ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Linguistics category.

“Literature is Like Hot Amala” | Interview with the Saturday Sun

I spoke with Ọlámìdé Babátúndé of The Sun over the weekend about my work. Here is the interview, first published here.

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It seems you have done more prose than poetry, is that deliberate or it’s just your forte?

I have actually written a lot of poems, mostly in English and some in Yorùbá. I just haven’t put them together in a book collection. I had a chapbook out in 2005 as soon as I left the university. I called it Headfirst into the Meddle. The second one, published in 2015 by Saraba Magazine, was called Attempted Speech & Other Fatherhood Poems. I’m currently completing work on a full collection for print, focused on the memory of my time in Edwardsville, Illinois.

But yes, these days, I’ve spent a lot of my time writing reviews of books I like (and hate), and writing essays on issues (especially about language) that I feel strongly about.

What are you working on next?

When I’m not racking my brain on the TTS-Yorùbá research, I am compiling a book of interviews with writers I’ve spoken to over the years. I think interviews are a forgotten art and it will be nice to have the voice of our artists showcased in other formats than just in their creative work. I am also working on a memoir of my time as a Fulbright scholar, which was an enchanting time with lots of interesting and important memories. I’ve put that off for so long. And then there a few other book and essay projects that I can’t talk about until they’re ready.

How imperative are reviews to a text for you as a reviewer because an author once said he did not care about whatever anyone had to say about his book and what should a good review be about?

I can’t prescribe what a “good” review should be about, but I can say what kinds of reviews I’ve enjoyed reading. And they include ones that give me appropriate context about the work and about the author. I’ve heard people say that they don’t care much about the author, that they just want to read about the work he/she has created. I don’t always feel that way. I am a social animal and I want to know as much about a creative endeavour as about the mind that created it. That’s also probably why I like the interview as an equally important means of engaging the writer’s mind.

What is the way forward to making literature and other forms of art more appealing to people particularly Nigerians?

Literature, like any other form of art, is like fine wine, or hot amala at a rare roadside buka. Those who want it will seek it out no matter the obstacles.

I bet one way is to ensure there are translations of works into local languages, how is that future looking in Nigeria?

I think one paragraph will not be enough to do justice to my thoughts on the gaping hole we have today in the production and consumption of literature in the mother tongue, particularly in Southern Nigeria. Translation is just one way. Actually writing, publishing, and distributing literature in Nigerian languages will be most ideal. And we can help that by no longer having our educational syllabi insist on “Literature-in-English” as a high school subject when we can simply have “Literature(s)”, which includes texts in as many relevant languages as the students can understand or tutors can teach. It’s to our shame that we have 500 languages and most of the texts that students read in our schools are in a foreign language, and by foreign authors.

In the nearest future where do you see Nigerian literature, what opportunities lie ahead regarding using cultural tools to effect positive changes in all facets of the Nigerian Economy?

As I said above, I’d like to see a more robust approach to literature in our schools. D.O Fágúnwà’s books are not only meant for the Yorùbá children’s minds. They should be taught both in the original text and in translation. Same for selected Hausa and Igbo literatures, etc. It is interesting to see a resurgence in the interest to read more indigenous Nigerian literature by foreigners and tourists than Nigerian citizens themselves. This shows that there is some economic potential in giving them attention. Some bold publisher has to start first. Or some rich philanthropist has to put money out in support of such an endeavour, at least at the early stages.

I’ve also, in the past, suggested that Nigerian Customs insist that products coming into the country that don’t have their instruction manuals written in at least one or two Nigerian languages should not be let in. Imagine what would happen if you export a Nigerian product to the US or China and write the literature in Yorùbá. They won’t let you in. So why do we allow that for us? A policy like that will create new job opportunities for Nigerian translators in the local language and signal that we take ourselves seriously.

Name some young and new generation of writers whose work you enjoy

I recently discovered Chika Jones’s spoken word poetry and I’m sold. He has a bright future ahead of him.

What does it feel like to be a poet Father and husband?

For what it’s like to be a father, I’ll refer you back to that chapbook of my poems I spoke of earlier. It’s called Attempted Speech & Other Fatherhood Poems and you can find it on the Saraba Magazine website. I wrote a lot of my first thoughts about the experience there. As a husband, my role is to support and protect my family, which usually has nothing to do with poetry.

