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Language

Insight into the Future of Language, Culture & Heritage

 

Kimani Nehusi - (PhD) is a progressive African historian

"To undertake a language is to undertake a culture."
 

Thabo Mbeki - former President of South Africa

“We are fortunate that there are still some ordinary men and women of our country who are daily weaving a memory, beading a legacy, cutting a spoor, telling a story, and loading into these bowls of history, a future for all our people driven by the humane vision of Ubuntu."
 

Solomon Ogbede Iyasere - Author of “Oral Tradition in the Criticism of African Literature”

“...the modern African writer is to his indigenous oral tradition as a snail is to its shell. Even in a foreign habitat, a snail never leaves its shell behind."
 

Professor Alfred Mtenje - University of Malawi

“In African context development in general cannot be realized without taking into consideration the use of the indigenous languages, the languages of the masses, the majority of whom are illiterate and have no access to foreign languages."
 

Marcus Garvey - was a Jamaican political leader, publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator.

“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."
 

Owen 'Alik Shahadah - director, African writer, and scholar.

“Urbanization is the slaughter house of African languages. And it is not only a threat from outside i.e. English. Amharic has, on its own, displaced more languages in Ethiopia than English."
 

Frantz Fanon - Martinique-born, French Creole psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and writer.

"To speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to assume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization."
 

Ahmed Sékou Touré - Guinean political leader and President of Guinea from 1958 to his death in 1984.

“We should go down to the grassroots of our culture, not to remain there, not to be isolated there, but to draw strength and substance there from, and with whatever additional sources of strength and material we acquire, proceed to set up a new form of society raised to the level of human progress."
 

Dr. Maulana Karenga - African-American professor of Africana Studies, activist and author.

"Our culture provides us with an ethos we must honor in both thought and practice. By ethos, we mean a people's self-understanding as well as its self-presentation in the world through its thought and practice in the other six areas of culture. It is above all a cultural challenge. For culture is here defined as the totality of thought and practice by which a people creates itself, celebrates, sustains and develops itself and introduces itself to history and humanity."
 

Amos Wilson - African-American author

“When a culture no longer meets the need of a people or solve the problem confronting a people, that culture must transform."
 

Ben Zimmer - American linguist, lexicographer, and language commentator.

“Language will become more technologically mediated."
 

David Crystal - British linguist, academic and author.

“Never predict the future with language."
 

Ludwig Wittgenstein - Austrian-British philosopher

“The limits of my language means the limits of my world."
 

John F Kennedy - was the 35th President of the United States.

“History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future."
 

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