Linguistic Rights: An Imperative for Indigenous Language Development towards Rural Entrepreneurial Enhancement

Abstract

Linguistic rights, especially for the indigenous people that are mostly found in the rural areas, are relevant to their development.  Every race and languages should have the freedom and right to develop in their communities using their native languages and not have extraneous languages imposed on them without their consent. Some people have been disenfranchised and isolated from development and also alienated from national development, participatory governance/politics because they are only knowledgeable in their indigenous languages. Hence, they do not have access to the so called official language and thereby isolated. We need to recognize their right to national discourse, education through their indigenous languages as bona fide citizens of the state they belong to. There is the need for capacity building towards enhancing indigenous language skills of the Adult/Mass Literacy educators who will be saddled with the responsibility of teaching and enlightening them in areas such as skills acquisition and skills enhancement, entrepreneurial development and subsequent utilization for economic transformation. We have to look towards the rural populace who has a lot of traditional skills and ingenuity to showcase both to Nigeria and the world. The quest for sustainable economy should take us to the rural people to harness their untapped potentials for the much desired national growth and economic transformation. The paper advocates that such a programme be done in the indigenous languages. Thus, the rural educators need to be abreast with indigenous languages to properly harness the entrepreneurial potentials that abound in the rural people and the unschooled. The paper calls for a concerted effort and synergy among all stakeholders for capacity building in the indigenous Nigerian languages towards co-coordinating and harnessing the enormous talents and potentials embedded with the rural populace who are mostly unschooled. This can be done effectively when we identify the indigenous languages needs for training and retraining purposes.

Key words: Linguistic rights, rural development, rural education, adult/mass literacy, entrepreneurial development, national and economic growth