Abstract
The Tiv language is one of the major languages spoken in central Nigeria. The language is of the Benue-Congo subclass of the Bantu parent family. It has over four million speakers spoken in five states of Nigeria. The language like many other Nigerian languages is in dire need of language planning efforts and strategies. Some previous efforts were made to plan the language and government too has made policies to back up such efforts. This study therefore examines empirically the current state of the status planning of the language and its implication for the future and survival of the language. Status planning deals with the allocation of functions to a community’s language(s). The functions investigated here include the educational, the media and home functions and it has been discovered that the language has a weak functional status. This therefore requires some conscious and deliberate language engineering strategies to be set in motion to rescue the language from its present bleak and weak functional status, to which end some recommendations have been made. Keywords : Language planning, Status planning, Nigerian languages, Tiv language
Highlights
Nigeria is a multimodal multilingual society (if we follow Fishman’s (1972) classification of nations as either amodal, unimodal or multimodal) with several great linguistic, cultural, religious and political traditions
Tiv language is one of the major languages spoken in central Nigeria in the states of Benue, Taraba, Nasarawa, Plateau and some parts of Cross River with a numerical strength of over 4 million speakers
Like many other Nigerian languages, belongs to this category of endangered languages as the findings have shown that it has a week functional status
Summary
Nigeria is a multimodal multilingual society (if we follow Fishman’s (1972) classification of nations as either amodal, unimodal or multimodal) with several great linguistic, cultural, religious and political traditions. While Crozier, Blench and Hansford (1992) keep the number at over 250, Ethnologue (2015) lists 527 languages with varying degrees of endangerment These figures present a picture of what the linguistic composition looks like even if some seem exaggerated. Tiv language is one of the major languages spoken in central Nigeria in the states of Benue, Taraba, Nasarawa, Plateau and some parts of Cross River with a numerical strength of over 4 million speakers. It is the major language spoken by the Tiv people who occupy the greater part of the Benue Valley. This is so because in multimodal speech communities issues of language planning are not a given and are not allowed to follow a natural selection process but are given attention and efforts made to ensure that all the language resources of the community are properly harnessed and utilised in such a manner that does not disadvantage other languages or groups
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