I read how irked you got for the misspelling of your name when you first created an email account. Could this have led to your mission to intervene in the saving of Yoruba Language globally?

I’ve since realized that the peculiarity of my name will always get me into these types mess. The email incident was the least benign. But when I returned to the University of Ibadan after my Youth Service in 2006 to pick up my certificate, I found out that they had written “Olatunbosun” on it, instead of “Olatubosun” which is how it is written in full. This is a running problem I get into most often with Yorùbá people. Non-Yorùbá people tend to stick with what they see on the page and don’t feel the need to add the extra “n”.

To your question, no. My work in language and linguistics wasn’t motivated by that one incident. There are many, some of which happened when I was very young. I blame my parents for all of it, for their insistent that we speak Yorùbá at home, which in hindsight was a very important gift. My most pressing motivation, I think, is the reality that the advances in technology will contribute as much to the endangerment of our languages if we don’t make those languages compliant with them as whether our children are made to speak them comfortably at home and outside of the home.

Your Initiative Tweet Yoruba, to what extent has it saved the third most popular Yoruba language from becoming extinct as predicted by the Linguistic Association of Nigeria? And how did you kick off the YorubaName.com?

The #TweetYoruba and the YorubaName project are two sides of one coin. The former was started as a way to call Twitter out in 2012 for not putting any African language on the list of languages for which the platform was being translated. It was an advocacy to make a case for Yorùbá which largely succeeded. I say largely because even though the promise has been made to launch Twitter Yorùbá, it hasn’t yet seen the light of day.

YorubaName.com was started as a way to expand on my university undergraduate project through which I compiled about a thousand names into a compact disc along with audio and other metalinguistic elements. By making it globally accessible online, with a crowdsourced element through which people can submit their own names and improve the meaning of the ones in there, I figured that we could gather even more names and better provide a sort of an online platform for education and cultural reinforcement. It ties back to that intention to make sure that anything that we value in the culture, any intangible cultural heritage, can also be accessible on the internet, and is compliant with information technology.

Not just for Yorùbá but for Igbo, Hausa, Edo, etc. If we want a language to survive into the next century, not only must we speak them to our children and use them in various public domains, we must also make sure that modern technologies can read, write, and function in them.

This brought on the Yoruba text-to-speech initiative, TTS Yoruba. Please enlighten us on how this is to benefit the 30 million who speak the language?

The TTS-Yoruba project is a result of my own personal research curiosity. For a while, I’ve been bothered by the fact that Siri – that automated voice on the iPad – was available in languages with as small as 5 million people. Yorùbá is spoken by over 30 million people, yet the combination of people speaking Swedish, Norwegian and Danish is just 15 million in total. Yet Siri exists in each of these three languages. The question I’ve always asked is whether it just isn’t possible to create a computer-generated Yorùbá voice or people just haven’t tried. I know that people have been trying, so I wanted to see what I could bring, as skill, into the research question. And if we succeed, there are very many significant benefits and possibilities. Imagine, for instance, being able to use an ATM in your local language. Many old women in the villages would no longer have a reason to distrust banks. We could also be able to use to create automated talking systems that can, for instance, be used by disabled people to use their voices to activate their phones in their own language. You can get your texts read to you, etc. There are also economic opportunities. I imagine that mobile phone creators will want to pay for a technology that allows more people to use their devices because of the new language elements.

Winning the prestigious Premio Ostana International Award for Scriptures in the Mother Tongue in 2016 is a big one, what other doors did this open for your career?

The Premio Ostana was a welcome recognition of the work we are doing to shine attention on the issues in mother tongue use in education, literature, and technology, etc. The Italian organisation which awarded the prize (Chambra D’Oc) has spent its time and effort seeking out and recognizing people and organisations across the world who work to promote a small, endangered, or minority language. They have done this as an extension of their own intention to celebrate their own minority language in Italy and France called “Occitan”. So, of course, I am proud to be affiliated with them and their goals.

As per open doors, I’ll say that I have kept my focus on doing the work at hand, and that’s more important as a tool for open doors.

