My English-speaking is rooted in a
Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one. I have
taken ownership of English.
This is how acclaimed
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes her relationship with
English, the language which she uses in her writing, and which millions of her
fellow Nigerians use in their daily communication. By taking ownership of
English and using it as their own medium of expression, Nigerians have made,
and are continuing to make, a unique and distinctive contribution to English as
a global language. We highlight their contributions in this month’s update of
the Oxford English Dictionary, as a number of Nigerian English words make it into the
dictionary for the first time.
The majority of
these new additions are either borrowings from Nigerian languages, or unique
Nigerian coinages that have only begun to be used in English in the second half
of the twentieth century, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s.
One particularly
interesting set of such loanwords and coinages has to do with Nigerian street
food. The word buka, borrowed from Hausa and Yoruba and first attested in 1972,
refers to a roadside restaurant or street stall that sells local fare at low
prices. Another term for such eating places first evidenced in 1980 is bukateria, which adds to buka the –teria ending from the word cafeteria.
