ktravula – a travelogue!

On His First (Bilingual) Words

One advantage of having a young child to raise, as a linguist, is the chance to use them as human study materials for language acquisition. It’s so cool I don’t know why I never thought of it before.

In any case, already a little sensitive to the intrusion of English into that early education space that I (and a majority of researchers) believe should be meant for the mother tongue, I’m pleasantly surprised that all of my son’s first words are – so far – in Yorùbá. At eighteen months and a few weeks, we’re now able to recognise “gbà” (take), and “bàbá” (father) out of hundreds of other yet incomprehensible syllables. He, of course, also says “bye-bye”, an English expression, with his wrist flailing up and down in a goodbye wave. The linguistic explanation for his easy acquisition of bilabial plosives first isn’t far-fetched.

However, from the time he was able to listen to instructions, I’d made a habit of regularly prodding him to pronounce those common Yorùbá words. Bàbá (father), Màmá (mother), “gbà (here, have), “wá” (come here), wo (look!), maabọ̀, etc. So far, he hasn’t mastered them all, but he knows what they mean and how they are used. And now, he can already pronounce a few of them. He can also understand equally accessible English words like “no” and “come” and “mummy”, which is helpful, since his mother speaks predominantly in English.

What I’ve come to discover in the end is that this bilingual upbringing will likely follow a similar path as monolingual one as far as the acquisition of complex terms are concerned. No matter what language the child learns first, won’t he still learn the easy, monosyllables first, and then others? And if that’s the case, why not just open him up to as many languages are possible? In any case, pure monolingualism is, these days, likely an impossible eventuality. Not in Nigeria anyway.

Maybe I have a theory here somewhere. In any case, there is hope.

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PS: I’m currently editing Ake Review 2015 – the literary publication of the Ake Festival 2015. If I’m not on this blog as regularly as I’ve always been, this is why. If you are in this area, you should come to Abeokuta in November for a gathering of writers from across the world.

I’m also working on my TED talk meant for delivery at TEDxIfe event in November. It’s a talk I’m tailoring towards this issue of bilingualism, particularly the destructive nature of our current educational policies. I’m currently in-between getting together a sunny speech to convey what is actually the gloom I feel. Not an easy balance.

Also, school has resumed, so plenty busy days lie ahead.

How Do We Fix This Broken Educational System?

Nigerian writer Ikhide Ikheloa gave a couple of provocative (and really thought-provoking) recommendations on the ASUU-FG mess and what could help fix the broken educational system in Nigeria…

Regardless of where you are, there are certain things that must happen, to maintain an appropriate standard of education. With the current ASUU wahala, all sides appear unwilling or unable to learn anything new and refreshing. No one is willing to accept responsibility, and in my view, ASUU is the worst culprit. Let me simply observe that these dysfunctions did not start yesterday, they were already manifesting themselves robustly in my time at the University of Benin, Benin City, in the late seventies. It is hugely hypocritical for anyone now to suddenly wake up, look around and smell decay. And by the way, ASUU, Ikhide has been telling you to clean up something as simple as your website since 2009, yet not a typo has been touched. What gives Ikhide or anyone the confidence that anything will change when you get some more money? The culture of abuse and mediocrity is pervasive. There needs to be a Needs Assessment done in that area. Seriously.

On African-themed Schools

This piece of news in the Dispatch of today highlights the success of a new kind of special public education in Missouri addressed mainly to black and African-American students with focus on African culture and values. According to the piece, the Missouri example follows the success of similar successful projects in Detroit, Kansas City and Los Angeles. Kinda reminds of specialized schools and institutions around Nigeria offering American-type or British-style education. With a widening achievement gap between white and African-American students, and research showing that the gap is not as much a gap of intelligence as it is a gap in teachers being able to address students’ needs, maybe this is not such a bad idea.

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 Wikipedi a 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.

