Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are There Native English Speakers in Nigeria?

Well, it is complicated. Chinua Achebe's books taught me an important lesson: It is possible to appropriate a language that is not yours and use it as if is yours. Read Things Fall Apart, the language does not get in the way, it is as if you are reading Igbo. Same with Arrow of God.

We have always indigenized the English Language, it did not start today. I was using "shebi" and "shomon" and "abi" from childhood. I always knew they were corruptions of the Yoruba language. 

The difference between my generation and this generation is in the classroom. The quality of instruction in Nigeria's public schools has gone to the dogs (from kindergarten to tertiary). No one on this forum needs to be told that. In Nigeria, other people's children are being abused in the name of education. I say other people's children, because our children do not and will never attend the classroom of the children that we are talking about.

If you want to know how a well-educated Nigerian speaks, find the type that visited me this summer - products of the most elite school that money can buy in Nigeria, headed to one of America's top universities, and then we can talk. She uses shebi abi LOL, LWKMD etc but when it comes to reading and writing, she can kick the crap out of any of my kids any day. And my kids are no slouches either. We fool ourselves.

Finally, I will observe this. Hard copy dictionaries are not being produced for many reasons -demand has dropped in the digital age. Also, the English language is being changed daily by new words - legitimate words like LOL, smh, etc. Languages were never meant to be static, but to evolve with use and need, What we see as a corruption of the language, the West sees as new additions to language. Westerners have supreme self-confidence. I don't know what we have. Whatever it is, it lacks confidence in our abilities to shape the world.

Languages as we know them are dying. Including the English Language. In their place, for good or for bad, is new language.

- Ikhide

 

- Ikhide

 

Stalk my blog at www.xokigbo.com

Follow me on Twitter: @ikhide

Join me on Facebook: www.facebook.com/ikhide

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From: Michael Afolayan <mafolayan@yahoo.com>
To: "usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com" <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Sunday, September 2, 2012 9:28 PM
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are There Native English Speakers in Nigeria?

Sad - very sad indeed! You had a scary but true observation, Farooq! Everywhere I also went in Nigeria this past summer I observed the same trend and it broke my heart. I was saddened by the fact that the new generation falls in the category of those Nigerian "Native English Speakers,"for lack of a better term, who have no competence in any language whatsoever. They are neither native speakers, near-native speakers, nor non-native speakers, just a rapid growing population of Nigerians with no linguistic pedigree. These children don't speak their indigenous languages and they don't know how to speak English either. One nice fourth grader once told me his mom already "bathed" my car. I did not know where to start to teach him but I tried. Ironically, I learned he was still the best among his peers - others knew less and spoke worse English! But to be fair to those children, shouldn't we ask what roles the parents are playing in the process of "illiteratizing" their children? Shouldn't we ask what roles the teachers are playing in under-teaching (or unteaching) those kids? And even equally important, shouldn't we ask the print media what kinds of English grammar they imprint on the pages of the Nigerian newspapers these children are exposed to everyday? Out Center in Nigeria, Center for Language in Education and Development (CELED), which advocates mother tongue education and instruction has often faced the uphill battle of convincing anyone of the significance of mother tongue education and/or instruction in school. Our people have forgotten that no society that is technologically and scientifically advanced today acquires its education in the language of others. At any rate, I hope our governments (federal, state, etc) would just be sensitive enough to this language problem which has become so pervasive in our country that they would re-examine their educational policies from preschool to tertiary. We can only hope! Again, thanks Farooq, and as always, your words make sense. Keep writing!

Michael O. Afolayan
From the Land of Lincoln
 

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From: Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Sent: Sunday, September 2, 2012 11:09 AM
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Are There Native English Speakers in Nigeria?

Are There Native English Speakers in Nigeria?

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Many native English speakers have asked me if there are native speakers of the English language in Nigeria. My answer is always that there are—depending, of course, on what one means by "native speakers." I will explain what I mean shortly.

Increasingly, thousands of Nigerian children in urban areas—especially in southern Nigeria—are growing up monolingual; the only language they speak is English. They don't even speak Nigerian Pidgin English self-consciously. That technically makes English their "mother tongue" (although their biological mothers may not speak English as a native tongue) and them "native speakers" of the English language (although they are geographically located in a part of the world where "traditional" native speakers—Brits, Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.—don't live). So what kind of "native" English speakers are Nigeria's English-speaking urban children?

 Before I answer that question, I will like to discuss the categories of English speakers that scholars have identified over the years. The first is "English-as-a-native-language" speakers who live mostly in the West—and in white southern Africa. They acquire the language effortlessly because it is the language of their parents and of their immediate surroundings.

