Question about lad English

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Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 1:12 am

Why do lads speak such bad English despite Nigeria/Ghana both having it as an official language and all the movies from the area I have seen are in English?

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 1:36 am

There are over 500 languages spoken in Nigeria, from Village dialects to regional languages

http://nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/main-square/69232-nigeria-has-over-500-languages.html

It is like India, English may be officially recognised, but the majority of the people use their own native language in day to day dealings.

http://www.surfindia.com/india-facts/languages-of-india.html

I found similar in the Solomon Islands, Everyone speaks Pidgin, most have some understanding of English, but with 400 or more local/tribal and Island languages, it gets a tad confusing.

This helps to explain why a lot of the lower level lads have poor English skills, they use the words, but out of syntax and meaning in a lot of cases.

Add in the border languages that are a mix of French/English/Tribal, and you have a recipe for total confusion.

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 1:56 am

Whats odd is that all the media seems to be in English. Nollywood and most Nigerian websites are in English. In India a lot of media is in Hindi or Tamil. Speaking of Nollywood I wonder if I could persuade a lad to make a Nollywood ripoff of a western movie. Given that they seem to be filmed on a budget of about $100 that could be possible. It would take a lot of work but it could be done...

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 2:36 am

At least in India, many of the languages are distant relatives of English. In Nigeria, the languages spoken by lads belong to the Niger-Congo family. (Hausa is spoken in the north; it is Afro-Asiatic.) They have about 7 vowels (not counting nasals), compared to 12 for English (and almost as many, counting length, in Indic languages), so they produce characteristic spelling errors. One of the funniest was "I gave birth to three plates"; Yetunde pronounced "three plates" and "triplets" identically. Even in South Africa they make similar errors; their Bantu languages, though not close relatives of Igbo/Yoruba, are still Niger-Congo.

Posted: Mon Jul 07, 2014 3:36 pm

I echo everything VX has said: English is one f*cked up language for non natives to pronounce, specially when it comes to vowels and fricative and approximant consonants (think french speakers pronouncing "that" as "zat" or dutch speakers saying "think" as "fink").

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 2:39 pm

Also, English is among the few languages in the world that has a disconnect between the way the language is written and the way its spoken. This is an added difficulty for those who speak it as a second language.

Posted: Tue Jul 08, 2014 3:38 pm

The advantage of English (and those who speak it) is its fault-tolerance. Even a train-wreck of a dialect can be deciphered if enough English remains to get the general picture. That's probably why is is so widely spoken - it works despite taking a dreadful beating on the way.

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