In April , you took part in the Culture Summit in Abu Dhabi with other participants from 80 countries around the world to discuss how cultural tools can fit into global challenges and capture existing opportunities, tell us of your experience.

The programme was organised by Foreign Policy magazine as a way to engage cultural arbiters and practitioners across the world, to figure out what opportunities exist for the celebration and advancement of (sometimes marginalized) cultures through art and creativity. I was glad to be there.

One of the things I took away from the event is that there are people doing great things, sometimes with little financial incentive, all across the world. One of the things I hope I left the participants and organisers with is that the language question is an important one in opening doors to development. As long as we keep thinking that the universality of English has freed us from the responsibility to support and encourage the survival of minority tongues from all over the world, we are still doing a lot wrong.

Your favourite world destination so far is where?

It is mostly Ibadan, where I was born and raised, and where both my parents still live. I have also made a sort of home among friends and adopted families in Edwardsville and Minnesota in the United States. I visited Verona in Italy last year and I had a whale of a time as well. Being able to find particular things relatable and enjoyable everywhere I go is a gift I greatly cherish.

What’s your worst travel experience?

Any one in which I get a small legroom seat on the plane. My legs are very long and don’t do well in cramped spaces.

Thank you for your time and for doing Nigeria proud, staying the course to preserve our languages.

Ẹ ṣé. My pleasure.

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First published in the Saturday Sun of September 16th, 2017

Wetin Dey? Nigerian Pidgin and Its Many Pikin

‘Better soup na money kill am’ | Good things don’t come easy

‘E don tey wey nyash dey for back’ | There is nothing new under the sun

‘Cunny man die, cunny man bury am’ | It takes a thief to catch a thief

‘Na condition make crayfish bend’ | Hard times encourage adaptation

Over 500 languages are spoken in Nigeria today, according to most accounts, although many of them are dying, endangered, or extinct. Three major languages spoken more widely than others are Hausa in the north (with about 70 million speakers), Igbo in the east (with about 24 million), and Yorùbá in the west (with about 40 million speakers). Other languages include Edo, Fulfude, Berom, Efik, Ibibio, Isoko, etc. Because of the multiplicity of languages in the country and the need to communicate among different ethnic groups, English, or Nigerian English, has served as a connecting tissue, but only in formal circles: schools, government, courts, etc. In the informal sector, however, where most Nigerians function every day, in the markets, on the streets, at restaurants, Nigerian Pidgin (NP) has emerged as a crucial and important feature.

Nigerian Pidgin doesn’t have its roots in English, but in Portuguese. In about 1456, when the first Portuguese ship reached Senegal via the Gambia river, to Sierra Leone about four years later, and other parts of the region in due time, they made contacts with famous kingdoms like Benin, Ghana, Mali, Songhai, etc. Benin at the time, now in present day Nigeria, was said to be one of the oldest and most highly developed states in the coastal hinterland.

To trade with these kingdoms and establish a cordial relationship beneficial to both parties, a mutually intelligible language had to be employed. It is unclear what kind of Portuguese these sailors spoke, but it is possible (and even likely) that they spoke a crooked and unrefined one, also befitting of that societal class of illiterate seamen. The contact of that pirate-type ship-lingo Portuguese with the language of the coastal Africans resulted in what eventually became Pidgin, and later Nigerian Pidgin.

At the time, however, it was a mere contact language, retaining elements of both cultures, enough to facilitate communication along with hand gestures and other universal signs. But it got the job done and helped cement the relationship between the seafaring Portuguese and the West African kingdoms. So that when the British showed up hundreds of years later, they found it easier to communicate with the indigenes, through a later variation of this language which, likely, had undergone sufficient evolution. This later contact with the British, via the slave trade, missionary invasion and colonialism further improved the intelligibility of the language, with English words added to supplement the earlier Portuguese ones.

The use of the word ‘pidgin’ in identifying the language as it exists in Nigeria today has added some confusion to understanding its current state. To linguists, a language is a pidgin only in the initial state of its creation, when it serves as the lubricating vessel of communication between two strange peoples (in this case, between the early Europeans and Africans). After a generation of contact, the language begins to evolve, with words and phrases from either language and others, introduced to flesh out the skeletons and give the language a unique character. At this stage it stops being just a ‘contact language’ and becomes a living one. We call this stage ‘creolisation’.

