WHY FULFULDE IS DYING IN NIGERIA(2)

My 3 year old daughter speaks 3 languages. She only started to speak English recently but she has been speaking Fulfulde and Hausa fluently for about one year now and that has given me the chance to observe firsthand the conflict between the two languages. She learns Fulfulde from us (her parents), numerous uncles and aunts, grandparents, and her mum’s friends (most of whom are Fulani) whereas she only gets to learn Hausa from domestic servants and the occasional Hausa-speaking guest. But in spite of this imbalance in the number of teachers, we noticed early on that if no drastic action is taken, she’d end up very poor in Fulfulde and very fluent in Hausa. Of course we took the necessary “drastic actions” and now she’s fluent in both languages. But just watching the conflict between Hausa and Fulfulde play out on her tongue gave me all the insights that I needed in order to understand what happened to Fulfulde in North West Nigeria and what is currently happening to it in the North East.

But writing an article to just say Fulfulde is dying because Hausa is replacing it, isn’t exactly what a rocket scientist like myself (just kidding) would want to do because every pullo in Nigeria already knows that. What I intend to do instead, is to give reasons why Hausa easily replaces Fulfulde. Why it is difficult for the two languages to coexist. Why children learning the two languages naturally gravitate towards Hausa. I have broadly divided the reasons into 3 categories, those that have to do with the grammatical structures of the Fulfulde language itself, those that have to do with socio-political factors, and those that are based on economic factors.

Grammatical Structures of Fulfulde:

Some months ago I was having a conversation with my dad when he uttered a pronoun that in my over thirty years of speaking Fulfulde I have never heard.  The pronoun was so new to me that I couldn’t even remember it afterwards but that notwithstanding, it did fire me up to investigate Fulfulde pronouns which in turn led me to investigate the grammatical structures of the language in general. What I found was absolutely astounding.

I discovered that most languages have what linguists call ‘Noun Classes’ which is just a way in which the nouns in a particular language are grouped. The number of noun classes a language has determines the number of pronouns it will have. Hausa has basically just 2 noun classes; masculine and feminine. Every noun in Hausa is classified as either male or female and each class simply shares the same pronoun. So a woman, a farm, a cap, a tree, a car, etc. all fall in the female class and are thus represented by the same pronoun “ta” while nouns like man, book, sense, etc. are classified as male and thus represented by the same pronoun “ya”. This applies to pretty much every noun in Hausa. They are grouped into these two broad classes and they are represented by these two pronouns. Simple, straight forward, easy to learn.

Now compare this with Fulfulde which has a whopping TWENTY SIX different noun classes (it is the highest that I have seen for any language). Each class is represented by a different pronoun. There’s a noun class for liquids like water, there’s another for food, another for animals with claws, another for hot substances like fire and electricity, another for diminutive objects, another for large objects etc. A few of the pronouns that readily comes to my mind are; o, nde, ngal, ngol, nge, ndu, nga, ka, ndi, ‘dam etc. there are 26 of them or 25 in some dialects.

And you find this kind of disparity in the complexities of the two languages with every figure of speech you pick. For want of space I’ll give just one more example. Take the verb systems of both languages. In Hausa verbs are more or less fixed in one form. In Fulfulde verbs that mean the same thing can take several forms depending on the noun it is paired with. To illustrate I’ll use different items of clothing as nouns and apply the verb “wear” to them in both Hausa and Fulfulde.

Hausa                     English                               Fulfulde

Sa Hula                     wear a cap                            Hufna Hufnere
Sa Riga                     wear a shirt                          ‘Borna Limse
Sa Wando                 wear trousers                      Duha Sarla
Sa Takalmi               wear shoes                           Fa’da Pa’de

From the above, it can be seen that the Hausa verb “Sa” which means wear can be applied to each of the nouns without any change. So a person learning the language will only have to learn one verb and it can be applied to several nouns. But in Fulfulde, there is no such luxury. Each noun requires its own verb. “Hufna”, “’Borna”, and “Duha” all mean the same thing i.e. wear, but they cannot be used interchangeably. Again the contrast between the two languages is apparent: simple vs complex.

The same level of complexity is found when one looks at Fulfulde Adjectives especially when one adds to it the elaborate suffix system that Fulfulde operates (Hausa doesn’t even have that) which sometimes replaces adjectives but at the same time ends up altering the noun.

The simplicity of Hausa makes it a much easier language to learn and perhaps that it what makes most children learning both languages at the same time to end up abandoning Fulfulde. But the complexness of Fulfulde has its pluses too. It makes the language more concise and precise. What can be expressed in two words and make perfect sense in Fulfulde, may require up to two full sentences in order to give the same meaning in Hausa. Perhaps this is why the Fulani are generally quieter in disposition than the Hausa whose language requires them to talk much more in order to make sense.

This factor has contributed immensely in the decline of Fulfulde in the North West and it’s doing same in the North East. The process is almost complete in Bauchi and Gombe States.

Socio-political factors:

Fulfulde gained ascendancy in the North East because the Fulani were able to build emirates that united peoples of different tribes. Because of this, a common language of communication was needed and Fulfulde became that language. In the North West, the emirates were already in place and there was a common language and as a result, Fulfulde never really enjoyed a Lingua Franca status there. In the north east, Fulfulde used to be a Lingua Franca but today, the smaller tribes in the region are increasingly seeing Fulfulde as a colonialist language (a language of a people that colonized them so to speak). And because of that, they are increasingly rejecting the language in favor of Hausa which they see as neutral. That singular act has dealt a devastating blow to the fortunes of Fulfulde for it has effectively dethroned it from its lingua franca status in most areas of the north east.

