ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Observations category.

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.

An Old Theatre House

Downtown Edwardsville, today.

An Old Theatre House was published on April 29th, 2011, with the tags , , under the Art, Observations category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

The Lovejoy Connection

The story of the civil war in America is tied in some way to this state, and not just because of Abraham Lincoln. An abolitionist, printer and minister, Elijah Lovejoy who lived in Alton a few minutes away from here, was killed in 1837 for printing materials supporting the abolition of slavery. Sitting beside Ken Burns a few days ago, a woman of about seventy-five years old walked up to us with two books to sign for her grandchildren. She also had a concern: She works in a museum in Alton and she has been troubled by the conspicuous omission of Elijah Lovejoy from the history of the civil war. What did Ken Burns think of that?

In spite of the many people already in line waiting behind her, Ken took the time to talk to the woman, agreeing, and also insist that the woman be not cowed by the restrictions of revised history. It was important, he said, that the story be told to all the people that visit the museum that indeed Elijah Lovejoy’s story is as important to the beginning of the war as the first recorded gunshot. It was disingenuous that anyone would go to lengths to prevent that part of the story from being told, and Lovejoy could as well have been called the first white casualty of the civil war that began twenty-four years later. A few hours on during the Q&A sessions of his talk itself, the woman came back to the microphone with the same question, this time to the hearing of a larger full-house audience. She got the same response, again, this time along with everyone else: tell the story, and don’t let anyone stop you.

What I took away from the episodes was not just the respect for that level of persistence to get word out about an omitted connection in the larger story that has defined the American history. There was also the added thrill of connectedness: The main library of this university is named after the man. There goes another gap filling in my history lesson.

The Lovejoy Connection was published on April 22nd, 2011, with the tags , , , under the Observations category. There are currently 1 comment on this article so far.

On the Way Home

There blows a dusty wind, removed from my already sweaty face by just a thin sheet of glass. It is night. The cemetry on the way back from town lay spread as it always did to the left of the road. There are flowers of many colours on the tombstones, marking spring, marking memory. They spread further into the thicket, with little colour snippets out of the dark. A racoon creeps across the road onto the other side, moving like a crippled dog. It looks like a baby fox brightened only by the little light slivers bouncing off the dark stones of the grave back onto its skin. The distance of a mile or a little more separates me from home in the little town. It feels like the harmattan season in another home far, far away. There is no uncertainty, or dread, or a once-familiar worry. There was however a thumping of heart, and a gait propelled by soothingness.

 

 

On the Way Home was published on April 13th, 2011, under the Observations, Soliloquy category. There are currently no comments on this article so far.

Wen E Go Come: Of Creoles

Linguist John McWhorter comes to the defence of the African American Vernacular English (also called ebonics) as a distinct dialect of English with its own complex grammar – rather than an abberation – in this rather enlightening podcast on NPR. Recent discussions in my sociolinguistics class have focussed on the big controversy about the language (as it should be properly called) and teaching and cultural attitudes in the United States. Is the slang (as some have pejoratively called it) coming over to challenge the dominance of real English? And what exactly does it mean to make provisions for acknowledging its status (AAVE) as a language in the classroom when there exists a whole lot of other learners (like genuinely disadvantaged white kids) who have to take instructions in standard English, without any special preferences. It is fascinating, the discussions.

The part that gets me thinking however is how this relates to the language situation in Nigeria at the moment, with pidgin (which should appropriately be called a creole actually, since pidgins are more defined by simple grammars and spoken only by first contact generations alone) still being relegated to a low status position in a society from where it has evolved into its own place over many years. With an equally complex and systematically observable grammar, form and lexicon, the language has become a lubricant in the multilingual dynamic of our nation with its over 500 languages. The situation is not any different from what is happening in the US, at the moment, in fact. The codification of language usually takes informal means, and after a few generations become standard in their own place with or without government sanctioning. It has happened with AAVE as it has with Nigerian Pidgin, Jamaican/Haitian patois, among others. All that remains is the right institutional sanctioning to make them more relevant in official discourse. PS: Nigerian Pidgin could also do with a new name of its own.

Wen E Go Come: Of Creoles was published on April 6th, 2011, with the tags , , , , , , , , , under the Academic, Observations, Opinion category. There are currently 48 comments on this article so far.