A Professor of English and Communication Arts on the Ignatius Ajuru College of Training (IAUE), Port Harcourt, Rivers State, Mercy Adesanya-Davies has advocated the creation of a conducive atmosphere for Nigerians to harness the facility of indigenous languages as a weapon to finish corruption and safety challenges within the nation.
The Ira-Kwara-born Adesanya-Davies acknowledged this within the 57th inaugural lecture of the college, which she delivered.
The occasion was presided over by the vice-chancellor of IAUE, Prof. Ugochukwu Onuchuku.
In her lecture titled: “Leveraging the Transformative Potential of Language on Nigeria’s Societal Challenges,” Adesanya-Davies asserted that languages, particularly the Nigerian indigenous languages, have the transformative potential to deal with Nigeria’s societal challenges.
She mentioned if the facility of languages and linguistics, as enshrined within the nation’s structure, have been adequately explored, “All evil vices within the nation must be shunned from corruption to insecurity, terrorism, banditry, which were resulting in retrogression, lack of peace, unity and progress.”
Stressing the impacts of indigenous languages on Nigeria’s societal challenges, utilizing a case research strategy, “Leveraging the Transformative Potential of Language on Nigeria’s Societal Challenges: A Case Examine of AUDIO Bible in Nigerian Indigenous Languages”, the college instructor recalled the influence made by Professor Ajayi Crowther by his Yoruba model of translated English Bible.
Advert
Describing Crowther because the pioneer and father of Linguistics in Nigeria and Africa, Adesanya-Davies mentioned Bishop Crowther was chargeable for creating the Yoruba alphabets from English alphabets, compiling a Yoruba dictionary and wrote many books, together with “A Temporary Historical past of the Yoruba”.
“The hallmark of Bishop Ajayi Crowther’s fame in Linguistics was translating the English Bible to Yoruba in 1883,” she mentioned.
Adesanya-Davies added that: “Nigerian indigenous languages are important to the nation’s cultural, social, financial, and political growth. Their preservation and promotion are important for sustaining cultural variety, bettering training, constructing communities, selling financial progress and fostering nationwide pleasure.
“I hereby current the audio Bible in Nigerian indigenous languages as having the transformative potential to unravel Nigeria’s societal challenges.”
As an utilized linguist, she propounds Synthetic Intelligence Linguistics (AIL), which is a brand new department of utilized linguistics.
“AI linguistics as a subfield of Utilized Linguistics can be wealthy and deal with the interplay between computer systems and human language. It could contain the event of algorithms and statistical fashions that will allow computer systems to course of, perceive, and generate pure language information,” she mentioned.
In line with her, one of many key objectives of AI linguistics “Can be to develop computer systems that may perceive and course of human language in a extra human-like method. This might contain creating programs that may analyse and perceive the that means of language, fairly than simply processing it as a sequence of symbols, as additionally agreed by McShane & Nirenburg (2021).”
She mentioned, “First God and His phrase on the creation, then man and his languages and subsequent it could be AI and AI Linguistics within the growth of mankind.”