American Mean Time

Universal time used to be determined at a village of Greenwich in the United Kingdom, and everything was measured against it. I never could figure it out and I grew up wondering why Nigeria was always one hour ahead of the BBC clock. Later in the Geography class, I figured out why. It had to do with the equator or something like that. Then one day I came to America and found out that there is something called Universal Time (UTC). Again, like the old British hubris, Americans expected everything in the world to be measured in relation to that so called universality. A few weeks ago, I had scheduled a phone interview with Rosetta Stone and it was due to come at 2pm (UTC). All I saw was the 2pm, and I planned my day accordingly. I was sitting by my desk at 1pm when the phone rang. It was the representative of the company, and they were calling for the said interview. Good thing I was not still in the shower at the time. What I didn’t bother to wonder at the time was why I seem always to be one hour away from the standard or universal time.

There are other things that have changed. Yesterday I scrolled through a list of the world ranking of universities. In the 60s and 70s when the now ruling leaders and of the Nigerian society were going to school, schools in the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union among others in Europe were the leading citadels of knowledge in the world. A few people came to the United States to study. Now, according to the list, the first dozen or so universities in the world are universities located in the United States. I scrolled down for a bit before locating my own institution somewhere down on the list, and it was enough to inspire a little urge for schadenfreude at the other ones a little farther down the list. But then, it could be worse, we could be one of the British universities who used to occupy the pride of place in the top list of world class universities. Now, they are somewhere scattered on the list, sometimes even farther lower than Taiwanese, Japanese, Swiss and Swedish institutions. I will not try to hazard a guess as to why.

Chuks is a MacArthur foundation scholar from Nigeria now here in the US. He has his own ideas of why it is a better alternative to go to school in the US in today’s world, beyond the common knowledge that its universities are ranked far higher now more than before. The system of learning and studying are such that the student is built to become independent in thought and research. What is wrong with European schools? “I know of the British schools,” he’d say, “and the system is built in such a way that you get to regard the professor as some repository of knowledge – a person high up there who knows everything and who should not be challenged – rather than a colleague like you who only happens to have read more, and spent more time on the field studying the same things that are available to you if you work just a little bit harder.” Chuks has never studied in the United Kingdom. The system in Nigeria is a mixture of both, with a slant towards the British, naturally, and unfortunately. I have been fortunate to have experienced the impatience with professors in Nigerian class who believe that just by the virtue of their age, experience or qualification, that they were beyond questioning or challenge. I have also been lucky to have met the right ones who would fix appointments with you in a bar so that you could both examine academic ideas over glasses of beer. I have met egoistic teachers who disallowed you from entering their class only because you didn’t scurry into the class when you saw them coming. I have also met those who set their evening classes under a tree just for a change of perspective. The progress in my academic development is mostly due to the inspiration and positive reinforcement of those good ones, and my rebellion against the hubris and negative reinforcement of the bad ones. At least, I survived.

Or so I think. The biggest misconception about the teaching and learning system of the American classroom today – at least from developing countries that I have some experience of – is that the presence of books and the internet makes it easy to get through. Well, it is true only to the extent of the student’s adequate balance of time and responsibilities. This takes me back to my title. American mean time refers not just to the new role of America’s very engaging, individualistic, and absolutely absorbing educational system in the world of academics. I am using it to refer to its absolute mercilessness when a student dares to take up more courses per semester than necessary. (Yes, this post is about me again). I have personally come to see the benefit of a more relaxed, yet ultimately absorbing schedule that allows the student to get all that is needed in, within a realistic time table that puts the least manner of stress on their mind. I do believe that I have become a better student of language due to the work of the past one year. And thanks to that is due to all my teachers, both the brilliant, open-minded ones, and the empty and needlessly hard-assed ones. At least I learnt something. Perseverance will get you through everything. Or almost everything. Brilliance (or modesty) plus an innate curiosity will compensate for the rest.

But maybe a few decades from now, we’d be talking about Chinese/Japanese Mean Time. Who knows?

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