Divided by a Common Language: A Comparison of Nigerian, American and British English more

In: Multiculturalism in the Age of the Mosaic Editor: Michael Ọladẹjọ Afọláyan, pp 53-63. ISBN 978-1-60876-995-7 © 2010 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. Chapter 5 DIVIDED BY A COMMON LANGUAGE: A COMPARISON OF NIGERIAN, AMERICAN AND BRITISH ENGLISH Farooq A. Kperogi Department of Communication, Georgia State University, Atlanta We all know that there is such a thing as British English; it is the progenitor of all subsequent “Englishes” (as professional linguists awkwardly call national and sub-regional varieties of the English language) in the world. And we do, of course, know that there is American English, not only because it is the earliest national variety to rebel against some of the quirky conventions of British English—a fact that inspired the celebrated Irish writer George Bernard Shaw to famously remark that “England and America are two countries divided by a common language” (see Pinto, 2000, p. 19)— but also because America’s current preeminent position in the world ensures that its variety of English is now relentlessly universalized through a scarcely perceptible but nonetheless powerful process of pop-cultureinduced linguistic osmosis. What of Nigerian English? Is there such a thing as Nigerian English? If there is, how is it different from and similar to British and American English? If there isn’t, why do Nigerians have such radically idiosyncratic usage patterns that set them apart from other users of the English language? Well, John Ogu (1992) has pointed that as early as 1967 N. G. Walsh called attention to the existence of a distinct variety of English called “Nigerian English.” He quoted Walsh to have observed that “The varieties of English spoken by educated Nigerians, no matter what their language, have enough features in common to mark off a general type, which may be called Nigerian English (1992: 88). CONCEPTUALIZING NIGERIAN ENGLISH While I do not want to get caught up in the definitional and conceptual squabbles among professional linguists over the meaning, scope, and content of Nigerian English (see, for example, Bamgbose, 1982; Jibril, 1986; Jowitt, 1991; Ajani, 2007) I think it is useful that I briefly operationalize my conception of it. By Nigerian English I do not mean Nigerian 53 Farooq A. Kperogi Pidgin English. Nor do I mean the English spoken by uneducated and barely educated Nigerians. I mean the variety of English that is broadly spoken and written by Nigeria’s literary, intellectual, political, and media elite across the regional and ethnic spectrums of Nigeria. I know this definition is barefacedly elitist. But this is true of all “standard” varieties of all “modern” languages in the world (Milroy, 2002). What is called British Standard English, for instance, is no more than the idiosyncratic usage of the language by the English royalty— and by the political, intellectual, literary, and media elite of the country (see Wales, 1994). The social and intellectual snobbery of the French language is even more blatant. There is a French language academy that not only consciously privileges the elite dialect of the language but that also polices its usage all over the world (for a history of the French Academy, see Vincent, 1901). An additional problem with my definition is that Nigerian English has not yet been purposively standardized. To this day, Nigerian English teachers and even some professional linguists still dismiss it as mere “bad English” (Ajani, 2007). I remember that when I served as an English language examiner for the West African Examinations Council (WAEC) in 1997, our team leader instructed us to penalize students who wrote “Nigerian English.” The irony, however, is that no Nigerian who was educated at home, including those who deride Nigerian English, can help writing and speaking English in ways that reflect their sociolinguistic singularities. It is a legitimate national variety that has evolved, over several decades, out of Nigeria’s unique experiences as a post-colonial, polyglot nation. It was the legendary Chinua Achebe who once said, in defense of his creative semantic and lexical contortions of the English language to express uniquely Nigerian socio-cultural thoughts that have no equivalents in English, that any language that has the cheek to leave its primordial shores and encroach on the territory of other people should learn to come to terms with the inevitable reality that it would be domesticated (Achebe, 1997; Ohaeto, 1997). Well, perhaps, it is not altogether unreasonable to aspire to write and speak English that closely approximates the way it is written and spoken in America and Britain, especially because of concerns for mutual intelligibility. However, when the existing semantic and syntactic resources of the English language are miserably incapable of serving local communicative needs, speakers are left with only two options: neologism (that is, invention of new words or phrases) and semantic extension (that is, encoding existing English words and phrases with meanings that are absent in the original, but which encapsulate the speakers’ distinctive socio-linguistic experiences). SOURCES OF NIGERIAN ENGLISH It seems to me that there are four fundamental sources of Nigerian English. The first source is linguistic improvisation. There are many unique Nigerian socio-cultural thoughts that simply cannot be