The world itself has no names for anything in the world or everything in the world would have the same name in every languages. We know that is not the case. Instead, it is human beings who gave whatever exists in the world the name by which such a thing is known, whether it is cars, aircrafts, drugs and so on. In other words, there are all manner of stuff in the world, they did not determine what they are by themselves until language names them.
This is why scholars of the ‘linguistic turn’ in social analysis say that it is language that creates reality because whether a man is stupid or reasonable is until he is named as such. In other words, the ‘linguistic turn’ does not say that there is no reality. No. it only says that no reality defines itself. Every reality is defined by the meaning of it that human beings have and such a meaning is communicated in words or in language use.
Unfortunately, the whole world does not speak one language. There are many tribes and each one has a different tongue in different places. And each of the tongues has a contribution to make to meaning. In order words, any language that dies rubs the world its own system of meaning and the world is the loser. That is why UNESCO, for example, compiles and alerts the world about dying languages.
It is thus a big deal when a language is documented in terms of its dictionary as some two scholars have done in the case of Hausa. It is an alert for other ‘tribes and tongues’ across the world to do so and even more.
