![]() It is of such widespread use in Nigeria that by the early 1980s, it had acquired a figurative meaning-a K-leg can now also be any sort of problem, flaw, setback, or obstacle. It is another term for the condition of knock knees, as well as a depreciative name for a person affected with this condition, whose inward-turning knees often resemble the shape of the letter K. Two decades later, Nigerian students also started to use the word as a noun meaning agricultural science as an academic subject or course.Īlso originating in the 19 th century is K-leg, first attested in 1842 in British English, but now used mostly in Nigerian English. In the early 1990s, agric began to be used in Nigeria to designate improved or genetically modified varieties of crops or breeds of livestock, especially a type of commercially reared chicken that is frequently contrasted with ‘native’ (i.e. It was originally used in American English around 1812 as a graphic abbreviation for the adjective agricultural, but is now used chiefly in this sense in West Africa. Another frequently used clipping with a longer history in English is agric. One example is the adjective guber(earliest quotation dated 1989), which is short for ‘gubernatorial’-so Nigerians, for instance, would call a person running for governor a ‘guber candidate’. It is a reference to Okada Air, an airline that operated in Nigeria from 1983 to 1997, and its reputation as a fast yet potentially dangerous form of transport, just like the motorcycle taxi.Ī few of the Nigerian words in the January 2020 update were created by shortening existing English words. ![]() Okada, on the other hand, is first attested twenty years later, and is the term for a motorcycle that passengers can use as a taxi service. Danfo, a borrowing from Yoruba whose earliest use in written English is dated 1973, denotes those yellow minibuses whizzing paying passengers through the busy streets of Lagos, the country’s largest city. The informal transport systems that emerged in Nigeria’s huge, densely populated cities have also necessitated lexical invention. The word later became a generic name for the female food vendors themselves-Nobel Prize-winning Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka notably includes a Mama Put character in one of his works. An even more creative synonym is mama put, from 1979, which comes from the way that customers usually order food in a buka: they say ‘Mama, put…’ to the woman running the stall, and indicate the dish they want. Another term for such eating places first evidenced in 1980 is bukateria, which adds to buka the – teria ending from the word cafeteria. The word buka, borrowed from Hausa and Yoruba and first attested in 1972, refers to a roadside restaurant or street stall that sells local fare at low prices. One particularly interesting set of such loanwords and coinages has to do with Nigerian street food. ![]() The majority of these additions are either borrowings from Nigerian languages, or unique Nigerian coinages that have only begun to be used in English in the second half of the twentieth century, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s. We highlighted their contributions in the January 2020 update of the Oxford English Dictionary, as a number of Nigerian English words make it into the dictionary for the first time. By taking ownership of English and using it as their own medium of expression, Nigerians have made, and are continuing to make, a unique and distinctive contribution to English as a global language. This is how acclaimed Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describes her relationship with English, the language which she uses in her writing, and which millions of her fellow Nigerians use in their daily communication. ![]() My English-speaking is rooted in a Nigerian experience and not in a British or American or Australian one.
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