The creolisation of Nigerian Pidgin happened gradually, with the adoption of the language not just as a contact lingo with Europeans but as a native language of contact and of trade with other ethnic groups in Nigeria. This is the characteristics of the language that helped it become the most used language in the country by the time it got independence from the British in 1960. By then, coastal communities, though with other native languages of their own, had adopted NP as a full native language and spoken it among themselves and to their children.

The syntax of Nigerian Pidgin is similar to the local West African languages than the European ones. That probably explains why it used to be called ‘Broken English’, or ‘Broken’ for short, when it was perceived to be a language of the unschooled, unsophisticated people, a language spoken by those unable to grasp the complexity of English. To say ‘I am leaving’ in NP, one would say ‘I dey go’, which is a lean and simple rendering of that basic action. ‘I will be right back’ is rendered as ‘I dey come’. This simple syntax, covered with the fleshing of English, makes it easy to use by Nigerians who eventually adopted it as a local language.

However, Portguese still has some influence. Words like sabi and pikin, which came from Portuguese ‘saber/sabir’ and ‘pequeno/pequenino’, words for ‘know’ and ‘little child’ respectively, have remained in NP, to mark the true origin of the language. So, for example, ‘You sabi dat pikin?’ means ‘Do you know that child?’ As you’ll notice, the pronunciation has also evolved as well, so that a ‘th’ is pronounced instead as a ‘d’.

There are also many different dialects of Nigerian Pidgin today, depending on where it is spoken. Because words are borrowed from each of the languages that have influenced NP – words like àbí (a question marker) and ṣé are more common in the west, while words like nna and unu come from Igbo in the east. The Niger Delta has the highest concentration of NP speakers and here the version spoken is widely regarded as the most authentic form, sometimes as a first language. Places like Sapele and Benin are regarded as norm-producing communities, where the language has the most root and influence.

And of course, because of the diasporic migration of Nigerians to other parts of the world, there are more refined NPs spoken today across the world, from Peckham to Chicago, Houston to Baltimore. They are not markedly different from the Nigerian versions, except in accent, influenced by their new environments and company.

It is estimated that NP is the most spoken language across the Nigeria today, spoken as a first language by over 30 million people, and as a second language by the rest of the country (about 140 million). However, the language has never enjoyed the respect of the country’s elites. It currently has no official status and is neither used in education, or governance. But in the early 60s, through the efforts of early Nigerian writers in English like Wọlé Ṣóyínká, Chinua Achebe, JP Clark, Ken Saro Wiwa, and Cyprian Ekwensi, fully formed Pidgin-speaking characters were introduced to Nigerian literature. This helped elevate the language a bit more into the mainstream.

In Nigeria today, NP functions in informal capacity, lubricating contact and communication between people of all classes, gender, ethnic groups, and educational status. It is the language of the streets, and of uneducated market women in cosmopolitan cities. The flavour infused in each expression from the speaker’s original ethnic background continues to enrich the character of each individual output.

Where NP has dominated, however, is in the informal sphere of television and radio entertainment, in Nollywood and the Nigerian music industry, which reaches not just all Nigerians, but also most Africans. Fẹlá Kútì, the inventor of Afrobeat, played no small role in mainstreaming Nigerian Pidgin through many of his hits like Follow Follow, Trouble Sleep Yanga Go Wake Am, Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, etc. On the streets of Nairobi, Johannesburg or Accra today, one is likely to hear ‘Wetin dey?’, ‘Wetin dey happen?’ or ‘How far?’, or any one of NP’s common greetings (meaning: ‘What’s up?’, ‘What’s going on?’, ‘How’re you doing?’) even in the mouths of non-Nigerians. This has happened through the influence of Nigeria’s entertainment industry.

In 2009, a ‘Conference on Nigerian Pidgin’ at the University of Ìbàdàn proposed to drop the name ‘pidgin’ altogether, and call the language ‘Naija’, a nickname once reserved for referring to the country in an endearing way. This has not caught on beyond those academic circles, and it likely never will because of the tension between what the academic intervention represents (stiffness) and what NP truly is (dynamism). It is the jolly playfulness, accessibility and musicality of NP that continues to help convey the convivial spirit of Africa’s most populous country, along with colours and sound, to the rest of the continent.

