then we are amiss in a crossroads. Exclusion inhabiting from the demise of the shared medium has several variations, including unanimity of the included group. Coherently, language can be used as a means of inclusion to the detriment of the excluded group. For Chandras & Babcock, mother tongue” is always positioned, partial, and political.”
Contextually, the world should not be reduced to the fabric of ‘languaging,’ there are other (or many) ways of communication unknown to us or yet to be named. The emergence of the tiny god-like coronavirus that sneaks into our body-shells and takes over as the emperor and the ultimate decision maker of our choice is a good example of the “unknown or unnamed” communicationary protagonist. What I am enlisting is how possibility became ‘us.’
There is something familiar about the word ‘mother’ in the initiation of ‘mother-tongue’ that makes me ask, “How about the father-tongue, and what position does it facilitate in the upper and lower deck?” This informed the question this essay is asking — to interrogate the upholstery of linguistic studies. Hypothetically, the father-tongue buys into the analytical framework that languages share closer ties with paternal lineages than maternal ones, thereby contrasting with the mother-tongue. Then, why do we populate mother-tongue as the thing that matters? Ricocheting downward, the father tongue produces some kind of commercial/public belongings, whereas the mother tongue buys into the algorithm of privacy and internality.
Belluz observed that “mother tongue is the greatest asset people can bring to learning a language,” in ‘becoming’ world-wise and skilled intention-readers and communicators, whereas, in contrast, Forster and Renfrew in 2011, scientifically summarized that “father tongue hypothesis seems to transact willfully over the mother tongue hypothesis.” In this paragraph, I would not hesitate to inquire that the inclusion and exclusion paradigm is poignantly feasible in constructing oneself. This explains why I purposefully infused the tandems of commerciality/public and privacy/internality standing-in for the mother and father tongue.
Language as a Migratory Outflow and Inflow
Traveling across European borders to learn about the migratory gesture of African settlement has provided me with the opportunity of learning about the mobility of mother tongues. Africans don’t just migrate; they migrate alongside their mother tongue, food, entertainment, tradition, and the technology that supports their guts. The African communities in Belgium, Portugal, Germany, Austria, France, Spain, the Netherlands, Britain, Italy, etc, from my understanding of the kinship that coordinates their idiosyncrasies, their ‘tongues’ were shaped to accommodate their beliefs, feasibility, tantrums, and what Robert Sapolsky called “conscious intention and consciousness intention” writ large.
The Black bodies in the diasporic ambience never depart from the wholeness possessed by the mother tongue; they are kept at bare, still intact, and are used for prophecies and in spiritual negotiations. This happens because the mother tongue operates from the root of quantitative flatness — refracting language-community attentions. In this scenario, the mother tongue is used to bond and provide a sense of community and solidarity — with others. This happenstance is carried out by old immigrants who have been absorbed in the host population and recent immigrants who are yet to ‘find a space’ in the country of settlement.
I gasp in awe at this discovery. Historically, the official language in many African homes is colonial; there is a contestation over the dominance of imported European languages in Africa as the medium of communication and (as) teaching instruction. The mother tongue of African descent has been argued to lack the adequacy of vocabulary to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the father tongue and to synchronize with modern scientific and technological concepts. The fact remains that ‘if we seek, we shall find.’ I would suggest that with adequate incentives, the mother tongue can be empowered to produce every ‘missing’ concept it lacks.
During my primary and secondary education in Nigeria, students were legally bound to communicate in these colonial languages or risk severe punishment by teachers. Indigenous African languages were consequently neglected, deepening the pervasive impacts of exclusion and sustaining elitism. Parents who could not afford to have their children learn the colonial language hired private tutors for their children to learn English or French. The ‘sufferings’ have been there all along — at the basic foundation, sitting closely with the sufferers, vindicating why I became amok upon the realization of the mother tongue as un/making project of the diasporic bodies.
In conclusion, Alexander emphasized that language can neither be harmful nor broken; therefore, it is not an “instrument of exclusion,” perhaps a tool of inclusion. Moving away from the spectrum of Alexander, anyone can learn any language, but can anyone learn their mother tongue, or is it inherently knowable? This question resonates because it gives us a new discovery about the mother tongue if we approach it ethnographically. So, what matters is not what the mother tongue per se stands for, but rather the people who use it and how it is applied. Succinctly, mother tongue does not separate people, pushing them into an exclusionary syndicate; it does not disadvantage people who cannot read or write. Father tongue does since it moves in an elitist fashion.
