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Languages Between Our Teeth
<p><br/></p><p><br/></p><p>There is a quiet kind of grief many young Nigerians carry, and it does not always look like grief at first. It looks like fluency in English, polished accents, school certificates, ambition, and the determined pursuit of a better future. But beneath that pursuit often lives a deep emotional fracture: the shame of not fully knowing one’s mother tongue, and the pressure to master English because it is treated as the language of success, respectability, and escape. Many in this generation are growing up between two worlds, speaking one for survival and mourning the other in silence.</p><p><br/></p><p>The tension is painful and deeply personal. English opens doors in education, work, media, and migration, so young people chase it not out of betrayal, but out of necessity. Yet every missed proverb, every unanswered greeting from an elder, every moment of struggling to express love, anger, humor, or memory in a native language can feel like a small cultural failure. Some are mocked for sounding “too local” when they speak their language, and mocked again for not speaking it well enough. They are trapped between aspiration and inheritance, between the future they are told to build and the roots they are quietly losing. What makes it more painful is that this conflict is not just linguistic; it is emotional, ancestral, and psychological. It can create identity dissonance, cultural guilt, and a feeling of being incomplete in both spaces.</p><p><br/></p><p>The ideal is not to choose one language and bury the other, but to create a society where multilingual identity is seen as strength, not confusion. English can remain a tool for mobility and opportunity, while indigenous languages remain vessels of memory, worldview, intimacy, and belonging. Schools, families, and media in Nigeria need to stop treating native languages as secondary or embarrassing, and instead preserve them through intentional teaching, storytelling, music, and everyday use. Healing begins when young people are no longer made to feel that success must come at the cost of cultural fluency. A generation should not have to amputate its tongue to prove it deserves a future.</p>
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