ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

Books Everywhere

As soon as school closed last week, professors emptied their shelves onto a table in our building. Old and new books, from fiction to plays and journals, poetry collections and textbooks lay spread there competing for attention. They were free to be taken away. By evening everyday, the best of the books would be gone. But by the next morning, there would be another load, and the process continued. I made a few selections every day of the week, including The Book of Yeat’s Poems by Hazard Adams and Exploring Language edited by Gary Goshgarian among many others.

Just last month, a colleague gracefully handed me a box filled with books of African writing published in the 70s. He had cleaned out his shelf and thought that I might be interested in the collection. I was. It is times like this that I wish that I was rich enough to pay for shipping costs to send tonnes of books no longer useful to their owners to small-town libraries and bookstores in Ibadan where young literary minds can get access to them. When I’m done with these, I’ll have to hand them to someone else who might find them useful. It’s hard to think that in a few years, the concept of books itself will have eventually become archaic, especially in these parts.

Books Everywhere was published on May 16th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 4 comments on this article so far.

Nativizing English

When I took my TOEFL (Test of English as a Foreign Language) exam sometime in 2008, I knew it was a futile exercise and I approached the test venue with all the contempt I could muster (I got 110/120, by the way). The reason was because English to Nigeria was not a foreign language but a national one. Everyone who has gone to school, especially through a university like I had – has acquired a competence that is as native as anyone else in England, America, or Australia. And although there are isolated cases of poorly formed university graduates in Nigeria (as well as in some other post-colonial societies) whose grasp of the language would not improve even no matter the amount of input, it was safe to say that graduating from the university was enough proof that one was competent enough in the national language which had been one’s medium of instruction in school from around age two or much earlier (and six, for some).

My linguistics classes in the university opened my eyes to a few of the reasons for this standardized test. The linguist Braj Kachru’s famous work on English’s “concentric circles” divides the English speaking world into three places. The inner circle is where the language is spoken as the sole language (England, US, Australia, etc), the outer circle is where it is spoken as a colonial language (India, Nigeria, Philippines etc), and the expanding circle where it is spoken only to be able to interact with the rest of the world (Japan, China, Saudi Arabia etc). That definition successfully relegates the post-colonial British world into a second place where competence is measured not just by situation of birth as what can be proven through standardized test – a very problematic situation. According to Wikipedia entry on the matter, a person’s native language “is the language(s) a person has learned from birth or within the critical period, or that a person speaks the best and so is often the basis for sociolinguistic identity.”

In Nigeria, as in India, Philippines, Jamaica, Trinidad and many other former colonies of Britain (and the United States), contact and exposure to English for many occurs during the “critical period” and develops over time with more exposure to education and progress up the social ladder. Thus by the time one is old enough to graduate from the University (and for many far earlier than that), they are already sufficiently socialized not just in the language use but also in the cultural nuances that come with it to be able to pass for a truly native speaker. We have the media to thank for that as well. The presence of abundant corpus of brilliant literature from these places should be enough to put any doubt about this to rest. VS Naipaul, described as the master of “modern English prose” published his first novel The Mystic Masseur in 1957 when he was just 25. Wole Soyinka, Africa’s first Nobel Laureate in Literature already published his play The Lion and the Jewel in 1967 when he was 33. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart which is widely regarded as the archetypal African novel in English was published in 1957 when the author was just 28.

Now, our wikipedia definition continues: “In some countries, the terms native language or mother tongue refer to the language of one’s ethnic group rather than one’s first language.” This is precisely where my issue lies, especially if any of such countries include the United States of America where many “native speaker” citizen graduates of universities will perform very poorly on the TOEFL test. Most job openings for linguists today require that the applicants be “native speakers of English.” What one would wish is that this stipulation is not based on this second but the first definition of “native language.” It will be disastrous if this were not the case. The closest I got to finding out is a discussion I started a few weeks ago on Facebook about whether I – born and raised in Nigeria (with Nigerian English and sufficient access to both British and American linguistic and cultural conditioning) – would be considered a native speaker. All responders said that I would not. The reason was not that I don’t speak the language with native-like proficiency, it is that I acquired the language along with another one during my critical period. It is likely that if any of my Facebook friends were on the board of my job application, I may have to go apply elsewhere.