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First published by the National Theatre, London, as companion to the play Barber Shop Chronicles by Innua Ellams, showing from May 30, 2017. The reference to Ken Saro-Wiwa and Fẹlá Kútì, added later, regretfully did not make it into the original text.

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References

Portuguese Explorations and West Africa https://www.cliffsnotes.com/study-guides/history/us-history-i/exploration-and-early-colonization/portuguese-explorations-and-west-africa
“Benin Empire” on Wikipedia. The Portuguese in Africa, 1415–1600 http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/agex/hd_agex.htm
John McWhorther “Portuguese Pidgin That Never Died” http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003935.html
Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary
Ethnologue.com
NAIJA Proceedings of the “Conference on Nigerian Pidgin http://www.ifra-nigeria.org/publications/e-papers/conferences/18-naija-proceedings-of-the-conference-on-nigerian-pidgin

Paging Bill Gates! (And YOU Can Help)

This time last week I got an interesting, and pleasant, surprise: I’d been listed along with 31 other fantastic people around the continent in the Quartz Africa’s Innovator’s List. Thank you, thank you, and thank you! Two days ago, I got another one: Bill Gates, one of the world’s innovative (and richest) icons had shared the Quartz List on his Facebook and Twitter accounts.

My wife who had called my attention to it was half exhilarated that I was getting this kind of recognition, and proud of me, and half desirous of same for her absolutely wonderful and important company currently saving lives in Nigeria through her work with a small team (in cold chain supply of blood) and in need of serious funding support.

Her perspective and excitement struck a chord with me and I have decided to spend some effort trying to get Bill’s attention both on twitter and on Facebook, because having his clout and support for many of the ideas and work we’re doing will give way more practical mileage than just the exposure of a list (great as it is). His Foundation, for instance, has supported hundreds of great ideas around the world that have then gone on to thrive and change lives. We’d like to have that too.

So, I would like to have a conversation with him, wherever, whenever, possible. Here’s one more reason:

One of the motivations for my work on YorubaName.com and other language-related work we’ve been doing over a decade comes from an early frustration with Microsoft products which always drew this red wriggly line under names that it considered foreign, even when they were not to the local environment. When Microsoft Word was used in a Nigerian environment where Yorùbá is spoken as a first language along with many others, the red line never lets the user forget who made the rules. It created a feeling of exclusion, or not being recognised. It was similar to the attitude among teachers in Nigerian private schools who scolded children for speaking “vernacular” in the class. It had the, perhaps unintended, consequence of keeping users (and students) feeling constantly inadequate – second class. Thankfully, this part of my motivation was highlighted in the profile for Quartz.

Screenshot (40) In any case, I am interested in talking with Bill Gates about the work I’ve committed myself to in increasing the African language content in technology. His help will be greatly appreciated and I will appreciate any help in being able to reach him. My last employment was at Google (Nigeria), if this helps. One of the things I did there, apart from my primary assignment, was help improve the Nigerian language currency in Google Translate and some other Google products, for mobile and for PC. I would like to do the same for Microsoft, if possible (I’m currently unemployed, you see). But more importantly, I’d like to explore partnership opportunities between Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and our Yorùbá Name Project.

One of the things I was pleased to discover while going through Bill’s Gates Notes blog is that he’s also a fan of Dr. Richard Feynman who is one of my biggest inspirations. Feynman’s book/biography Surely You Must Be Joking is my all-time favourite book showing how one can be smart, motivated, and still have fun at the same time. His follow up work, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out is one book I’ve always returned to. It’s a collection of essays, thoughts, lectures, interviews, on a number of fascinating pursuits and thoughts. Dr. Feynman was an easy man to love, and to listen to.

So, maybe this collision is a good sign.

How you can help:

If you have direct access to Bill Gates (or if you ARE Bill Gates), and/or you’d like to connect us, please send me a mail at kt AT ktravula.com.
If you know any other way I can reach him, other than the grant application processes on the Gates Foundation website, please leave them in the comments below.
If neither of the above, please help retweet my tweet to him, and upvote my comment on his Facebook page. It might work (or it might not). Who knows!

Thank you.