 But "nativeness" in language isn't solely about ethnic identity or culture. It can also be determined by the sequentiality of language acquisition, that is, by determining which language one spoke from birth even if that language isn't the native language of one's parents. A child born to Chinese immigrants in the USA or Britain who speaks only English, for instance, is a native English speaker.

Then you have "English-as-a-second-language" speakers. Speakers of English as a second language come from countries where people have a first—and sometimes a second, even third— language before they learn English, but where English is not only a school subject but also the language of instruction for all subjects at all or most levels of education. In these mostly linguistically plural countries, English often functions as the lingua franca and as the language of the media, government, the courts, elite social interaction, etc. Nigeria, Ghana, India, Kenya, Bangladesh, etc. are examples of countries with English-as-a-second language speakers. English-as-a-second-language speakers can, and often do, achieve near-native proficiency in the language if they work hard at it.

People in this category are, as I've pointed out, at least bilingual, that is, speak two languages, and at most multilingual, that is, speak more than two languages. But because they are disproportionately exposed to English in schools, work places, the media, etc., they are liable to either additive bilingualism (where proficiency in English can strengthen proficiency in the mother tongue and vice versa) and subtractive bilingualism (where proficiency in English can detract from proficiency in the mother tongue or vice versa).

Another category of English speakers is "English-as-a-foreign-language" speakers. People in this category come from non-English-speaking countries and learn English either only as a school subject or as adult learners seeking to get sufficient proficiency in English to be able to study in English-speaking countries, or to just perform basic communicative tasks in the language. Examples are people from China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, France, Spain, etc. 

Nigerians who are confronted with their bad English grammar often protest that people in economically successful countries like Japan, China, and some "Asian Tigers" don't speak English and that, that somehow mitigates their own poor grasp of a language they have been learning from age 5 to adulthood. But that's a bad contrast of contexts. People in those countries aren't English-as-a-second-language speakers, although English may chronologically be the second language they have learned after their native languages. 

In these countries, English isn't the language of instruction at all levels of education; it is just a subject in the educational curriculum—the same way that French, for instance, is in ours. English isn't the language of government in their countries. Nor is English the language of the media. So it is unreasonable to expect the same degree of proficiency in English between English-as-a-foreign-language speakers and English-as-a-second-language speakers.

The last category of English speakers in the scholarly literature is speakers of "English as an alternate language." These are people who live in countries where English is a native language but who have a native language that isn't English. Examples are French Canadians, Native Americans, the Aborigines of Australia, the Maoris of New Zealand, and recent immigrant communities in native-speaker countries who still retain their native languages. These people have access to the native varieties of the English language if they so choose, but they are not technically native speakers because they first acquired a mother tongue before encountering English.

Now, where do urban-dwelling, monolingual, English-speaking Nigerian children fit in these categories? They are not considered "native speakers" of the English language because they don't live in the traditional linguistic habitat of native speakers of the language—UK, USA, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, etc. But they are not, technically speaking, English-as-a-second-language speakers because English is chronologically their first—and, for that matter, only—language. Plus, it is the only language their parents speak to them. And they are certainly not "English-as-an-alternate-language" speakers because they live in an English-as-a-second-language linguistic clime.

However, the English that monolingual Nigerian children speak has all the quintessential characteristics of Nigerian English, an English-as-a-second-language variety. So who are they? I propose that they be classified as speakers of "English as a native second language."

This is obviously clumsy phraseology, but it captures the uniqueness—and, yes, clumsiness—of the situation of urban, English-only, Nigerian children. They speak a variety of English that will mostly certainly lead native speakers of the language in the UK, the US, Canada, etc. to think that the children speak another language before— or in addition to— English. But they don't. Their English has all the "mother-tongue interferences" that their parents' and teachers' English has. Yet they do not speak any native Nigerian language and therefore don't have the linguistic cognitive structures that lead to "mother tongue interference" in English. It seems to me fitting to describe them as "native speakers" of an "English-as-a-second language" variety.

The problem with this category of English speakers is that their "native" status doesn't guarantee the same level of effective communication in the language as traditional native speakers. As one linguist beautifully put it, 

"The mother tongue is an indispensable instrument for the development of the intellectual, moral and physical aspects of education. It is a subject thought and by which other subjects can be tackled, understood and communicated. Clarity of thought and expression is only possible when one has a certain command over the mother tongue. Weakness in any other subject means weakness in that particular subject only, but weakness in the mother tongue means the paralysis of all thought and the power of expression. Deep insight, fresh discoveries, appreciation and expansion of ideas are only possible when one understands the subject through being able to assimilate and be stimulated by the ideas of the subject."

Replace "mother tongue" in the above quotation with "English" and you will appreciate the peculiar situation of monolingual, English-speaking Nigerian children. Next week, I will highlight the peculiar English expressions that are typical of Nigerian children and compare them with known native-speaker varieties. Keep a date.

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