A New Spoken and Emerging Standard English That You Never Knew
Not only English spoken by the native speakers of English should be considered dialect and standard.
The evolution of music in Nigeria not only set Nigeria on the World map, but will showcase the emerging and stylistic kind of English spoken in the country that deserves attention.
"It is a known fact that English, the world's medium of communication, has different dialects and varieties. At least, six countries are considered to have distinct varieties of English: British English, American English, Canadian English, Australian English, New Zealand English, and South African English.
You may likely disagree like others on the existence of Nigerian English as a distinct variety of English. in academic circles, Nigerian English has been a topic of debate for years. John Ogu (1992) pointed out that as early as 1967, N. G. Walsh called attention to the existence of a distinct variety of English called "Nigerian English." Walsh observed that "The varieties of English spoken by educated Nigerians, no matter what their language, have enough features in common to mark off a general type, which may be called Nigerian English (1992: 88)."
Wash’s observation is enough to warrant an extensive study on the state of the English language spoken in Nigeria. Different scholars have over the years written to prove and disprove the existence of Nigerian English. But since the dust of what is Nigerian English has not been settled, the discussion shall continue in its different forms. In its crude sense, is there any such thing as Nigerian English? Considering the number of speakers, it has.
Ethnologue (2009) ranks Nigeria as the third largest English population speaker in the world after India and the United States of America. The entire English-speaking population in Nigeria is put at 79,000,000 while those that speak it as their first language in Nigeria are put at 4,000,000. Yes, I believe so.
Though Theo Vincent (1974), (Ajani, 2007). Calls it a mere "bad English" and Salami (1968) contends that what has been identified as Nigerian English is in reality "errors of usage”, we cannot dismiss outright the linguistic creativity and stylistics coinages because dialects and varieties of any language must have some sort of differences.
An example of countries that have developed their distinct variety, or better still rebelled against some of the quirky conventions of British English is America where George Bernard Shaw remarked that "England and America are two countries divided by a common language" (see Pinto, 2000, p. 19).
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 as Salami and other anti-Nigerian English proponents want Nigerians to speak, especially because of concerns for international mutual intelligibility.
However, when the existing semantic and syntactic resources of the English language are miserably incapable of serving local communicative needs, what then should speakers of ESL like Nigeria do? In this situation, you will agree with me that 2 things are plausible: 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 the speakers' distinctive socio-linguistic experiences). Kperogi (2010: P1.)
Chinua Achebe, in defence of his creative semantic and lexical expressions of the English language to express uniquely Nigerian socio-cultural thoughts that have no equivalents in English, says that: 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 (Achebe, 1997; Ohaeto, 1997).
Achebe has proven Rage Cacheo right when he says that: “in my view, the global diffusion of English has taken an interesting turn: the native of this language seem to have lost the exclusive prerogative to control its standardization.” This is why Ekpe (2006) says: we should no longer talk about globalization, but rather a glocalization of English.
Glocalization is an admixture of the local socio-cultural phenomena in a language with that of a widely used language to portray the native worldviews, social life, culture and religion of its users. This localization has forced the English language to play unaccustomed roles as can be seen in words such as shakara (show up), efiko / efiwe (study hard), amebo (a gossip), carry go (continue), chacha (brand new), shine your eye (be vigilant and lots more.
According to Wolfson (1989), although the English language has gained worldwide prominence, it is not used the same way everywhere. In the same vein, Ashcroft et al. (1989) point out that, although British imperialism resulted in the global spread of the English language, the English of Nigerians is not the same as that of Britons or Americans, and that a continuum exists between the various practices constituting English language usage throughout the world.
Ashcroft and Wolfson’s view need not be debated further because when two or more languages and cultures come into contact, different types of sociolinguistic interaction take place. Sometimes a diglossic situation may result, or language shift, attrition or even language death … (Sebba 1997) and that forms the birth of Nigerian English.
To prove the existence of NE as a variety, Platt et al. (1984) believe that for any variety of English language to qualify as a "New English", it must fulfil the following criteria: It must have been taught as a subject as well as used as a medium of instruction in places where languages other than the English language were the main languages.
It has developed in an area where a native variety of English languages was not the language spoken by most of the population. It is used for a range of functions among those who speak or write it in the region where it is used. It has become "localized" or "nativized" by adopting some language features of its own, such as sounds, intonation patterns, sentence structures, words and expressions. Looking at the above criteria, it is unfair to deny the English spoken in Nigeria a status of variety. So, Nigerian English in simple terms is the popular English spoken and written by Nigerians in everyday conversation.
