You Have Failed As A Parent If Your Kids Can’t Speak Your Native Language – Yul Edochie

Nollywood actor Yul Edochie has expressed concern over the growing trend of Nigerian children who cannot speak their native languages. He recently revealed that the sad trend is mostly rampant among kids who are of Igbo heritage.

In a post shared via his official Facebook page, Yul lamented that several Igbo kids often struggle to communicate fluently in their mother tongue nowadays, and it is mostly due to parental neglect.

According to him, the reality is a parental failure that must be corrected as soon as possible because indigenous language preservation should be crucial in every home.

“Many of us who are Igbos, our children cannot speak Igbo. It’s a failure on our part that must be corrected moving forward,” he wrote.

His remarks have since sparked heated debate across social media, with some users supporting his call for cultural revival, while others blamed the dominance of English in schools and society for children failing to learn their native dialects.

WOW.

Nollywood is a sobriquet that originally referred to the Nigerian film industry. The origin of the term dates back to the early 2000s, traced to an article in The New York Times. Due to the history of evolving meanings and contexts, there is no clear or agreed-upon definition for the term, which has made it a subject to several controversies.

The origin of the term “Nollywood” remains unclear; Jonathan Haynes traced the earliest usage of the word to a 2002 article by Matt Steinglass in the New York Times, where it was used to describe Nigerian cinema.

Charles Igwe noted that Norimitsu Onishi also used the name in a September 2002 article he wrote for the New York Times. The term continues to be used in the media to refer to the Nigerian film industry, with its definition later assumed to be a portmanteau of the words “Nigeria” and “Hollywood”, the American major film hub.

Film-making in Nigeria is divided largely along regional, and marginally ethnic and religious lines. Thus, there are distinct film industries – each seeking to portray the concern of the particular section and ethnicity it represents. However, there is the English-language film industry which is a melting pot for filmmaking and filmmakers from most of the regional industries.