Luckily however, as I found out a few minutes ago, the list of countries exempt from taking the TOEFL now includes Nigeria. (When I took the exam, the only African countries exempted from taking it were Liberia and South Africa. Go figure.) I am therefore glad to hear this finally though it takes the sting out of the indignation that I had brought to writing this post. I had once suggested that American students begin to take the TOEFL before getting into universities as well in order to vet their English language proficiency. It’s not going to happen, of course, but the idea tickles me.

Nativizing English was published on May 14th, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Academic, Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently 5 comments on this article so far.

How to Become a Language Snob

Inspired by Clarissa’s list of “20 Ways to Become Known as a Male Chauvinist“, I am compiling my own top ten list of How to be Known As a Language Snob, along with extra points.

___________________________

1. Whenever you meet someone from a different country tell them “I like your accent. You don’t speak like other _____________ (fill in country name) that I have met.”

2. After meeting someone for the first time, let your idea of a compliment to them be “Oh you speak good English.” For extra points, ask them where they learnt to speak it so well.

3. Whenever someone says to you “I like your accent too”, look insulted and ask in a high voice, “I have an accent? What do you mean I have an accent?” For extra points, be actually insulted by that.

4. Be disgusted by people speaking their local language around you. For extra point, go to them (whether you know them or not) and ask them to speak English instead. After all, they are in America.

5. If you come from a multilingual society, pretend that English is the only language worthy of learning by your children. Punish them if they speak the mother tongue. Don’t speak it to them. For extra points, justify this by saying that “In today’s world, English is the only language worth learning.”

6. Wonder aloud many times why anyone speaks any other language at all no matter where they live. Ask “Why can’t they all learn English?”

7. Fail students who write “spelled” as spelt, learned as learnt, “labor” as labour and “neighbor” as “neighbour”. For extra points, tell them that they have spent enough time in the USA to know how those words should be spelt.

8. When someone tells you that their course of study is linguistics, ask them what the importance of that course of study is. When they tell you, ask them why they didn’t study business instead.

9. When someone tells you that their course of study is Teaching English as a Second Language, tell them without prompting that it is a good idea because they would finally be able to return to their home countries to teach the people there how to speak English.

10. Complain that the reason you did poorly in a class was because the accent of the teacher was too thick for you to understand/process. For extra points, wonder why the university didn’t employ a full-blooded American for the position instead of foreigners.

How to Become a Language Snob was published on May 10th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , under the Observations, Opinion, Uncategorized category. There are currently 3 comments on this article so far.

Polysemy in Politics

Perhaps we all spoke too fast. Certainly not. The man who ran his mouth for several weeks demanding proof when there seemed to have been many available everywhere that a half-black man was born in the US finally got a certain “respite” when the document was released. After all, he played a role in it. And then, a few days later, he got some good bashing from the man he had spent the previous weeks maligning. Like a few other commentators (including Baratunde who made a personal video on youtube decrying the humiliation the “white privileged businessman” brought on the “first black president” by being forced to comply), I also thought it was racist. His further demanding the president’s college transcripts rather than asking more sensible questions about the economy or the direction of the country made it even worse. The whole “birther” escapade reeked of something more than just partisan politics.

A few days ago, former President Bush declined an invitation to go with President Obama to the site of the World Trade Centres where terrorists had knocked down two prominent buildings killing thousands of people. He was, according to reports, keeping up with his desire to stay out of the spotlight. He had lived up to this promise many times by refusing to comment on current topical/political issues in order to keep the focus on the president rather than on himself – obviously aware of the star power of his ex-presidency. Some other reports however saw it as a snub. The current president had refused to give enough credit to the former one for investigation procedures that led to this victory, and thus, he could as well go it all alone.