expressed in the “standard” form of the English language. So Nigerians either translate their local languages to take care of this lack, or they appropriate existing English words and phrases and imbue them with meanings that serve their communicative purposes. When Chinua Achebe wrote in Things Fall Apart, for instance, that “proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten,” (Achebe, 1996, p. 5) he was consciously Divided by a Common Language appropriating English lexical items to express a uniquely Igbo cultural thought, which doesn’t make any sense to a native English speaker. A second source of Nigerian English is drawn from innocent grammatical errors initially committed by Nigeria’s media and political elite and repeated several times in the mass media. In time, these errors got fossilized and incorporated into what one might call the Nigerian linguistic repertoire. This mode of language change, of course, takes place in all other varieties of English, including British and American English, as I will show shortly. A third source is old-fashioned British English idioms and expressions that have lost currency in Britain since the 1960s. Idioms such as “bad eggs” and expressions such as “more power to your elbow” (usually rendered as “more grease to your elbow” in Nigeria) are intelligible only to older British speakers. The fourth source is derived from Americanisms interspersed with British English to create a unique identity that is both American and British and, in a sense, neither American nor British. In what follows, I will compare the Nigerian, American and British varieties of the English language. In doing this, I will be guided by the four main fountains of Nigerian English that I have identified: linguistic improvisation, old-fashioned British expressions, initial usage errors fossilized over time and incorporated into the Nigerian linguistic repertory, and a mishmash of British and American English. LINGUISTIC IMPROVISATION Perhaps the most contemporary example of Nigerian linguistic creativity is the appropriation and contortion of the word “flash”— and its inflections “flashing” and “flasher”—in the vocabulary of Nigerian mobile telephony. Neither American English nor British English—nor, for that matter, any other variety of English in the world— uses these words the way Nigerians do. The closest semantic equivalent in both British and American English to what Nigerians call “flashing” is “buzz.” To “flash” someone in Nigerian English is place a purposively momentary call to their cell phone as a way to tell them to call the number back because the caller has insufficient units in their cell phone to sustain a long call. (In Nigeria, cell phone users are not charged for receiving a call). What of “flasher”? In Nigerian English it means someone who “flashes,” that is, one who places a momentary call to a cell phone, whereas in both British and American English, a flasher is someone, usually a man, who has a compulsive desire to expose his genitals in public! During a recent visit to Nigeria, a friend who had “buzzed” my phone incessantly jokingly said he was a “professional flasher”! He had no idea what a “flasher”— or, even worse, a “professional flasher”— meant in standard American and British English until I told him. He was, of course, shocked. He asked if he could use the word “buzzer” since I said “buzz” is the closest word that describes the sense Nigerians convey when they say we “flash” someone’s phone. But buzzer is just another word for a doorbell. Similarly, the use of the phrase “well done” as a form of salutation for someone who is working is peculiarly Nigerian. Nigerians use it to approximate such expressions as “sannu da aiki” in Hausa, “eku ise” in Yoruba, “ka soburu” in Batonu (my language), which have no parallels in American and British English. In both American and British English, “well done” either functions as an adjective to describe thoroughly cooked food or meat (Example: I like Farooq A. Kperogi my food well done), or as an exclamation expressive of applause— synonymous with “bravo.” It is also used as an adjective to describe something that has been executed with diligence and skill. It is not part of the cultural repertoire of people in the West to reserve a special form of salutation for people who are working. Another distinctively Nigerian expression is “naming ceremony.” Since the native speakers of the English language do not celebrate the christening of their children the way people do in Nigeria, they have no need for a “naming ceremony.” But Nigerians do. So they creatively coined it. What of the expression, “quite an age!” to mean “long time, no see”? (The phrase “long time no see,” by the way, was originally an exclusively Chinese English expression, by way of Hong Kong, before it was accepted into Standard British English. Perhaps some Nigerian coinages will also be incorporated into standard American and British English some day). Well, it is also a Nigerian improvisation. Interestingly, I learned that expression from my secondary school English teacher who was such a fastidious semantic purist that he wanted us to write and speak English in ways that would make the Queen of England envious! I actually only realized that the expression is distinctly Nigerian when neither my American friends nor my British professor in graduate school could decipher it. The way Nigerians use the word “sorry” is also a good example