Polyglot Nations Look to English as Unifying Force

Concrete melts into adobe as Road A126’s cracked pavement winds deeper into northern Nigeria--past the 10-foot cornstalks of Zaria, past Funtua and its Turkey Multiplication Farm, past the billboard near Langalanga touting throat lozenges that are “Dimpled! Minty! Long-lasting!”

Finally, with tropical Nigeria far behind and the Sahara dead ahead, a parched market town rolls into view: Gusau, a thousand miles from the sea, where scarlet peppers dry under a blistering sun, men transport live goats atop motorcycles and Islamic law guides the community’s every endeavor.

In this distant outpost--populated by Hausas, Fulanis, Ibos and Yorubas, all reared speaking their own ethnic tongues--there is, people say, one unifying force.

“Without English, this society wouldn’t function,” says Basil Ohakwe, a teacher at Sambo Secondary School over on Kaura Namoda Road. “It is what makes Nigeria Nigeria.”

One country with 110 million Africans. More than 300 distinct ethnic groups, each with its own language. And because of this, an unexpected twist: English, a tongue Nigerians never wanted, has become the glue their nation needs to survive.

What they have done with it is happening in nation after nation, blanketing Earth with new ways to communicate: Like India, Singapore, South Africa, the Caribbean and, long ago, America, Nigerians have taken the language of their overlord and made it uniquely, distinctively, their own.

And by doing so, they are changing the world’s definition of what it means to speak English.

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“How de body?”--West African pidgin for “How are you?”

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It never should have been a country; even its most ardent nationalists acknowledge that. It was the creation of competing European colonial powers who carved up Africa by drawing lines on a map. Britain got Nigeria.

But its declaration of independence on Oct. 1, 1960, united the disparate ethnicities in the pursuit of a new nation. English, which had become most Nigerians’ second language, wasn’t necessarily their preferred method of talking to each other. But Hausas didn’t speak Yoruba, Yorubas didn’t speak Ibo, Ibos didn’t speak Hausa. So English was the only option, and it became the official one.

“They colonize us, take all our artifacts, and they leave us a language we have to speak to communicate,” grumbles Yinka Fashina, a salesman at the CSS bookshop in Lagos, Nigeria’s coastal commercial capital. Behind him, Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” blares from a speaker.

Welcome or resented, English is needed more than ever. Even in predominantly Muslim Gusau, where Hausa and Arabic are heard on every corner, examples abound.

An Ibo man stopping by the Sarba Video Center to rent “Hot Bubblegum” or “Maniac Cop 3: Badge of Silence” needs English to speak to owner Sarki Abukar, a Hausa. A Fulani seeking a trim at De Universe Barbing Saloon needs English to ensure the right cut. Eurostar satellites perched atop ramshackle stores suck in English TV broadcasts from Lagos and CNN Center in Atlanta. And if you tune in to the hourly newscasts on Zamfara State Radio, 567 AM, odds are you’ll hear one in English.

“I’m glad I know English. I can go out and about with it,” Abukar says. And Aliyu Rufai, who teaches Arabic and Islamic studies in Gusau, agrees. “English,” he says, “helps me have access to the world.”

Nigerians everywhere echo this. In teeming, sweaty Lagos, real-estate agent Michael Okunsanmi sits in his cramped office and insists Nigeria would be doomed without English. At Igbosere Magistrate Court, judges in powdered wigs admonish barristers in English. In the National Assembly in Abuja, legislators say that without English, Nigeria would collapse under a babel of tongues.

“Which one would you pick?” says Olabiyi Durojaiye, a Yoruba senator. “Even if you speak three, you need English.”

That pragmatism trickles down to the gaunt teenager in rags at the foot of the Victoria Island Bridge in Lagos, clutching her infant to her breast. She spots a foreigner and begins communicating in pidgin--the dialect Nigerians call “broken English,” used alongside “standard English” in much of the country.

“Excuse me . . . hi . . . baby . . . please,” she says, thrusting the child forward and extending a palm. Thanks to English, Nigeria’s official language, she departs 50 naira richer.

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“No be fightin, no be killin, you be listenin to the bossman.”--Maj. Gen. Timothy Shelpidi, outgoing commander of the Nigerian-led ECOMOG West African peacekeeping force, speaking to Sierra Leonians in Krio, their region’s dialect of English.

