Farooq. has just joined my campaign to call on the federal government to institute without further delay the implementation of all the Nigerian lingua francas across the nation no matter with what accents these accents are being spoken.
Accent refinements can then feature in the second stage consolidation of the programme. Imagine language teachers teaching both Yoruba and English in the North or a Farooq on a sabbatical in Ibadan teaching both English and Hausa.
Come on federal government! You have nothing to lose but stand to gain enormous job creation potentials and an integrated closer Nigerian society.
OAA
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: "Farooq A. Kperogi" <farooqkperogi@gmail.com>
Date: 26/03/2020 17:28 (GMT+00:00)
To: USAAfrica Dialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Haba!
Oga Michael,
School of Communication & Media
As usual, you've made several penetratingly insightful points that bear testimony to your admirable multidisciplinary scholarship. I have an anecdotal experience to support the point you made about how proficiency in written English by a non-native speaker can be notionally "undermined" by the "thickness" of the foreign accent of the speaker.
In the early days of the Internet when I hadn't visited any country where English is spoken as a native language, I used to be active in Yahoo groups. In my cyber interactions at the time, no native speaker believed I was Nigerian. One American grandmother from Illinois (whom I later physically met and with whom I am now friends many years later) was so sure that I was a Londoner lying about being a Nigerian that she asked for my Nigerian number. She thought I either would not be able to provide one or would give her a random Nigerian number. Either way, she thought, her point would be made.
I gave her my number and she called. The fact that I could discuss the content of our group chat convinced her that I was indeed the person I said I was. But I sensed that she was taken aback by the disjunction between the "thickness" of my English accent and the written proficiency she admired during our interaction. When we finally met in 2005, she confessed that she expected to hear a British accent.
Nonetheless, I disagree that "this North-South English usage dichotomy is tantamount to two captives fighting over who cleans the whip of their master the more. We need to snap out of it and put our linguistic house in order."
English is now, for all practical purposes, a non-ethnic language that has emerged as the world's lingua franca. There are now more non-native English speakers in the world than there are native English speakers. So the notion of English as "the whip of [the] master" is, sorry to say, now passé. As you know, I come from a border area. There is no educated Beninese I know who doesn't speak and write very good English--and, we all, of course, know they weren't colonized by Britain.
It turns out that there are more Benin Republic Baatonu people in the US than there are Nigerian Baatonu people. My wife remarked the other day that the Benin Republic Baatonu people she has met here (and in Benin Republic itself when we traveled there in 2016) tend to speak better English than Nigerian Baatonu people.
She is right. Many Nigerians are still burdened by this notion that proficiency in English is a capitulation to neocolonialist domination. Other people in the world have a more instrumentalist attitude to the language: it's nothing more than a passport to social mobility in a world that is dominated and defined, at least for now, by the English language.
As I've always said in my interventions, no one is infragibly wired to express thoughts only in the language of their early socialization. Because all the concepts with which I make sense of the world are learned in English, not in my native Baatonu language, I think in English and express my thoughts better and more coherently in it (with my Baatonu-inflected accent, of course!) than in my native language.
Accentual diversity is natural to all languages. Accents, as you know more than I do, are markers of geo-cultural zones, of social status, of educational socialization, etc. There are several accents in even Oyo Yoruba. And, among my Nigerian Baatonu people, there are at least three different accents; there are way more in Benin Republic.
Among native English speakers, as I pointed out earlier, there's a multiplicity of accents. Some accents are privileged and enjoy prestige. Others are not. That we speak English with different accents from native speakers and mock each other over it, in my opinion, is neither an indication of an internalization of inferiority nor a reason to discard the language.
To give another example, non-native Hausa speakers in West Africa (who now outnumber native speakers) not only speak the Hausa language with different accents but also mock each other's non-native Hausa accents. Heck, Kano Hausa speakers delight in ridiculing the Sokoto dialect of the language called Sakkwatanci. Is that a reason to stop non-native Hausa speakers from speaking Hausa as a lingua franca in their linguistically plural communities? I don't think so.
Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Associate Professor
Journalism & Emerging MediaSchool of Communication & Media
Social Science Building
Room 5092 MD 2207
402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
Twitter: @farooqkperogi
Author of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
On Thu, Mar 26, 2020 at 7:24 AM 'Michael Afolayan' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:
--The subliminal message in Farooq's submission is clear: as long as we lean on the language of others to express our minds, we will continue to wallow in fake ego, self-pity, and/or self putdown. The truth is, we just can't get it right. Period! We are not intrinsically wired to use someone else's language to navigate our communication paths and not miss some steps or even the whole path, especially in the realm of phonetics and even in the overall language use. To paraphrase the rhetorical question of Paulo Freire, how can you name your own world in the words of others and expect it to be hitch-free? My big cousin (our family daddy) is probably one of the best users and writers of the English language on earth, in my subjective estimation. The nonagenarian is a sociolinguist and retired professor of English; but just listen to him speak the English language. His accent is so thick and I bet, an average first language and/or native user of the English language would almost want to use an interpreter to understand when he speaks. Yet, I can't imagine even an Oyinbo person writing better in English than he does. Folks like Professor Abiodun Adetugbo, a foremost dialectologist, would tell you that our dialects or even idiolects affect our articulations and/or dictions. I have seen Obasanjo make his presentations in Yoruba (in his beautiful Egba dialect) and you would have to love it! Like Obasanjo's Yoruba, if Buhari or even our polished friends (Professors Buba, Kperogi or the late Balewa) were to present in Hausa language (BTW, I know Kperogi's MT is Batonou), it would still most likely be better than in the English language.
