Have you ever sent an email to someone or some people in the United States, Canada, Britain or some other English-speaking Western country and didn't get a response? Well, it is entirely possible that your email didn't even make it to their inbox. If it did, it is also possible that certain uniquely Nigerian expressions in your email that were popularized in the West by Nigerian email scam artists triggered a scam alarm and caused you to be ignored. What are these "419 English" expressions that are like waving a red flag in front of a bull in the West?
First some context. A few days ago, a Nigerian Facebook friend of mine, who is also a professor here in the United States, put up a status update that inspired this column. He wrote: "Was I really wrong? Was the professor at the other end of the telephone line correct? She read my email and decided to withdraw her offer of introducing me to people in environmental education because my written English 'is suspect.' So I asked her to give me an example of something I expressed incorrectly. The first example was 'I hope to read from you soon.' She said the correct expression is 'I hope to hear from you soon.'
"I cleared my throat and informed her that it was not a face-to-face communication and that I thought the word to hear did not fit into a totally text-based communication. She did not sound impressed and till date never returned my calls. Should I change my communication style and let orality creep into my text? Does anyone know the rules about such things?"
As I wrote in my contribution to his update, the American professor who called his English "suspect" and stopped communicating with him on the basis of his "suspect" English was most certainly rude and uncharitable. Unfortunately, however, ending email communication with "I hope to read from you soon" is not only unconventional among native English speakers; it's also one of the core phrases associated with 419 emails from Nigeria, which is frankly unfair because it's part of the lexical and expressive repertoire of Nigerian English. It's the worst example of what I call the pathologization of the linguistic singularities of a people.
However, this incident should cause us to reflect on the place of Nigerian English in inter-dialectal English communication, especially because 419 emails have done more to popularize Nigerian English to the rest of the English-speaking world than anything else. That means the stylistic imprints of scam emails from Nigeria vicariously criminalize many innocent Nigerians, as the Nigerian professor's case and similar other unreported cases have shown.
Concerns about authorship attribution of fraudulent e-mail communications emerged fairly early in studies of Internet fraud. Computational linguists and information systems specialists have deployed strategies to perform software forensics with intent to identify the authors of fraudulent e-mails. Oliver de Vel and his colleagues, for instance, employed a Support Vector Machine learning algorithm for mining e-mail content based on its structural characteristics and linguistic patterns in order to provide authorship evidence of scam e-mails for use within a legal context.
I know this because about 10 years ago I did research on the rhetorical strategies and stylistic imprints of 419 emails. In the course of my research I came across several forensic linguistic programs that developed email authorship identification markers based solely on phrases and expressions that are unique to 419 email scams. The software developed from these programs helps people automatically trash "419-sounding" emails.
The problem, as you can expect, is that the software also deletes many legitimate emails from honest Nigerians since the alarm triggers for the software are uniquely Nigerian English expressions. "Hope to read from you soon" features prominently in the repertoire of "red-flag" expressions the software uses to identify 419 emails. (For evidence, search "I hope to read from you soon" on Google and see what comes up).
When my friend quoted his American acquaintance as saying that his English was "suspect" based on certain expressions, such as "I hope to read from you soon," I knew immediately that the American was hinting that some of his expressions raised Nigerian 419 email authorship identification red flags. The professor is probably familiar with 419 email authorship identification programs and the phrases that trigger them.
One won't be entirely wrong to call the whole host of 419 email authorship identification programs as engaging in borderline linguistic racism because they basically pathologize and criminalize the stylistic idiosyncrasies of an entire non-native English variety. All of us who were born and educated in Nigeria can't escape Nigerian English inflections in our quotidian communicative encounters every once in a while. The 419 scam artists write the way they do because they are the products of the Nigerian linguistic environment. It's like isolating American English expressions that appear regularly in the emails of American scammers and developing an authorship identification program based on these expressions so that any email from any American, including even the American president, that uses any stereotyped American English expression is automatically "suspect."
Well, instead of dwelling in self-pitying lamentation, I've decided to highlight some of the stock Nigerian English expressions that email authorship identification programs use to identify Nigerian 419 email scammers—and unfairly criminalize many honest Nigerians.
School of Communication & Media
Kennesaw State University
Cell: (+1) 404-573-9697
Personal website: www.farooqkperogi.com
"The nice thing about pessimism is that you are constantly being either proven right or pleasantly surprised." G. F. Will
TF:This "outrught (ly)* war is all my fault.I used the word innocently recently without ever knowing that it had been explicutly banned as non-standard by English Professor Farooq (Faruk?) on these boards. One of my usual caterwauling trasducers - fancifully called Nebukadineze (Nebukadnezzer?) - then wrote that it was not an English word at all, only for me to show that it exists in several reputable online dictionaries (I have not bought a physical dictionary in forty yesrs), only for Farooq to write that only words in the physical Oxford dictionary count, particularly in polite company should be used by educated professorial l elites like himself and yours truly.But before Farooq actually came into the war - I know I shouldn't start a sentence with "but*, but who is grading? - I had teased him by once signing off as mimicking him. He took the bait in Trumpian fashion - with his admirers and detractors then taking him on ever since with Trumpian- and Clintonian-support gusto. He has in the process shown himself as a true English Language (Sergeant) Major, no pun intended.
May I confess that in my 1970 WAEC, I got an A1 in English Language and Physics, A2 in Literature, Mathematics and Chemistry and A3 in French and Biology (with a torrid C4 in BK which leaked in my year and had to be re-taken). Emulating one weird friend also prepsring for WASCE, I read a dictionary daily, seeking a new word (and its usage and pronunciation) each day. So I was really torn between becoming a Kperogi or myself - but God saved me, and I became an Engineer!So let us move on. I will continue to use words as I see fit. If you don't know the meaning of any word that I use, please ask, and I will tell you. If it is not in the dictionary of your choice, please add it to the next edition - and I would thereby have joined the zillion makers of the language.And there you have it.Bolaji AlukoOn Thursday, October 27, 2016, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu--> wrote: --Dear all:
Three members on this list provide the best in terms of service, far more than I can ever do:
Farooq on sensitivity to words, language, and governance. We cannot thank him enough. I cherish reading all his post and I actually send many of them to my students. I once challenged him in a private message to discuss how we can move forward as a nation as he has fresh ideas which break conventional boundaries and he is not a respecter of traditions that don't work.
Funmi on expanding our reading and creative horizons. We cannot thank her enough. I don't know her, and I was touched as to how she reacted when she lost a friend and a relation, the professor killed by his driver.
Yona on resources to transform the continent. We are grateful.
The recent discussion on "outright" and "outrightly", to me, contains outright distractions which may be outrightly unnecessary. Stop.
Let us celebrate greatness when we see one: these three talented people are doing this generation a lot of service. Farooq is not driving down his ideas down anyone's throat, just as prophets of change don't accompany their words with AK47; Funmi is not calling anyone an illiterate for not reading her weekly recommended texts; and Yona is not asking anyone to use the resources.
Stay blessed, we all. I use "we all" in a deliberate version. Language is located in context and tradition: what is after 6 is more than 7. Someone sees 7, but others can see 13! If you see 13, do not think the one who sees 7 is wrong.TF
Toyin FalolaDepartment of HistoryThe University of Texas at Austin104 Inner Campus DriveAustin, TX 78712-0220USA512 475 7224512 475 7222 (fax)
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