of linguistic creativity. They have expanded the word’s original native English meaning from a mere exclamation to indicate an apology to an exclamation to express concern for a misfortune (such as when someone skips a step and falls). Nigerians use it whether or not they are responsible for the misfortune. This usage of the word, which is completely absent in American and British English, is an approximation of such expressions as “sannu fa” in Hausa, “pele o” in Yoruba, “ndo” in Igbo, “kpure kpure” in Batonu, etc—all special expressions to express empathy over other people’s personal misfortunes. For Nigerians, the American and British phrases to indicate concern over people’s little personal mishaps seem distant and lacking warmth. Nigerians also have a whole host of euphemisms, especially for excretory activities, that absolutely make no sense in American and British English. For instance, Nigerians use the expression “spoil the air” (or its other variations such as “pollute the air,” or simply “pollute”) to mean fart. Most Nigerian cultures are prudish and resent directness in discussing excretory activities. A similarly distinctive Nigerian euphemism, which I too didn’t know was uniquely Nigerian until I came to the United States, is the expression “to ease oneself,” which Nigerians use to cover a multitude of sins in the toilet! Where Nigerians would say “I want to ease myself,” Americans would say “I need to go to the bathroom” or, if it’s a public building, “I need to go to the restroom.” One day I told a friend in Louisiana that I wanted to “ease myself.” He was completely lost. When I had occasion to meet with my British professor of English, I told her about this. (We used to spend our spare time ridiculing American English since Nigerian English is a close cousin—or a child, if you like—of British English.) I told her Americans had no clue what I meant when I said I wanted to “ease myself.” She was silent for an uncomfortably long time. Then she said, “I am afraid I too have no idea what that means.” I knew then I was alone. Another example of linguistic improvisation in Nigerian English is the use of the expression “co-wife” or “co-wives” to refer to female partners in polygamous marriages. Divided by a Common Language Americans and Britons do not have an equivalent lexical notation for this since polygamy is, in fact, a crime for which people go to prison. In the last 15 years or so, it has also become customary for Nigerians to arrange “sendforth parties” as an organized expression of goodwill for people who are about to leave them for a new place or for a new venture. This expression, which seems to have originated as a coinage by Nigerian born-again Christians, would certainly make no sense to many Americans and Britons. Its equivalent in standard British and American English is “send-off” (note that Nigerians also say “send-off party” although “send-off” is a noun, not an adjective, in American and British English) or “farewell celebration” or, rarely, “bon voyage.” Americans also call it a “leaving party.” Nigerians coined the expression “send-forth party” because “send-off” seems aloof, even hostile. The adverb “forth” appears to Nigerians to convey a connotation of forward motion, of advancement, while “off” strikes them as suggesting departure with no expectation of return. So Nigerian born-again Christians who coined this phrase argue that to say they send people off creates the impression that they derive perverse pleasure in those people’s departure from them. But linguists would call this reasoning naïve, if not downright ignorant, because the definition of an idiom—which is what this phrase is— is that it is an expression whose meaning cannot be inferred from the meanings of the individual words that make it up (Chitra, 1996). OLD-FASHIONED BRITISH ENGLISH Old-fashioned British English is a robust resource for Nigerian English (Awonusi, 1990). Such expressions as “bad eggs” to mean bad people, “men of the underworld” to refer to criminals, “harlot” as a synonym for prostitute, “parastatal,” to denote an autonomous subunit of a government ministry, “trafficator” to mean indicator or blinker (what Americans also call turn indicator or turn signal), “trafficate” to mean “use the indicator,” “vulcanise” to mean repair a puncture—and “vulcaniser to mean someone who “vulcanizes”— etc have lost currency in Britain. The “Irish English” expression “more power to your elbow” (often distorted to “more grease to your elbow” in Nigerian English) is another British archaism that enjoys currency in Nigerian English. But why do Nigerians render it as “more grease to your elbow”? It seems to me that it is because of the false attraction of the unrelated idiom “elbow grease,” which simply means hard work, that is, the use of physical energy. (Example: the job of a carpenter requires a lot of elbow grease). USAGE ERRORS NORMALIZED OVER TIME This is where Nigerian grammarians argue intensely: should they treat clear cases of usage errors as legitimate deviations that deserve to be dignified and incorporated into the corpus of Nigerian English? Are they not rewarding sloppiness and intellectual laziness—and ridiculing Nigerians in the process— if they do that? These are perfectly legitimate questions. Farooq A. Kperogi However, the normalization of usage errors that are repeated by the educated elite is not exclusive to Nigerian English. There is a surfeit of such examples in