Dynamics of Language and Culture as a Paradigm for Interrogating Igbo Identity

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which language and culture can suffice as an interpretative framework for interrogating the issues and challenges of Igbo identity within the multidimensional context of Nigeria. As a function of individual, group and collective personality, the search for identity, which is both physical and transcendental, can hardly ignore the pivotal significance of language and culture. Nonetheless, realities of contemporary times have tended to provoke a number of issues, which sire a seedbed of identity crisis and by extension gnaws away the centrality of language and culture in identity construction. This is the research problem identified, which we sought to address in this paper. To this effect, we identified language and culture as veritable tools of identity construction. However, the corroding effects of modernity and intervening variables on language and culture have not only divested the latter of their instrumentality but advertently or inadvertently emboldened real-time disruptive tendencies and concomitant exigencies to alter the salient ontological relationships that characteristically define the typical African society. To reverse this ugly trend, we suggest a retooling/re-jigging Igbo language and culture in a manner that would reposition them to reclaim their ‘lost paradise’ and re-invent them as indispensible integers in the identity construction equation.