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Literature
Colonialism
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Things Fall Apart:
An Invasion of the Tongue
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Observing cultural eradication through linguistic imperialism in Chinua Achebe's brilliant, deceptively simple novel.
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To kill a civilization of unrivaled strength, the Church looked towards the mind and the tongue. As missionaries and colonialists were introduced, the indigenous faith, etched into the words of the elderly and the oracle, reiterated until distilled into the culture of the people, fell on waning ears. The Igbo language decayed; English replaced it; and so Umuofia crumbled, left without the words to explain why. Through re-education and linguistic imperialism – weapons of peaceful war – “re-civilization” occurred. Language, the product and lifeline of society, with its extinction strands history, religion, and tradition in an unexplainable past. It was to the overwriting of language and core values that the village of Umuofia in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart succumbed.
Language, intrinsic in the penning of the book, denotes the value systems of the characters and the stature of Umuofia. In the rallying cries of Umuofia Kwenu! strength is supported by “all-powerful medicine” – the agadi-nwayi, literally “old woman”. Yet order and shame follow with the usage of the word agbala, meaning both “woman” and “man of no title”. The language itself ties the female both to the weak and the strong, a dichotomy characteristic of the village’s culture and order system – women are of lower societal rank than men, but revered nonetheless for their ultimate necessity. Even names reflect this, with Nneka, one of the most common in Mbanta, meaning “Mother is Supreme”. Faith, core to both colonial and pre-colonial groups, also emerges in the Igbo language: names of gods revered, like Chukwu – a portmanteau of the words chi and ukwu, meaning roughly “a personal spirit” and “great/of great power”, respectively – indicate their portrayal to the village; in this case, Chukwu is “a supreme God who made heaven and earth…[and] all minor gods” (179). When Mr. Brown details the faith of his Church, the words change – structurally, through capitalization, importance is distinguished – and the singular God towers over all gods on the paper. The language of Umuofia ties itself strongly to the beliefs, societal organization, and values of the village; its disruption would threaten their survival.
Linguistic imperialism, the common product of both religious and secular foreign influence in native environments, causes the rupture of Umuofia’s unity. Edward Sapir, one of the founders of ethnolinguistics, which correlates culture to linguistics, describes language as both a cause and a result of society. The domination of a language over another, then, is the imposition of a society upon another. In Things Fall Apart, this befits the criterion for imperialism presented by Dr. Robert Phillipson, both in having a subtractive effect on the original language as well as defining an inequality among speakers and non-speakers. Not only does the language of the Church call for the redefinition of traditional Igbo terms, but those who stray from the Igbo language are rewarded with religious validation, while “God will laugh at [the rest] on the judgment day” (155). An interesting quote from Sapir’s Culture, Language and Personality refers to the affinity that language brings, which is “intuitively felt by most people; ‘He talks like us’ is equivalent to saying ‘He is one of us’.” (Language, 17). In Umuofia, Mr. Brown speaks through an interpreter, Mr. Kiaga, famously disconnecting the languages with a dialect that, although spoken by “one of [the people of the region], as they could see from his color and his language,” presented enough of a gap to ostracize those that followed it (144).
Linguistic Imperialism is channeled most directly in the dominance established by Mr. Kiaga over Igbo language and values, separating Nwoye from his father – “Those that hear my words are my father and mother”, in Kiaga’s words – and invalidating all verbiage linked to faith – “Only the word of our God is true”; as the following of the Church progresses, belief isn’t just aligned with Christianity, but withdrawn altogether from the power of the village (157, 153). With the abandonment of its core beliefs comes the severance of relationships in Umuofia, leaving those who did not convert to reflect; referring to the “white man”, Obierika recalls that “He came quietly and peaceably with his religion… Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” (176) Those ties are the result of language; those divides of imperialism; that fall of linguistic imperialism.
Achebe’s emphasis on language and his transition between Igbo and English throughout the novel highlight the importance of cultural diversity and preservation. It may seem contradictory to have written a display of pre-colonial African culture in a language of which only 25% of speakers are native (the rest most likely learning as a secondary language). Though the intent was to spread the story to as wide an audience as possible, Achebe sought to maintain authenticity in the world he described, writing in simple vocabulary and concepts of the Igbo language, exclamations not always followed by an explication, and a glossary at the end of the novel to immerse the reader in words and a culture that cannot or would not be translated directly. As the novel progresses, this use of macaronic language dissipates, transmitting the quieting effect of imperialism on a syntactic and stylistic level. Though the Igbo language is not eradicated completely, the interactions between it, the interpreting dialect, and English have a detrimental effect; Umuofia is the representation of the fall that occurs as a result.
Note: The copy used for an accurate page-to-page reference is as follows: Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart. Penguin Classics, 2006.
Additional Sources:
Sapir, Edward. Culture, Language, and Personality: Selected Essays. Edited by
David G. Mandelbaum, U of California P, 1949.
Zeng, Jie, et al. “English Linguistic Neo-Imperialism in the Era of
Globalization: A Conceptual Viewpoint.” Psychology of Language.
Frontiers, www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/
fpsyg.2023.1149471/full.