Last week,, I turned in a final semester paper in my Discourse Analysis class titled “Polysemy in All-Male and All-Female Speech” using evidence from elicited conversations to make judgements about how humans use ambiguous statements and expressions to achieve desired goals, and particularly how innocent and sometimes unintended speech acts are sometimes construed to very specific purposes by hearers and listeners. I guess it is only fitting that all of this news events are happening at this moment when the paper is sufficiently turned in. Yet it left an excess of active brain cells making perhaps needless connections to current affairs in the name of discourse analysis. Sometimes, a speech – or an act – is just what it is, without any underlying intentions.

Photo from http://bit.ly/kR4lyE

Polysemy in Politics was published on May 8th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , under the Observations, Opinion category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Nativizing English

Kachru’s concentric circle includes my country Nigeria as part of the outer circle where English is spoken only because of historical contingency. This is true. Along with India, Philipines and a host of other nations of the world, English is spoken in Nigeria as a result of colonization. This took place in the 1800s and ended in the 1960s. The inner circle countries where English is spoken as a first and only language is the UK, the US, Austrailia, Ireland, New Zealand, etc. People who live in those countries are called native speakers of English perhaps because that is the only language they speak.

The idea of a “native” language however presents an interesting question to my curious mind. Is a language native to those who speak it only because it is the only language they speak or because they speak it with such total and infallible competence? Going by the name, a language is native to those who speak it as their own perhaps only language. I am a native speaker of Yoruba. It is not my only language, but I speak it since birth and have a native-like competence over it. I can teach it. I know the rules of speaking a behaving in the language without any more prompting. I have acquired the language without knowing it. Yes.

The same, however, applies to English for me. I have acquired it from birth, subconsciously and simultaneously with Yoruba so much so that I can’t tell apart which one of them I speak more frequently. I think/dream in either. I have Caucasian  friends who have learnt the Yoruba language almost to the point of native-like proficiency. If they were born in Nigeria, they probably would speak it just like me. They would be native speakers – like thousands of people in the carribbeans whose only language is English (and a creole). So two weeks ago, I asked on Facebook if I would be considered a native speaker of English – for the purpose of applying for a job in the US, and the majority of the responses was “no”. The consideration was that since I speak another language from birth, I cannot be considered a native speaker. Besides, Kachru has put me in the outer rather than the inner circle.

I believe that native speaker language stipulation falls flat when defined only by place or circumstance of birth rather than levels of proficiency. As output in English literature from Africa and other post-colonial societies have shown, what makes a good speaker of a language is not really where s/he is born as how much s/he has applied himself/herself to mastering it. Wole Soyinka (Africa’s first Nobel Literature Prize Winner, and Nigerian) is as much a native speaker of English as Karin Barber (Yoruba scholar in Birmingham) is a native-speaker of Yoruba going by proficiency and the corpus of their literary output in the language. I doubt that anyone would doubt as well that Salman Rushdie or VS Naipaul are native speakers of English either because of their Indian ancestry.

I suspect however that this misunderstanding of what is a native speaker comes mostly from American purism – a kind of desire to protect one’s position by claiming total control of all its parts.  By this policy, I suspect that citizens of Liberia or South Africa would be given a pass as a native speaker in a job requiring that, ahead of citizens of Nigeria or Ghana. The last time I checked the TOEFL exam requirements, students from Liberia and South Africa were exempt from taking it. Go figure. If an American couple living in Nigeria gives birth to a child and raises him there for ten years, s/he would become a proficient native speaker of at least one Nigerian language and could, if s/he pursues it, be able to teach it too. The same should apply to a Chinese couple living in the United States. Their child would become proficient enough in English to be able to do anything with it.

I hope that the definition of what makes a native speaker of a language is revised to exclude stipulations of ethnic belonging to the target language. I suspect however that it already has, just that some people haven’t caught up with the news yet. 🙂

Nativizing English was published on May 1st, 2011, with the tags , , , , under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.