For Kperogi (2010), Nigeria English is the variety of English that is broadly spoken and written by Nigeria's literary, intellectual, political, and media elite across the regional and ethnic spectrums of Nigeria. Moving further, I will consider the concept of deviance and deviation to conceptualize the distinctiveness of Nigerian English. Deviance and deviation presuppose that there is a particular variety of the English language that is considered the model that all speakers should aspire to speak. It has a set of rules or conventions which guide its structure and function.
This variety has no regional colouring either in accent, pronunciation or grammar. In essence, Standard English is the form assumed to be shared and accepted by educated speakers throughout the English-speaking world despite great variants in accent, grammar and vocabulary by different speakers. Nigerian English, as has shown some marked departure from the native speakers' usage of English. There have been attempts at distinguishing between instances of departure that are decidedly bad or wrong, having gone against known grammatical traditions and instances of departure that are still manageable. The former is deviance while the latter is deviation. Deviants cut across levels of usage of the language. That is morphemes, syntax, pronunciation, etc. Deviation on the other hand is usually restricted to lexical items and at times too, idiomatic expressions. However, deviations are not particularly bad grammar because the departures are meant to accommodate the native experience of which Nigerian English is part.
I shall try to bring out the sources of Nigerian English which some are a result of coinages and British Akaike words. Kperogi (2010), (2015) sums it up in 4 sources. That is: linguistic improvisation, old-fashioned British expressions, initial usage errors fossilized over time and incorporated into the Nigerian linguistic repertory and a mishmash of British and American English. Linguistics improvisation: Many unique Nigerian socio-cultural thoughts simply cannot be expressed in the "standard" form of the English language. So, Nigerians either translate their local languages to take care of this lack, or they appropriate existing English words and phrases and imbue them with meanings that serve their communicative purposes. When Chinua Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart, for instance, that "proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten,” he was consciously appropriating English lexical items to express a uniquely Igbo cultural thought. the use of the phrase "well done" as a form of salutation for someone who is working is peculiarly Nigerian. Nigerians use it to approximate such expressions as "sannu da aiki" in Hausa, "eku ise" in Yoruba. Well-done is used as an exclamation expressive of applause— synonymous with "bravo. “In the West 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. Kperogi (2010, 2015.) a further example is the "naming ceremony." Since the native speakers of the English language do not celebrate the christening of their children the way people do in Nigeria, they have no need for a "naming ceremony." But Nigerians do. So, they 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, by way of Hong Kong, before it was accepted into Standard British English so coinages of Nigerian English will perhaps keep entering the Oxford English dictionary as 29 words including Okada got listed recently. innocent grammatical errors initially committed by Nigeria's media and political elite and repeated several times in the mass media: In time, these errors got fossilized and incorporated into what one might call the Nigerian linguistic repertoire.
This mode of language change, of course, takes place in all other varieties of English, including British and American English. For example, the misuse of the phrase "due to" by Queen Elizabeth II. In traditional grammar, "due" is an adjective, and when it is followed by the preposition "to" it should be attached to a noun (example: the cancellation of the event was due to the rain).
The use of "due to" at the beginning of a sentence in the sense of "because of" or "owing to" was considered uneducated. But when the Queen, in a Speech from the Throne, said "Due to inability to market their grain, prairie farmers have been faced for some time with a serious shortage," this "uneducated" usage gained respectability (Greenbaum and Whitcut, 1988, p.227). A more recent example is the use of the word "illegals" by the American media to refer to illegal immigrants.
The word initially met with hostility from grammarians in America because "illegal" is said to be an adjective that should not be used as a noun. But this usage is now gradually being accepted.
Old-fashioned British English: Old-fashioned British English is a robust resource for Nigerian English (Awonusi, 1990). Idioms such as "bad eggs" and expressions such as "more power to your elbow" (usually rendered as "more grease to your elbow" in Nigeria) are intelligible only to older British speakers.
The fourth source is derived from Americanisms interspersed with British English to create a unique identity that is both American and British and, in a sense, neither American nor British. For example, torchlight, short nicker, sent forth etc.
In conclusion, there is no doubt that there exists Nigerian English and Adetugbo unequivocally states that Nigerian English like British and American English should be regarded as a dialect or a group of distinct forms of a language devoid of any perforate connotation of inferiority usually attached to the world.
Adeniran [1987]] sums up that, language is responsible for the cultures of its users, being themselves part of their respective culture and culture cannot be divorced from Language and vice-versa.
Since language cannot be separated from culture the language and in this English, cannot be divorced from the culture of the users.
Therefore, Nigerian English [N.E] has to be seen as a product of its general social context. In my next article, I shall try to prove how standard the English spoken in Nigeria is and why it should be considered as such. To know more about this, press the follow button and wait patiently for more.
