Of English Language, Nigerian English, and Nigerianisms

(By Farooq Kperogi) – Divided by a Common Language: Comparing Nigerian, American and British English

It is important to stress that Nigerian English is not bad or substandard English. It is a legitimate national variety that has evolved, over several decades, out of our unique experiences as a post-colonial, polyglot nation.

However hard we might try, we can't help writing and speaking English in ways that reflect our socio-linguistic singularities. Even our own Wole Soyinka who thinks he speaks and writes better English than the Queen of England habitually betrays "Nigerianisms" in his writings. Or at least that's what the native speakers of the language think. For instance, when he was admitted into the Royal Society of Arts, the citation on his award read something like: "Mr. Soyinka is a prolific writer in the vernacular English of his own country."

I learned that Soyinka's pride was badly hurt when he read the citation. But it needn't be. It was Chinua Achebe who once said, in defense of his creative semantic and lexical contortions of the English language to express uniquely Nigerian thoughts that have no equivalents in English, that any language that has the cheek to leave its primordial shores and encroach on the territory of other people should learn to come to terms with the inevitable reality that it would be domesticated. …

By Nigerian English I do not mean Nigerian Pidgin English. Nor do I mean the English spoken by uneducated and barely educated Nigerians. I mean the variety of English that is broadly spoken and written by Nigeria's literary, intellectual, political, and media elite across the regional and ethnic spectra of Nigeria. 

I know this definition is barefacedly elitist. But this is true of all "standard" varieties of all "modern" languages in the world. …

An additional problem with my definition is that Nigerian English has not yet been purposively standardized. Our English teachers still dismiss it as mere "bad English." I remember that when I served as an English language examiner for the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) in 1997, our team leader instructed us to penalize students who wrote "Nigerian English." The irony, however, is that no Nigerian who was educated at home, including those who deride Nigerian English, can avoid speaking or writing it either consciously or unconsciously.

Take as an example one cocky friend of mine who is so self-assured about his English language skills that he dismissed my attempt at chronicling and systematizing Nigerian English usage as a glorification of "bad English." For him, there is no such thing as Nigerian English. There is only uneducated English, which overzealous, starry-eyed idealists like me want to intellectualize, he said. Fair enough.

After he told me that, I asked him what he does on the seventh day of the birth of his children. "I do the naming ceremony, of course," he said. I asked him again what he says to people when he meets them working. "I say 'well done' to them," he said. I told him that these are uniquely Nigerian expressions. ... He was stunned, even embarrassed. But … he needn't be.

Well, perhaps, it is not altogether unreasonable to aspire to write and speak English that closely approximates the way it is written and spoken in America and Britain, especially because of concerns for mutual intelligibility. However, when the existing semantic and syntactic resources of the English language are miserably incapable of serving our communicative needs, we are left with only two options: neologism (that is, invention of new words or phrases) and semantic extension (that is, encoding existing English words and phrases with meanings that are absent in the original, but which encapsulate our unique socio-linguistic experiences). 

Having made these prefatory remarks, let me proceed to compare Nigerian English with American and British English. In doing this, I will be guided by the four main fountains of Nigerian English that I identified last week: linguistic improvisation, old-fashioned British expressions, initial usage errors fossilized over time and incorporated into our linguistic repertory, and a mishmash of British and American English.

Linguistic improvisation 

Perhaps the most contemporary example of our linguistic creativity is the appropriation and contortion of the word "flash"— and its inflections "flashing" and "flasher"—in our mobile telephonic vocabulary. Neither American English nor British English—nor, for that matter, any other variety of English in the world— uses these words the way we do. The closest semantic equivalent in both British and American English to what we call "flashing" is "buzz." If you tell an American or a Briton that you have "flashed" their phone, they will probably have no earthly clue what you're talking about.

What of "flasher"? Well, in both British and American English, a flasher is someone, mostly a man, who has a compulsive desire to expose his genitals in public! The last time I was in Nigeria, a friend of mine who had "buzzed" my phone incessantly jokingly told me that he was a "professional flasher"! He had no idea what a "flasher"— or, even worse, a "professional flasher"— means in standard American and British English until I told him. He was, of course, shocked. He asked if he could use the word "buzzer" since I said "buzz" is the closest word that describes the sense we convey when we say we "flash" someone's phone. But buzzer is just another word for a doorbell.

Similarly, our use of the phrase "well done" as a form of salutation for someone who is working is peculiarly Nigerian. We use it to approximate such expressions as "sannu da aiki" in Hausa, "eku ise" in Yoruba, "ka soburu" in Batonu (my language), which have no parallels in American and British English. In both American and British English, "well done" either functions as an adjective to describe thoroughly cooked food or meat (Example: I like my food well done), or as an exclamation expressive of applause— synonymous with "bravo." It is also used as an adjective to describe something that has been executed with diligence and skill. It is not part of the cultural repertoire of people in the West to reserve a special form of salutation for people who are working.

Another distinctively Nigerian expression is "naming ceremony." Since the native speakers of the English language do not celebrate the christening of their children the way we do in Nigeria, they have no need for a "naming ceremony." But we do. So we creatively coined it.

What of the expression, "quite an age!" to mean "long time, no see"? (The phrase "long time no see," by the way, was originally an exclusively Chinese English expression before it was accepted into Standard British English. Perhaps some of our Nigerian coinages will also be incorporated into standard American and British English). Well, it is also a Nigerian improvisation. Interestingly, I learned that expression from my secondary school English teacher who was such a fastidious semantic purist that he wanted us to write and speak English in ways that would make the Queen of England envious! I actually only realized that the expression is distinctly Nigerian when neither my American friends nor my British professor could decipher it.