British and American Standard English, the most prominent being the misuse of the phrase “due to” by Queen Elizabeth II. In traditional grammar, “due” is an adjective, and when it is followed by the preposition “to” it should be attached to a noun (example: the cancellation of the event was due to the rain). The use of “due to” at the beginning of a sentence in the sense of “because of” or “owing to” was considered uneducated. But when the Queen, in a Speech from the Throne, said “Due to inability to market their grain, prairie farmers have been faced for some time with a serious shortage,” this “uneducated” usage gained respectability (Greenbaum and Whitcut, 1988, p.227). A more recent example is the use of the word “illegals” by the American media to refer to illegal immigrants. The word initially met with hostility from grammarians in America because “illegal” is said to be an adjective that should not be used as a noun. But this usage is now gradually being accepted. Similarly, the use of the pronouns “them” and “their” as gender-neutral, generic forms (as in, “everybody should bring THEIR book”) now enjoys wide currency in both British and American English, even though it was once considered an unpardonable solecism. The time-honored admonition against the use of conjunctions (such as “and” and “but”) to start a sentence is also no longer obeyed anywhere. And that’s why this sentence begins with “and”! Also, the expression “both the two of them,” which is now perfectly acceptable in American English, was initially greeted with hostility by syntacticians who thought (rightly, I think) that it was gratuitously tautological since “both” expresses “two-ness.” The word “normalcy” which now enjoys widespread currency and acceptability is also believed to have initially been a malapropism (confused with the more correct “normality”) introduced to the English language by former U.S. president Warren G. who Harding (Jenkins, n.d.). So Nigerians need not feel inadequate because they have also congealed and normalized usage errors. Nigerians, for instance, use the word “disvirgin” to mean “deprive of virginity.” However, there is no word like “disvirgin” in any American and British English dictionary. Americans and Britons use “deflower” to express the sense Nigerians convey when they use “disvirgin.” Curiously, the word “deflower” is not part of Nigerians’ active idiolect. Contemporary Nigerian usage has even extended the original sense of “deflower” in the use of the word “disvirgin.” Now when people use their passports (which Nigerians also uniquely call “international passports”) for the first time, they say they have “disvirgined” their “international passport!” Another rich wellspring of this strand of Nigerian English comes from the confusion of parts of speech. An example of this kind of usage error that has gained currency—and respectability—is the way Nigerians use the word “opportune.” The word is used as if it were a verb when, in fact, it is an adjective in British and American English. It is common to hear Nigerian politicians say “I have been opportuned to serve my people”—or suchlike expression. Opportune, which simply means “well-timed” (example: “the opportune arrival of the policeman saved him”) cannot have a past tense because it is not a verb; it’s an adjective. The error arises, perhaps, from thinking that “opportune” is a derivative of “opportunity.” The widespread use of the phrase “barbing salon” to mean hairdressing salon or barber’s shop— and “barb” to mean have a haircut— belong to this category of usage error. Nigerians use “barb” as a backformation from barber—a hairdresser who cuts hair and shaves beards as a trade. But in American and British English, “barb” denotes, among several meanings, the Divided by a Common Language pointed part of a type of wire. It is also used metaphorically to refer to an aggressive remark directed at a person. When it is used as a verb, it usually means to “provide with barbs,” that is, to put barbs in a fence. The use of “barb” to mean “have a haircut” is entirely meaningless to native speakers of the English language. So is the phrase “barbing salon.” Another usage error that enjoys wide currency in Nigerian English is the addition of the “-ly” forms to words that are already adverbs. Prominent examples are, “outrightly” and “downrightly.” In British and American Standard English, these words are both adjectives and adverbs, and do not take the “-ly” form in the sense of “beautifully,” “utterly,” etc. An additional province of usage errors from which Nigerian English has emerged and continues to emerge is the misuse (or, in some cases, lack of use) of prepositions. For instance, Nigerians are fond of saying that a place is “conducive” without adding the preposition “to” to make a complete sense—that is, by the standards of American and British English where “conducive” always co-occurs with the preposition “to.” Where American and British speakers of the English language would say “our universities are not conducive TO learning,” Nigerians would say “our universities are not conducive.” Other widespread usage errors that have now been normalized are: the use of the phrase “hot drink” to mean “hard drink,” that is, alcoholic beverage or liquor; “talk less of” to mean “let alone;” “of recent” to mean “recently” on the model of “of late;” “plate-number” instead of “number-plate;” “instalmentally” instead of “in installments”; “spent