Economic factors:

With increased urbanization and trade, the North East has found itself integrating more and more with the rest of northern Nigeria. Not integrating would mean economic isolation. Integrating would mean the inevitable ascendancy of Hausa because fulfulde will increasingly banished from markets, businesses, and public life in general. Thus Fulfulde in the North East (its last bastion in Nigeria), will be reduced to a strictly domestic language i.e. a language only spoken within the confines of homes and by the Fulani alone. It has already happened in Gombe, and it is happening in Adamawa.

And that is not all, with the phenomenon of Hausa home videos currently trying to reach every home of every town in the North West and the North East, Fulfulde will continue to be under attack even inside home. And the way I see it, it’ll only be a matter of a few decades more and it’ll all be over for Fulfulde in Nigeria. The same fate also awaits several other languages in Northern Nigeria. I read about one language in Taraba State that has just 3 known speakers left. And that was as at the year 2010. They are all probably dead now.

At this point, it would seem that I have concluded that Fulfulde is dying and nothing can be done to save it. Well, in reality I think the process is not entirely unstoppable because I strongly believe that if a language like Hebrew that died once and remained dead for two thousand years can be revived to the extent that it is now spoken by over 5 million people as a first language, then one that has only shown signs of being terminally ill can be resuscitated as well. It is the effort required to do this that I feel the fulbe in Nigeria are either unwilling or unable to exert.

NB: The fulfulde used in this piece is of the Adamawa dialect.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

WHY FULFULDE IS DYING IN NIGERIA

 

It has been said by many eminent linguists that of the 7,000 or so languages currently in existence, only about half will survive to the end of this century (some even predict a figure as low as 10%). When I first heard this on the BBC in 2010 my mind instantly went to my beloved Fulfulde. I was convinced at the time that it was amongst the terminally ill (forgive the expression) languages. Of course I was wrong as I was later to find out that Fulfulde in general was not considered an endangered language, at least not at the moment. But I also found out that because of how widespread Fulfulde is (it is spoken by indigenous populations in nineteen countries spread across West, East, and Central Africa), it does not all have the same destiny. In some countries it is strong, swallowing up other languages even. In others, it is dying. It is my opinion that Fulfulde in Nigeria belongs to the latter category. And even though Nigeria has more Fulani than any other country, I have a feeling that it would be the first country in which the language goes extinct. At the moment, Nigeria has the highest number of Fulani that can’t speak Fulfulde. In North-western Nigeria (the region where the Fulani first settled when they came to the area now called Nigeria some 600years ago) if you randomly pick 10 Fulanis, the chances are that 9 out of the 10 would not be speakers of the language (in some places it would even be 10 out of 10). In this article, I am going to show why I think Fulfulde in Nigeria is marching to an inevitable death. And I’ll also try to show why I think the process is unstoppable.

I am not a linguist by any stretch of the imagination but my involvement with linguistic thought is fairly long. It started in my undergraduate days when I had the fortune of working with Dr. Rudolf Leger a German professor of West African languages. Dr. Leger was an intellectual of the finest kind. It is said that he could converse comfortably in 40 different languages, more than thirty of which were African. By his own admission, of all the African languages he speaks, Fulfulde was the closest to his heart. And throughout the period I worked with him, he showed his passion for the language amply. He would, for instance, scold us (I and the other guy working on the team) each time he catches us conversing in Hausa. And when we try to make excuses about dialect differences, he just wouldn’t buy it. Once he came into the campus to pick us up in his old model Land Rover and he saw me eating something outside, he wasted no time in telling me that it was a very un-Fulani thing to do, that eating outside didn’t conform to Pulaaku (a code of conduct that outlines how Fulanis should behave in public and in private as well as how to deal with other people). Now take a moment to think about this; here was a white, blonde haired, probably blue-eyed (am not sure) German teaching me, a young Fulani man, how to remain true to Pulaaku. That was Dr. Rudolf Leger.

Dr. Rudolf Leger

He was the man that first drew my attention to the correlation between language and the wider culture of a people. When a language declines, the culture declines…when a language dies, the culture dies.

Dr. Leger was working on a book about Fulfulde proverbs and the Pulaaku concept. His co-researcher (Dr. A.B. Muhammad) who happened to be our Deputy Vice Chancellor, commissioned us to do the computer editing because they needed people that not only could work with computers but who understood Fulfulde very well and would be able to spot spelling mistakes and make corrections. As mundane as my job was, it did open my eyes to something important – the importance of language. Since then I’ve read writings about language from the masters – from David Harrison to Noam Chomsky – whenever I was sufficiently bored enough to not fear any possibility of plunging deeper into boredom.

Another thing the job taught me was that Russians academics cooked the crappiest foods. There was this Russian academic who shared an apartment with Dr. Leger. She was also in Nigeria on some kind of a research program and she hardly ever speaks. One day she surprised us and cooked lunch. And guess what…it was the crappiest lunch I had ever seen. And I have seen quite a bit of crappy lunches from my boarding house days and my little experience with low-budget mama put joints, so trust me on this. I took one look at it and I knew there was just NO WAY I was going to eat that but then again, the last thing I wanted to do was to appear rude to her. Luckily for us God was on our side. Shortly after serving us, both of them announced that they will go for a short swim and take lunch later. It was all we needed.

Apart from that lunch, my experience with Leger was nothing short of wonderful and it left me with a love of the Fulfulde language that otherwise I probably wouldn’t have had. It made me interested in reading anything and everything about Fulfulde. Only recently I was reading in one journal about some languages in Northern Cameroon that have since gone extinct and have been replaced by Fulfulde. And I was utterly amazed at how even though the two countries are so close together, Fulfulde could wax stronger in one and lazily march towards its death in the other. I needed to know why it was possible for this to happen. And in the concluding part of this piece I’ll discuss the explanations that I (a non-linguist) was able to come up with.