All that is just the phonology; the language use is another thing altogether!
Look, friends, this North-South English usage dichotomy is tantamount to two captives fighting over who cleans the whip of their master the more. We need to snap out of it and put our linguistic house in order. If we are not careful, we, especially. generations after. ours, will fall victim of what the Yoruba call "Àgbóògbótán Ègùn", a concept well captured in what Professor Awoniyi referred to as being "members of two worlds, citizen of none!"
Michael O. Afoláyan
===On Wednesday, March 25, 2020, 11:15:03 PM CDT, Farooq A. Kperogi <farooqkperogi@gmail.com> wrote:
This is not an issue to be touchy and self-conscious about. When Obasanjo was in power, northerners, especially Hausaphone northerners, also mocked southern Nigerian English accent. I've published letters in my now rested grammar column from readers who derided southern Nigerian accents. Here is an example published on January 20, 2007, which is archived on my blog:
"And one thing [about] the people of southern Nigeria is that their spoken English is not very good. However, they keep thinking that they are the best. [They are] very ignorant until they happen to be in the white man's land when they know [the truth]. A southerner here will pronounce 'mother' as 'murder' and 'occur' (correctly pronounced as something like 'occa') as 'occo,' 'doctor' (pronounced 'docta') as 'docto, and so on.
"On many occasions, you will see President Obasanjo addressing the English-speaking white people who most times resort to using translators fixed to their ears [rather] than listen to him directly. I really don't understand. What is the factor governing the difference in [pronunciation] between the North and South of Nigeria when it comes to English Language?"
In my response to the writer, I dispelled his assumptions and I pointed out that an accent is the unique, phonologically specific, culturally determined, and sometimes unconscious, way we orally express ourselves.
Pronunciation is only part of the story of an accent. You can have a perfect English pronunciation (in any case, there is no such thing as a "perfect" English pronunciation, which explains why pronunciation is not an ingredient of Standard English) and have the "wrong" accent, depending on where you are and who is listening to you.
As far as most non-Nigerians are concerned, interestingly, all Nigerians—whether they are southerners or northerners—have fairly the same national accent with only insignificant, barely perceptible variations. In fact, it's customary for Americans and Europeans to talk about not just a "Nigerian accent" but also an "African accent." Inattentive? Yes! But that's the reality.
Most non-Americans, for instance, also think there is a monolithic American accent, which is, in fact, indistinguishable from Canadian accent. But anyone who lives in America and pays attention knows there are wide regional variations in accents, and that the southern drawl tends to invite the most ridicule nationally.
There is no such thing as a person who has "no accent." As phonologists often remind us, "a person without an accent would be like a place without a climate."
Accents have been used historically to distinguish between in-group members and outsiders. For instance, the term "shibboleth," now understood in everyday speech to mean "a manner of speaking that is distinctive of a particular group of people," was used in ancient Israel to tell one tribe of Jews from the Ephraimites, who reputedly couldn't pronounce the word "shibboleth" because they didn't have the "sh" sound in their own Hebrew dialect.
Farooq
Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.Associate ProfessorJournalism & Emerging Media
School of Communication & MediaSocial Science BuildingRoom 5092 MD 2207402 Bartow Avenue
Kennesaw State University
Kennesaw, Georgia, USA 30144
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.comTwitter: @farooqkperogiAuthor of Glocal English: The Changing Face and Forms of Nigerian English in a Global World
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
--On Wed, Mar 25, 2020 at 6:50 AM Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:
--Many private messages have been sent that Southerners are mocking Northerners over language and accents. And some have been posted with one going viral.
Haba! When Kperogi was talking about verbs and nouns, you all forget that he is not an Igbo man. I don't know that verbs and nouns now have colors.
Haba! When someone says a letter emanating from a state house, a paid media communicator with a degree, is badly written, what as being Kanuri or Hausa go to do with this?
Haba! Have you not heard Gowon speak? Or he speaks well because he is not a Hausaman? Do you not know of a man called "the golden voice of Africa?" Tafawa Balewa, Nigeria's first prime minister!
Haba! Let me show you the recorded Keynote Address by Malami Buba, my Fulani friend; or the writings of Aisha Bawa, my Fulani friend; or of Bunza, my Fulani friend; or Ashafa, my Kaduna friend; or Bishop Kukah, the Zangon-Kataf man. Are they not better than many of the so-called southerners?
Haba! Everything is not about resource control or federal character.
Haba! This nonsense must stop today.
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