The way we use the word "sorry" is also a good example of linguistic creativity. We have expanded the word's original native English meaning from a mere exclamation to indicate an apology to an exclamation to express concern for a misfortune (such as when someone skips a step and falls). We use it whether or not we are responsible for the misfortune. This usage of the word, which is completely absent in American and British English, is an approximation of such expressions as "sannu fa" in Hausa, "pele o" in Yoruba, "ndo" in Igbo, "kpure kpure" in Batonu, etc. The American and British equivalents seem very distant and lacking in empathy and warmth.

We also have a whole host of euphemisms, especially for excretory activities, that absolutely make no sense in American and British English. For instance, we use the expression "spoil the air" (or its other variations such as "pollute the air" or simply "pollute") to mean fart. Most Nigerian cultures are prudish and resent directness in discussing excretory activities.

Another interesting euphemism, which I too didn't know was uniquely Nigerian until I came to the United States, is the expression "to ease oneself," which we use to cover a multitude of sins in the toilet! Where we would say "I want to ease myself," Americans would say "I need to go to the bathroom" or, if it's a public building, "I need to go to the restroom." One day I told a friend in Louisiana that I wanted to "ease myself." He was completely lost. When I had occasion to meet with my British professor of English, I told her about this. (We used to spend our spare time ridiculing American English since Nigerian English is a close cousin—or, if you like, a child—of British English.) I told her Americans had no clue what I meant when I said I wanted to "ease myself."

She was silent for an uncomfortably long time. Then she said, "I am afraid I too have no idea what that means." I knew then I was alone.

However, my least favorite of our linguistic improvisations is the word "detribalized" as an adjective to describe someone who transcends narrow ethnic allegiances. This usage of the word derives from our wrong-headed and ignorant use of the word "tribe" to describe our ethnicities. In its modern usage, tribe is a condescending, even derogatory, word that Europeans and people of European descent reserve only for people they consider inferior. You will never hear of the English tribe or the German tribe or, in fact, the Japanese or Chinese tribes.

In American and British English, "detribalize" is a verb used condescendingly to imply that "culturally superior" Europeans have caused a people to lose their "savage" cultural identities. In other words, to detribalize a person or a people is to Europeanize or westernize them. It is to make them lose their language, their customs, their mores—generally things that make them "primitive" by European standards. In Australia, for example, Europeans forcefully adopted Aboriginal children and "detribalized" them by taking them to white foster homes so that they would lose all connections with their original culture and thereby become "civilized."

Only Nigerians use "detribalized" as an adjective. I once read an interview that the late Bola Ige granted to a newspaper where he resented being described as "detribalized." I was happy that a prominent Nigerian finally saw through the stupidity of the word. But then he said he preferred to be described as "untribalized." Well, no such word exists in any dictionary, and it is just as self-denigrating as "detribalized."

Another example of linguistic improvisation in Nigerian English is the use of the expression "co-wife" or "co-wives" to refer to female partners in polygamous marriages. Americans and Britons do not have an equivalent lexical notation for this since polygamy (derisively called bigamy here) is, in fact, a crime for which people go to prison. I am curious to know, though, how Mormons (members of a heretical Christian sect that practices polygamy in the state of Utah here in the U.S.) refer to "co-wives."

We have also expanded the meaning of "playmates" or "joking partners" to refer to people in traditionally and historically sanctioned, semi-ritualized joking relationships, which permit the kind of privileged familiarity that leads us to tolerate and even laugh at the abusive teasing that goes on between specified ethnic groups, trades, families, etc.

For instance, members of my ethnic group, the Batonu (also called Bariba by Yoruba people), have a "joking relationship" with Kanuri, Fulani, and Zarma people. (The Zarma are the second most populous but most politically powerful ethnic group in Niger Republic). Nupe people have a "joking relationship" with Katsina people. Zaria and Suleja people have a "joking relationship." The examples are legion. Well, this tradition has no parallel in Western cultures. So they have no name for it. However, these terms are now firmly established in the literature of anthropology and are well on their way to being incorporated into British and American English—if that has not already happened.

In the last 10 years or so, it has become customary for us to arrange "send-forth parties" as an organized expression of goodwill for people who are about to leave us for a new place or for a new venture. This expression, which seems to have originated as a coinage by Nigerian born-again Christians, would certainly make no sense to many Americans and Britons. Its equivalent in standard British and American English is "send-off" (note that it is NOT "send-off party" because "send-off" is a noun, not an adjective) or "farewell celebration" or, rarely, "bon voyage." Americans also call it a "leaving party."

I guess Nigerians coined the expression "send-forth party" because "send-off" seems distant, even hostile. The adverb "forth" appears to us to convey a connotation of forward motion, of advancement, while "off" strikes us as suggesting departure with no expectation of return. So we think that to say we send people off creates the impression that we derive perverse pleasure in their departure from us. But linguists would call this reasoning naïve, if not downright ignorant, because the definition of an idiom—which is what this phrase is— is that it is an expression "whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words that make it up."

Other examples of neologisms that are exclusively Nigerian are "chewing stick," "pounded yam," "K-legged" (called "knock-kneed" in British and American English), "next tomorrow" to mean the day after tomorrow, "take in" meaning to become pregnant, "put to bed" meaning to give birth to a child, "not on seat" to mean not in the office, etc.

Most of these expressions are utterly incomprehensible to native speakers of the English language. But I think that's no reason to stop using them when we communicate with each other. However, we need to know that these expressions are distinctly Nigerian so that when we have cause to tell a non-Nigerian interlocutor that we've not been "on seat" because our first wife has just "put to bed" and her "co-wife" has just "taken in," we will not be surprised when he is perfectly clueless! As I cannot exhaust all the examples of Nigerian linguistic improvisation in this series, let me turn to the next subsection.