AFRICAN PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROBLEM OF LANGUAGE

Abstract

The Question of Language in Africa is a very fundamental area under discussion in African Philosophy. This is as a result of the fact that the fundamental nature of language in philosophy cannot just be over looked. Language on this ground, as it were to be, is traditions or enlightening bound. Hence, to disagree with a particular people on the place of their language is to disagree with them on their cultural heritage or existence. While employing analytic and descriptive methods in the course of this research, it will be argued that language plays not just a reflective role in the structuring or foundation of philosophizing but also, it occupies an incontrovertible ground in the quest of philosophy as a subject matter. Since philosophy in its nature is all about clarifications and resolutions of “intangible issues”, many African indigenous languages should be given a self-importance in the place of doing reflections just the way reality appears to them against their foreign counterparts because of the obvious epistemological compensation surrounded therein (especially in mother- tongues). This paper argues that a huge amount of groundwork is needed to be done in terms of encouragement and improvement on the status of indigenous languages, so as to meet up with the international standard. However, the need for the use of a foreign language that may engender the understanding of indigenous African language across ethnic barriers alongside the language of the environment is being advocated. This is not without sounding a forewarning that such is often weighed down by the use of the implement of translation.Though this is workable, it is far from being the ideal. The researcher uses the various Indigenous African languages as the foundations of this research. It is finally on this ground that there is the possibility of having what we might be called a genuine African Philosophy arising from the analysis of African long-established worldviews.