Nigerianisms, Americanisms, Briticisms and Communication Breakdown (I)

Besides, he often adds, we can’t legitimately talk of Nigerian English since such a variety is neither codified in any systematic manner nor does it enjoy any prestige or recognition in the pantheon of the world’s Englishes. But, socio-linguistically speaking, that is a notoriously untenable justification for denying the existence of Nigerian English. Nigerian English, […]

Besides, he often adds, we can’t legitimately talk of Nigerian English since such a variety is neither codified in any systematic manner nor does it enjoy any prestige or recognition in the pantheon of the world’s Englishes. But, socio-linguistically speaking, that is a notoriously untenable justification for denying the existence of Nigerian English.

Nigerian English, in spite of what any swaggering semantic purist might say, does exist. As I have consistently shown in this column, it has identifiable stylistic imprints, idiosyncratic vocabularies, distinctive turns of phrases, and is spoken and written habitually by our intellectual, media, and political elites. That it has not been consciously codified and systematized is inconsequential to its materiality.

As I will show shortly, Nigerian English is distinctive enough that its semantic and structural deviations from the dominant, so-called standard varieties have real material consequences for its speakers who have been geographically displaced from its primordial habitat, that is, Nigeria.

A couple of days ago, I saw a black man at the post office here in downtown Atlanta. He looked transparently bewildered and frustrated. And, because his looks struck me as manifestly Nigerian, I walked up to him and introduced myself. I then asked if he was Nigerian. My hunch was accurate: he just recently migrated to the United States. So why was he irritated and disoriented?

He told me it was because “these damn Americans” couldn’t understand him when he said he wanted to take a “passport.” He was directed (misdirected, it turned out) to the post office from CVS pharmacy where he first went to take a “passport.” Although he saw a photographer who obviously took “passports,” he was told to go to the nearby post office if he wanted a “passport.”

But the guys at the post office asked him for proof of American citizenship when he told them he wanted to take a “passport.” “Can you imagine that? Proof of citizenship to take a damn passport!” He seethed with raw, gnawing, impotent rage as he recounted his experiences to me.

This poor guy, who is only a few months old here, was suffering the material consequence of his Nigerian English. What we call “passport” in Nigerian English, I told him, Americans call “passport photos” or “ID photos.” I said to him that the Americans thought he wanted the government-issued document that you show when you enter or leave a country.

“But I didn’t say I wanted an international passport,” my acquaintance protested. Well, “passport” is the only word Americans (and Britons) use to denote the government-issued document for international travel. If he had said he wanted an “international passport,” I told him, he would probably never have been directed to the post office; he might have been advised to travel to his home country—or anywhere but America. The phrase “international passport” conveys a radically different meaning to an American from what it does to a Nigerian English speaker.

In contemporary American English, the word “international” is often used as the semantic equivalent for the term “foreign.” For instance, students from outside America aren’t called “foreign students” here; they are usually called “international students.” American news media organizations don’t call their non-American operations “foreign news desks”; they call them “international news desks.” (My friend at CNN tells me that Americans now prefer “international” to “foreign” because “foreign” can suggest an invidious “othering.” Never mind that in official documents, their government refers to non-American residents as “aliens,” which is more alienating–pun intended–than “foreign”!)

So, it is entirely conceivable that an American would understand “international passport” to mean the passport of a country other than America. My explanations mollified my Nigerian acquaintance. He went back to CVS Pharmacy. He now knew better than to say he wanted to take a passport; he told them he wanted to take an “ID photo” and had it without any further incident.

Several such encounters must be happening on a regular basis as the Nigerian diaspora in the West continues to expand, especially through the Green Card Lottery program.

I can also imagine recently arrived Nigerian immigrants in America having a communication breakdown with their American interlocutors when they use the idiom “pass out” in the peculiar way we use it in Nigeria. We use “pass out” to mean “graduate,” usually from a high school, as in: “I passed out of [or from] Okuta Community High School last year.”

This usage, of course, owes its provenance to British English where “pass out” is used to mean “graduate from a military college.” But the only sense of “pass out” known to most Americans is the idiom’s usage to mean “faint.” If you tell an American that you “passed out” of a school, she would probably think you mean that you had fainted at that school!

But it’s not only in America that our peculiar Nigerian English expressions can cause a communication breakdown. For instance, “go-slow,” our expression for traffic jam (which we sometimes extend metaphorically to connote sloth, grinding red tape, insouciance, or governmental inaction—a reason that the late President Musa Yar’adua was nicknamed “Baba Go-slow”) is the name for a form of industrial protest in Britain where workers deliberately slow down their work.

It isn’t a far-fetched scenario that a newly arrived Nigerian immigrant in the UK could tell his British boss that he was late to work because of a “go-slow.” And that could get him fired! The boss might think he was on a one-man industrial protest, or that other workers were on a go-slow and that coming late to office was his own way of observing the go-slow in the workplace.

Well, the truth, though, is that speakers of other varieties of English face the same kinds of communication shocks that Nigerians face when they leave their primordial shores. New Zealanders, for instance, find that they get quizzical stares from Americans, Canadians, and Britons— indeed from everyone but a New Zealander—when they use the expression “it didn’t eventuate” to mean “it didn’t happen.”