Journal of Education & Social Policy

Nigeria’s Multilingual Setting and Critical Evaluation of the National Language Policy: Prognosis of the Future of Nigerian Languages
Ahmad Muhammad Mahmoud Introduction Language tradition has not gone beyond being transmitted from one generation to another. The nature of transmission can either be biological or cultural. It is natural that human beings can be genetically programmed to acquire a particular language or dialect totally different from that of their mothers, family, or community. Being the most valuable possession of man, language is the overall enormous highly recognized over other species. With regard to language, there are a lot of the classic contributions contributed by some renowned linguists on language as a concept. Sapir (1921) describes the term “….a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols”. Also, Bloch and Trager (1942) view language as “…. a system of arbitrary symbols by means of which a social group cooperates.” It is also seen as a conventional system of signal used for communication by a community and or any other language group. This describes that that system of signal refers to phonemes that are combined to produce segmental and super segmental sounds that culminate into utterances carrying meaning as a message being the vital aim of a language (Gimson, 1980).But Hall (1968) sees language as “the instinctive where by humans communicate and interact with each other by means of habitually used oral-auditory arbitrary symbols.” Brook (1971) submits that language remains “….a learned systematic symbolic vocal, culturally acquired and exclusive mark of a man”. Words like communication, interaction, and oral auditory are very important and relevant to the work at hand. The linguists are primarily concerned with natural languages, that is exactly why the question “what is language?” carries with it the presupposition that each of the several thousand recognizably distinct natural languages spoken throughout the world is a specific instance of something general (Lyons, J. 1981).

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