By: Rachael Ogunmuyiwa
Moses Olateju, a professor of Language Stylistics and Literary Criticsm has recommended that indigenous language should be protected. He said this while delivering an inaugural lecture at Trenchard Hall, University of Ibadan on behalf the faculty of Arts, University of Ibadan recently.
The inaugural lecture titled, “Language and Style(-listics) in Literary and Routine Communication: The Yoruba Example”, focused on the language style prevalent in literary communication of Yoruba while examining the language style in the writings of D. O. Fagunwa, Adebayo Faleti and Oladejo Okediji as representatives of the language style prevalent in literary communication.
While establishing the differences between literary communication and routine communication as being casual and non-casual respectively, he disclosed that stylistics exposes an author’s creativity and sense of aesthetic value in literary communication. However, Prof Olateju registered his fear about the danger of obscurity with which literary communication is beclouded such that readers may get lost in the “prison house of language”.
He asserted that stylistics cannot die unless people stopped becoming creative in their use of language.
According to him, “Our indigenous languages, Yoruba especially, must not die out. Let us protect them, shore them up, revalorise them and increase their usages in more domains such as politics, governance, business, in our homes, for when a language dies, the culture and even the literature also die. Without our language and culture, we all, literally and stylistically speaking, are walking corpses.”
