What part of your body do you use for speech, the mouth or the tongue? No, there is no universally accepted answer. “Dholuo”, the name of my mother tongue, indicates that, in our language, people speak with their mouths, not with their tongues. It is, of course, fully debatable since the tongue is situated in the mouth.

What is clear is that, in the word Dholuo, the prefix dho is the genitive form of dhok, the word for a mouth among the Luo of Kenya and Tanzania. In that specific form of Dholuo, then, the mouth is the primary organ of speech. There is only one problem. It is that this particular Luo group — known as Jokapodho — are not the only Luo people.

The majority of the Luo-speaking communities live, not in Kenya, but in the two Congos, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, the two Sudans and Uganda.

Among all of them, the word dhok refers both to language and to the mouth, primarily because among most of them both “language” and the “mouth” are known by the same word dhok.

Why? Because, according to them, the mouth, not the tongue, is the most important organ of speech. Apparently, however, this seems true only of what Prof B.A. Ogot — the most celebrated historian of the Luo of Kenya — calls the Southern Luo. Of the Northern Luo — including Charles Onyango Obbo’s Padhola and Jekeri Okot p’Bitek’s Acholi — not mouth but tongue is the word for a language.

Thus Okot’s people know their mother tongue, not as Dholuo, but as Lepluo, where lep is the genitive form of lew, the universal Luo word for the organ which intrudes so imperiously in your mouth. In this way, the Northern Luo are more in keeping with the world’s trend, including English, where the word “language” is derived, through the French langue, from lingua, the Latin word for the biological tongue.

But this is not true of all Germanic and other Indo-European languages. Thanks to a Norman French imperialist called Guillaume le Conquerant (“William the Conqueror” to his vanquished Englanders), language, too, is England’s word for oral communication, a word which William took to England as langue (French both for that organ and for language, in general).

Yet the Norman French are not really Latin in provenience. As their name implies, they were a northern Germanic tribe — closely related (in both culture and blood) to the Norwegians (both terms, Norman and Norwegian, having something etymological to do with the word “North”, namely, in Scandinavia, where the Norwegians remain rooted.

In Europe — quite apart from England — it is true only of the so-called Romance languages, namely, the Latin-derived “mouths” of France, Italy, Portugal, Spain and certain puny linguistic communities in central and south-eastern Europe.

But England’s case is special because — as the American linguist Mario Pei says — although English is Germanic at base (namely in diction as well as in grammar) — English has an “imposing” Greek-and-Latin superstructure of thought (in civics, culture, religion, science, technology and suchlike).

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