I am from the South Eastern part of Nigeria in Africa and the language of my people is the Igbo language. We have so many dialect of it and variants of it that some part find it difficult to fully understand all what the other parts are saying, this is due mainly to their border to other tribes that have a totally different language but in general we understand ourselves if we speak the central Igbo language. It can be explained in this manner, we say the UK has English as their language, but when I first went to the UK I discovered that we had Scottish, Irish and people from Wales speaking a variant of English that even an English man finds hard to understand. I even noticed that even in England you still had other variant of English people speak you have to listen had to understand, to solve this problem the have the Queen’s English which allows everybody understand themselves and that we are taught in schools in all British colonies.
Now back to my topic, when our forefathers gave their children name it had meaning based on the things that were happening, events, day of the week, festivals, relatives you resemble, ancestors they believe reincarnated to come back to the world again, objects, animals, plants, who you took after their character (I wonder how they knew that when a baby is just born, lol) and so many things imaginable and unimaginable. But the thing is, when someone introduces himself, you would easily know where his from and know the meaning of his name, this helped preserve our language because you learn the interpretation of the name and keep in tone with the language.
The colonial masters came and found it hard to pronounce our names, they really messed up a lot of names and told our father they had to be baptized and take up English/Hebrew names in line with their new Christian status. Many took up names that they did not understand or know the meaning or how it came about, we started drifting away from our way of naming our children, at the beginning we were giving an English name, a Native name and a surname that is also a Native name, so that people easily know which family you belong to. So you would have something like Brown Ucheoma Okechukwu. Brown is the English name means the colour brown at least that is how we see it here, Ucheoma which a native Igbo name means good thoughts or good sense and Okechukwu another native name which the family name means God's portion or God’s gift.
A lot of us are still going by the surname our forefathers went by, I think mine goes back 5 or 6 generations that is what my son has as his surname and that will probably what his own children will take as their surname for as long as they want. But I see a changing trend now, I see an Igbo man bearing the names James Richard Williams. There is no linking to the tribe or people he belongs to and that is so said because his children will follow the same pattern and at the end of the day the language is fast getting extinct. The worst part of it is that most of the people bearing these names don’t even know the meaning they just name their children after the names of pop stars, celebrities and actors or actresses.
In conclusion, I am not against people naming their children whatever name they want to, but I think they should also give them a native name so that they will be helping in preserving their local languages and prevent it from going extinct like many other languages have gone.
Thanks for reading my post, like I always say, upvote it if you liked it I’ll truly appreciate that. Keep your comments coming and follow me if you have not already done that. Again, thanks a lot for your support to me always.
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