It must have been in my 200 level year that the question was asked to which our lecturer, Dr Bidemi Okanlawon, replied: “If you find it attested in the language, why not?” The question: “Is it correct to say ‘It is me?'”
And that’s the point: linguists describe language and hardly prescribe. You have no doubt heard of the following rules: “Between is used for two people, among for more than two. ‘It is me’ is not correct English; send-off should be send-forth. Whenever you use not only, you must also use but also. The word however should always be followed by a comma. May is present tense and might is past tense” and such other hogwash.
Now, complete this sentence for a start: ” Just what kind of relationship exists —- your friend, your sister and your mum?” Among or between? Then, consider the title of a paper I delivered in 2006 at a University of Ibadan students’ conference: “English in Nigeria: Between Form, Function and Relevance.” If you think “Among” should have been used here— well, you had better leave well enough alone. Sometimes that’s just the best thing to do. Oh, there’s no comma after sometimes here and it can only be hoped that the purists are not already lighting the fires of purgatory. Well, punctuation in English usage is in many ways a matter of personal taste. So is the use of compound forms. There’s just no fixed way of writing songwriter. Song-writer/ song writer/songwriter are all correct. It is a question of personal taste.
Over the past 30 years, I have interacted with texts from different traditions. What I have discovered about language is that the more you probe into it, the less enthusiastic you become about the so-called rules that prescriptivists, many of them without any formal training whatsoever in language studies, are so enamoured of. Yet, even without my copy of “Contemporary English Usage: An Introductory Survey,” I have never forgotten the admonition by S.T Babatunde, one of Nigeria’s brightest in the Department of English, in the preface of the 2003 book. Babatunde’s poser: How do you describe an object permanently on the move? In Igbo English in the Nigerian Novel and the preface to a A Dictionary of Nigerian English Usage, Herbert Igboanusi also engages the same question, although from a different angle.
That’s a major challenge, and we may want to bear it in mind whenever we choose to tell people what they should or should not say. By the way, the dictionary is not the foremost authority on language usage. The authorities are the users, and then those who DESCRIBE what the users do. You may indeed learn the meaning of some words in a dictionary, but it cannot teach you how to form acceptable sentences in any language. You have to immerse yourself in ACTUAL usage. And then you have to use the current edition of the dictionary because in language studies, if you are not current, you cannot be correct. All of the following sentences are correct: “Council notes that the money was paid/ Management commends the research team/The management were divided/ Arsenal are a great team/The question was engaged at different forums/ A student should learn to respect their teacher/ Somebody left their bag here.” Yet you find many Nigerians pontificating on their supposed incorrectness. Traditionally in English you would say “Somebody left their bag here” if you were not sure who did, but nowadays the use of the Singular THEY has become widespread because of the anti-sexism advocacy. Thus: ” A teacher should not assume that their students know nothing.” Many would of course say: ” A teacher should not assume that her students know nothing.” But this only exemplifies what Yisa Kehinde Yusuf, one of the eminent Professors of English in Nigeria, calls reverse sexism. Yet there are those who insist on the traditional form: “A teacher should not assume that his students know nothing,” although admittedly such people are in the minority in the Inner Circle/English as Mother Tongue contexts.
Indeed, dictionaries are written by corpus linguists: people who describe samples of actual usage. Dictionary writers would be out of job if there were no speech communities. And if you feel it’s your duty to lay down the rules of language outside the speech communities/communities of practice from which they derive their legitimacy, who the hell are you? Or as they say in Nigerian Pidgin: Who you be?
And, by the way, correctness in language is determined by acceptability, which is why I would never penalize a student who speaks of a highway/expressway (American English) instead of motorway (British English) except of course such a student changes a fixed form such as ” Lagos/Ibadan Expressway.” Since Nigerians have chosen that form for this particular road, it would amount to sociolinguistic ignorance to change it to some other form. It does no good to aspire to the throne of Pontifex Maximus of any language. For the avoidance of doubt, highway is American English.
American English is standard English and is the default English in many language journals, yet I find many Nigerians daily rejecting American English forms, changing ize words to ise even when they are attested in British English, and generally advertising their ignorance. If American English is anathema, pray why do you use the following words? (I have put the British forms in brackets) truck (lorry), kerosene (paraffin), lawyer (solicitor), bank teller (cashier), bus (coach), bumper to bumper (nose to tail), call on phone (ring), corn (maize), department (faculty), drunk (pissed), emergency room (casualty), eraser (rubber), expensive (dear), freezer (cold store), suspenders (braces), scholarship (bursary), flight attendant (hostess), glue (gum), gutter (gully), insane (mad), raincoat (mack), soccer (football), sweater (jumper/pullover), telephone booth (call box), vacation (holiday), toothpick (cocktail stick), tuxedo (dinner jacket)?
Umbrella is an American English word. And if you detest American English, you shouldn’t speak of a living room (lounge). In short, you should cease to exist. I must say that I felt let down when I heard a professor of English say at a media staff conference I attended some years ago: ” I have told the MD not to be saying gotten! So, who are you?” The statement was rhetorical, but it mirrors one of the biggest challenges that we have to deal with in codifying Standard Nigerian English: the stigmatization of American English. Yet SNE is nothing but a combination of British, American and local English forms. It is disingenuous to stigmatize American English, a language encountered by Nigerians in real time on a daily basis—on the internet, social media platforms, in film/ music, books, computers, etc. There is simply no Nigerian living in Nigeria who speaks strictly British or American English. It is quite uncharacteristic of trained linguists to stigmatize inevitable forms.
Those who condemn American English certainly do not realise the irony when they say: “You don’t have to tell me that!” Yet the more idiomatic British expression would be: ” You needn’t tell me that!” Well, sometimes it’s best to leave well alone. If you eat scrambled eggs (buttered eggs), if you say some people are stingy (mean); if you drive a station wagon(estate car) and yet still think that American English is incorrect, then perhaps you should stop sending mails (post), living in an apartment (flat), eating chips (crisps) and smoking a cigarette (fag). You should not book rooms (make reservations) at hotels, you should not go to the hospital (go to hospital) and you should never live in a duplex ( semi-detached house).
Let’s now go to what I called hogwash above. Consider the following sentences: “She’s not only a good singer, she is an excellent footballer/ She was mad at me. I was however as calm as ever/Please hurry up, you just might meet her in the office.” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with any of these sentences.
Written by Abiodun Awolaja, PhD.
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