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In the CSS bookshop, a woman from India walks up to Yinka Fashina. “Do you have a book called ‘Word Power’?” she asks in accented subcontinental English.

“Over there, in that section,” he replies. Then it occurs to him: a Nigerian and an Indian, doing business in a common language. “We were colonized by the same people,” he says sardonically.

As British English and, more recently, American English cut swaths across the world, they leave a linguistic wake. One result: the creation of different, distinctive brands of English known as “New Englishes.”

Each is flavored with the experiences and vocabulary of its region. And each is used in two crucial ways: to be understood across ethnic lines within one’s own country, and to improve one’s lot in school, at work and with people who do speak the language of access.

West Africa’s Englishes are peppered with regionalisms that might confound a Nebraskan. Lagos, for example, is notorious for its maddening “go-slows”--traffic jams. Nigerians get haircuts at “barbing saloons,” refer to clothing as “wears” and call con men “fraudsters” or the more cryptic “419s.” Ghanaians catch buzzes at taverns called “spots” (thus the mellifluous “Vicky Nicky Snacky Spot” in Cape Coast). Liberians add an “o” to words (“I say-o--welcome to my country-o.”).

Not exactly the Queen’s English.

“The trouble with the English language,” Peter Enahoro quipped in “How to Be a Nigerian,” a tongue-in-cheek 1966 book, “is that it is no longer English.”

But who is to say what is “real” English in a world where native speakers of British and American English are in the minority? English was fruitful and multiplied, and now, guided by its speakers, it is more varied than ever.

“In years to come, Nigeria will be speaking a better English than the British,” predicts Francis Alade, vice principal of the Nigeria Federal Training Center, where young people train for government jobs. “It’s no longer foreign. It’s become our language.”

And the language of others too. Singaporean English (“Singlish”) appropriates Chinese, Malay and Tamil words and grammar; in Singlish, when a boss “fires” someone it may be only a reprimand, and when people “sleep late,” it means they stayed up late, not got up late. New Zealand English features terms from the indigenous Maori, and Indian English is a melange that includes Hindi borrowings, Britishisms and unique regional expressions. The upcoming edition of the Dictionary of South African English includes Zulu words, reflecting a sea change in a nation whose Afrikaans language gave us the word “apartheid.”

Globalization has also produced Englishes specific to profession. Aviation English, for example, used at most international airports, is so specialized that pilots attend school to study it. Scientific English produces sentences that start like this: “Theoretical predictions are compared with the HERA data on hadronic multiplicities in the current fragmentation region . . . “

Most widespread is Internet English, which has taken root so deeply that Wired magazine this year published its own stylebook, “Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age.” “When,” its editors wonder, “does jargon end and new vernacular begin?”

The new vernacular has arrived. Doubt it? Imagine someone in 1980 comprehending this: “I have a six-gig hard drive and 128 megs of RAM, and I can download my Outlook data into my PDA through my USB port.”

Or, more tersely, this chat-room example: “lol :)” (laughing out loud and smiling).

So many Englishes, so many speakers. According to very rough estimates by the government-funded British Council, English speakers fit into three loose, overlapping groups: 375 million people speak English natively, while 375 million more speak it as a second language in their own countries and about 750 million speak it as a foreign language entirely.

“Even American English is a local dialect of global English now,” says David Crystal, author of the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language.

What’s more, the population growth in second- and foreign-language nations is three times that of the United States and Britain, so soon the numbers will be even more skewed. And English will become even more global.

Because, more than ever, it will belong to everyone.

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“Are all your pot plants looking a little jaded?”--South African commercial for potted-plant food.

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A German oil worker who speaks English as a foreign language travels to the Middle East with his international company, which uses English. There he meets a woman from Malaysia. They marry, have a child and decide to rear it speaking English.

The linguistic consequences are staggering.

“Here is a baby who is learning ‘English as a foreign language’ as a first language. What kind of English will that be?” wonders Crystal, the world’s leading global English expert.

As established Englishes meet or collide with new Englishes, they hatch something entirely fresh, something Crystal believes will become what he calls “ISSE”--International Spoken Standard English.

His prediction: This English will be the 21st century’s umbrella language--what a Singaporean girl will use to speak to a Norwegian she meets in Beijing, what a Milwaukee high-school student will use to e-mail pen pals in Nairobi and Zagreb and Melbourne.