A Night in Wales: Pursuing The “English Not”

The curious linguist in me was on high alert during my tour of the Ysgol Glantaf Welsh-medium School in Cardiff where every subject but English itself is taught in Welsh. I spotted, quite early, that the word Ysgol in the name referred to “school” and was pronounced almost the same way (thanks to my guide Jeremy); that “alright” was used a lot in the classes, perhaps because of a lack of a common Welsh equivalent that could do the job better; and – as was called to my attention while at Radio Cymru – the word “lot” remained the same in English as in Welsh, to the consternation of many conservative Welsh speakers concerned about the dilution of the language. I picked up a few more new knowledge: the “f” sound is pronounced as “v” so “Glantaf” is actually [glantav], and whenever “d” is doubled as “dd”, the sound is the voiced dental fricative, as we have in “those” and “them”. And finally, to my delight, I realised that “Cymru”, the native word for “Wales” is pronounced more like “Camry.”

Walking around a few classes I was privileged to attend as an observer, one of the questions I put to the students was what language they would prefer to learn in if they had a choice. The overwhelming response was “Welsh”. This came not just from native Welsh students but also from students of English-speaking homes. “Why?” I followed up, now genuinely curious as to whether this was just a way to impress this visitor from Nigeria. One of the reasons I remember is that “it is easy to read and spell. The sounds correspond more to the spelling.” I remember this because it refers to one of the famous complaints about the nature of English, but also because it made me acknowledge the role of accessibility in the assessment of a language as a tool for learning. As a Nigerian with a life-long tussle with the English language and a fairly competent grasp of its grammar, the claim of a one-to-one correspondence between the spelling of Welsh and its pronunciation is a little curious (See: “Cymru” above), but the enthusiasm of the student was hard to ignore.

In the end, the idea of a thriving culture of mother tongue education in a language not English – in a British country, no less – impressed me more than anything else I came across in my ten days in Britain. From the days of the Treachery of the Blue Books to the period of the Welsh Not, the country of Wales seems to be back on its footing on the way to a truly vibrant cultural identity. See what happened when one British journalist mistakenly spited Welsh-medium education through a carelessly worded phrase!

In Nigeria, the policy of mother tongue education is scoffed at with one common argument, notable in its emptiness when applied to the Welsh example: “Using the mother tongue to educate a child in a country of so many languages will lead to a fractured and disunited country in the future, a drawback to true national development.” Well, the United Kingdom almost got fractured last year, and the Welsh weren’t the culprit! Scotland, which spearheaded the move, isn’t as big on its indigenous language use (with less than 2% of its population speaking Scottish Gaelic), and perhaps even fewer speaking Scots as a first language. Wikipedia says none of these languages has formal recognition nor is used as a medium of instruction in Scottish schools. So, there goes the argument for language as the only means of national integration!

I note, with sadness, the absence of any school in Nigeria today where any Nigerian language is used as a medium of instruction from start to finish. Nowhere where Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, or any other technical discipline is taught in a Nigerian language. Could that have contributed to the 70.67% failure rate of English and Mathematics at last year’s year-end results? Your guess is as good as mine. But we have ourselves to blame for not looking for new ways to change a system that is obviously not working as expected. What is education, after all, if not a means of empowering the child?

Why The Interest in the Mother Tongue?

I wrote a guest post for the We The Humanities blog, on February 21, 2016, to commemorate the UNESCO International Mother Tongue Day 2016. I had participated as a curator on the twitter handle for the same collective this time last year.

Here is an excerpt from the piece:

The responses (and criticisms) I’ve always got point to the universality and inevitability of English (and French, and Mandarin, and any other foreign language but a local one), and their success in the world as a cultural vehicle, as the reason why we shouldn’t bother with our own languages since that is merely a quixotic adventure with no economic and pragmatic importance. As I shared with the audience during my curation week at We The Humanities, my experience teaching Yorùbá to eager and willing students at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, who paid good money to acquire a piece of knowledge that others in Nigeria take for granted, has convinced me otherwise – not just of the viability of the language and its cultural value but also of an otherwise sad reality that over many generations from now, Yorùbá students may have to travel to America to acquire the knowledge of the language.

Read the rest here on the We The Humanities blog.

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