horse” instead of “spent force” (example: “that politician is now a spent force”); “wash a film” instead of “develop a film;” “beer parlor,” instead of “bar;” “rentage” instead of “rent.” There is another category of usage errors in Nigeria that I like to call bad grammar about grammar. By this I mean the tendency of Nigerians to misuse or encipher the terminologies of grammarians with unique meanings. For instance, Nigerians use “grammar” to mean unfamiliar words, what George Orwell once elegantly called “exaggerated Latinisms” (Orwell, 1946). Grammar merely means the branch of linguistics that is concerned with syntax (arrangement of words in sentences), morphology (rules for forming words) and, sometimes, semantics (study of meaning). What of “jargon”? I grew up thinking that “jargon” meant grammatically incorrect, nonsensical English. The word only means the specialized technical vocabulary of a group or a discipline, which is usually not accessible to the general populace, as in, the jargon of the legal/medical/journalistic profession. But it is not unusual to hear many educated Nigerians tell people, in a state of anger, that they are “speaking jargons” even when the accused are speaking plain English. I guess it’s because the word almost sounds like “jagajaga”— a Nigerian Pidgin English word that encapsulates everything Nigerians deem objectionable. Then you have “colloquial English,” which Nigerians use to mean bad, old-fashioned English. In British and American English, however, colloquial English simply means conversational English, that is, informal spoken English as opposed to formal written English. Everybody—from Britain to America to Nigeria—speaks colloquial English when they speak in casual, everyday settings. Perhaps, Nigerians have such a negative view of the word “colloquial” because it almost sounds like “colonial,” a word that now has a pejorative connotation in Nigeria and elsewhere. Another Nigerian English expression that appears in British English but with an entirely unrelated meaning is “go-slow.” Nigerians use “go-slow” to mean traffic jam—what Americans also call “snarl-up.” In British English, however, “go-slow” is a form of industrial protest where workers, instead of going on an out-and-out strike, deliberately slow down Farooq A. Kperogi work in order to win demands from their employers. (Americans call this a “slowdown”). Nigerians also use expressions like “you can be rest assured that…,” instead of “you can rest assured that…”; “he has long legs” instead of “he is well-connected”; “one hell of trouble” instead of “one hell of a lot of trouble”; “oil bunkering” instead of “oil theft”— when “bunker” is used as a verb, it simply means “to fill with oil.” The word “bunkerer” is uncommon, perhaps non-existent in British and American English. There are expressions like “you cannot eat your cake and have it” instead of the rather illogical but nonetheless correct “you cannot have your cake and eat it.” The Nigerian musician Evi Edna Ogoli’s 1980s hit song titled “You can never eat your cake and have it” especially popularized and conferred respectability on this usage error. But Nigerians are not alone in the practice of distorting the structure and content of popular expressions. All speakers of the English language—from Britain to America— have been “complicit” with some form of distortion of popular sayings and aphorisms. For instance, the popular expression “blood, sweat and tears” is actually a distortion of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speech to the British nation. His exact words were: “blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” The expression “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing” is a distortion of “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” The expression “there is method in my madness” is a misquotation of a passage from Shakespeare’s Hamlet where Polonius observed, “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Likewise, the expression “Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink” is a misquotation of British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s line in Ancient Mariner. In it, he wrote, “Water, water, everywhere, nor any drop to drink” (Greenbaum and Whitcut, 1988, p. 451). The examples are numerous. But we have all got used to these misquotations—or are not even consciousness of them in the first place—because they were committed by the most educated people in the English-speaking world and have been passed down to us. So Nigerian English speakers are only adding to a list that is already too long. Nigerians also impose the plural form on words and expressions that don’t normally have them in British and American English. Examples are: “cutleries,” “an advice” (instead of “a piece of advice”), “ a good news” (instead of simply “good news”), “luggages,” “baggages,” “informations” (instead of “bits/pieces of information”) “invectives,” “equipments,” “slangs” (slang words) “faithfuls,” “offsprings,” “personnels,” “furnitures,” “legislations” (instead of “pieces of legislation), “a beehive of activities” (instead of “a beehive of activity”), etc. Some spelling errors are also widespread in Nigerian newspapers and in the writings of even some educated Nigerians. Some them are: “alot” instead of “a lot,” “infact,” instead of “in fact,” “inspite” instead of “in spite,” “nonchallant,” instead of “nonchalant,” “pronounciation,” instead of “pronunciation,” strenght,” instead of “strength,” “emanciated” instead of “emaciated,” etc. A RAGBAG OF AMERICAN AND BRITISH ENGLISH The trouble with labeling anything American English these days is that American English is now actually international English, which is unrelentingly diluting even British English at an alarming rate. I once read the story of a starry-eyed British linguist who came to America to study how American English deviates from British English. Between the period of his research and the time of the publication of his book, the expressions he identified as uniquely Divided by a Common Language American, which he hoped would amuse and amaze British speakers, had become so commonplace that many British readers wondered what the point of his book was. Today, British English has become so thoroughly Americanized that one has to be really careful when differentiating between the two varieties of English. Perhaps, we can rephrase George Bernard Shaw and say America and England have now become two countries that are increasingly being united by a common language. That is why it no longer makes any sense to learn British English these days since the British are themselves relentlessly Americanizing their English. Having said that, it is still possible to isolate expressions that are peculiarly American and British. And there are instances when Nigerian English brings these two old varieties in a creative, if improper, linguistic conversation. Perhaps the best example I can think of is the word “torchlight,” which Nigerians use to denote a small portable battery-powered electric lamp. The British word for the same object is simply “torch” and the American name for it is “flashlight.” So Nigerians took the British “torch” and combined it with the American “light” to produce a unique word that is both British and American—and neither British nor American! Of course, “torchlight” also exists as a separate word in both British and American English, but it only refers to the light produced by a flashlight—or a torch, if you will. The word “short-knicker” belongs to this category, too. It is also derived from mixing American and British English. “Shorts” is the preferred American word for trousers that end at or above the knee. The British prefer “knickers,” although as I said earlier, American English usage is now so widely spread in Britain that these distinctions are sometimes meaningless. But the important point to note is that Nigerians formed this word when it still made sense to talk of distinct American and British English. I have also found out that Nigerian speakers’ use of the phrase “international passport” to refer to “passport” is traceable to America. By “passport” I am referring to the document issued by a country to its citizens, which allows them to travel abroad and reenter their home countries; I am not referring to “passport photos,” which Nigerians like to call “passports”— against the conventions of British and American English. In American bureaucratic circles, “international passport” is commonly used to denote non-American passports. There is, for instance, the “International Passport Act” and an “International Passport Office Program” in the United States. The act and the program address the passport issues of people from other countries who travel to the United States for various reasons. So “international passport” in America simply means foreign passports. Americans do not generally prefix the adjective “international” when referring to their own passports. Perhaps the first Nigerians that traveled to the United States were confused by this nomenclature and passed down the confusion to other speakers. And the Nigerian English idiom “off head” seems to be traceable to the American “off the top of my head” which is now also common in Britain. Both expressions describe the sense of doing something with little or no preparation or forethought. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS In spite of the foregoing, the truth is that Nigerian, American and British varieties of English are, in reality, more alike than unlike. And my prognosis is that with the phenomenal Farooq A. Kperogi expansion of the Internet all over the world, mutual intelligibility between these varieties of English will continue to increase. This chapter is intended to aid this process. My attitude is that there is no reason for Nigerians to stop using words like “flashing” or “flasher”—and many such linguistic improvisations— when they speak to each other. However, they need to be careful not to use such words outside Nigeria because of possible semantic and cultural ambiguities that could ensue from their usage. Flashing, that is, the public display of nudity, for example, is an offense for which people go to prison in America and Britain. It seems reasonable to expect that Nigerians can cause the original meanings of some of these words and phrases to be expanded to accommodate their unique usage patterns. After all, the people Hong Kong contributed the expression “long time, no see” into the English language, an expression which not only subverts the traditional structure of the English language but was originally meaningless in English because it is a direct translation of Chinese into English. Indian English and African American English have also contributed a lot to the structure and vocabulary of international English. 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