Regional varieties would still thrive. Ghanaians would still address one another in Ghanaian English. New Zealanders would speak New Zealand English, and Americans and Brits would speak American and British English. They’d use what worked in their respective cultures.

These regional Englishes would contribute ingredients to global English. A word from Liberian English could be spread from Monrovia by a diplomat who becomes, say, U.N. secretary-general and carries the word to billions when he uses it during a news conference broadcast live worldwide.

History suggests English will fragment into even more regional dialects, each shaped by its speakers, each possessing characteristics unique to its culture. For example, Crystal wonders, “What could happen to ‘th’ in a world of people learning English who have trouble saying it?”

But, since global intelligibility is more crucial than ever, each English speaker will be understood in other parts of the world by using that umbrella language--a tongue quite possibly resembling the English that Dan Rather and Peter Jennings use on the evening news.

Or maybe not. Maybe another fate entirely awaits English, something created and fed by technologies not yet invented.

“Nobody knows what happens to a language when it becomes a global language,” Crystal says. “There is no precedent. The history of language is no longer a guide.”

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“Can or not come to a cocktail tonight?”

“Can lah!”

--exchange in Singaporean English

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“Quiet!” Basil Ohakwe tells the 100 young men packed into the sweltering classroom at Sambo Secondary School in Gusau. On this sunny Monday morning, he’s in no mood for nonsense.

The youths, ages 12 to 18, sit before him in plastic flipflops and white pajama-like tunics. Hausa, Yoruba, Ibo, Fulani, they are in this classroom to practice English.

One by one they rise, standing on the cool stone floor: Salisu Sabo from Gombe state, Abaka Nesuanke from Abuja, Murtala Oman from Zamfara state. Some whisper tentatively; others puff chests and boom as they tell about market day in their hometowns.

” . . . the market day in my town is on Sundays. . . . It sells clothes, tomatoes, rice, beans. . . . People come from even outside the country--from Cameroon--to buy fish. . . . It is very close to the river. . . . “

Ohakwe tells them that this language will enable them to travel to Lagos and beyond, and be understood.

“In the old days, if you spoke English people would look at you like you’re a European or an American. But now, knowing English is Nigerian,” says Ohakwe, an Ibo. “Now that English is spoken by everyone, people say, ‘Oh--I understand you. We are one.’ ”

It’s not quite that easy. Hundreds have died in Nigeria in recent months, victims of ethnic discord. But democracy, instituted last year after years of military rule, appears to be sticking.

With it comes even more need to communicate across ethnic lines. When dictator Gen. Sani Abacha ruled, he filled government buildings with his appointees--northern Hausas who spoke their own language with each other. Now, under President Olusegun Obasanjo, a Yoruba, Nigerians of all ethnicities are filling government jobs. More then ever, people default to English.

Even in Gusau, where Zamfara state Gov. Ahmed Sani recently instituted Sharia, or Islamic law, few expect it to push English aside.

“It is the way our children acquire knowledge,” says Sani, sitting in his office near a big-screen TV tuned to CNN. “We want to encourage our children to be scientists and engineers.”

He pulls a green volume from the bookshelf: “Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.” It is in English.

Down in Abuja, inside the air-conditioned National Assembly building, men and women in Yoruba caps, Hausa robes and Ibo jewelry broker the new democracy’s political deals. Listen to the cacophony of English that echoes through the senate chamber:

” . . . the maintenance of federal roads . . . support the motion . . . refer it to the appropriate committee . . . senators from the oil-producing states . . . “

Sure, Nigerians didn’t ask for the colonial legacy that handed English to them. But they’re making the best of it, making it their own as they launch their experiment in democracy.

“New Englishes” like Nigeria’s, whether born from subjugation or pragmatism, are compromises, allowing people access to a wired world while maintaining elements of their own culture.

Who owns English today? Nigerians and Ghanaians, Liberians and Sierra Leonians. Singaporeans, Malaysians, Indians and Filipinos. New Zealand Maori and Australian aborigines, black Americans and Scottish highlanders. Fijians living in Hong Kong and Cubans living in Miami. Airline pilots. Physicists. Anyone who surfs the Web.

Who owns English today? No one. Everyone. It spread, it multiplied, it just kept changing. And now it belongs to the world.