The Nigerian English, undoubtedly, is a full-fledged variety of the English. Evidently, as a second language users of the English, the Nigerian English is the only version of English available and obtainable by Nigerians living in the country. The nature of this variety is that it allows us to communicate and express our social and cultural realities in the language spontaneously and effortlessly.
That is, it is a language variety that has been linguistically domesticated, localised, indigenised and nativised to capture our socio-cultural worldview. However, while this regional variety is characteristically peculiar to us, it is imperative to note the the Nigerian English is not an embodiment of grammatical misconstructions. On this note, it is deemed necessary to distinguish between the standard Nigerian English from the other one I ascribe as Nigerian blunders.
The Nigerian blunders, simply put, are expressions that do not conform to the grammatical rules of the English language and thereby distorting and truncating meaningful communication. To start with, there is nothing Nigerian about saying; “Ashake is an upcoming global artiste’’. The fact is that the utterance is a blunder. It is rather better to say; “Ashake is an up-and-coming global artiste’’ in order to make meaningful sense. Moving on, the idiomatic expressions as: “Make haste while the sun shines’’ and “what is good for the goose is good for the gander’’ are outright nonstandard. The implication of these expressions is that they could be misinterpreted by anyone outside Nigerian clime. For global intelligibility, the foregoing idioms can be rendered as “make hay while the sun shines’’ and “what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander’’ respectively.
Also, it is a misconception which is borne out of ignorance to describe a person who talks excessively as "lousy". Rather, such individual can be described as a garrulous or talkative person. Again, the Nigerian English does not permit anyone to say “night vigil’’, “wake-keeping’’ or faithfuls. Instead, you can simply say: vigil, wake/ christian wake and faithful (regardless the number).
To simply end, this lesson will be in series as there are still a lot to unravel about the Nigerian English with the view of rectifying the common pitfalls many of us make in communication. Therefore, I enjoin you to stay blessed till next week Wednesday.
© 21st of September 2022,
Damilare Adeleye
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