How the mode of transportation determines the medium of the message
Lagos, Nigeria
Talk radio is for nations with crappy traffic.* This is the only way I can explain Rush Limbaugh in America — people must be longing for a scapegoat for their road rage. But a happier convergence of gridlock and radio is Wazobia FM. The people of Lagos, Nigeria (population ~8 million) have embraced their local pidgin English radio stations with a vengeance. I wonder if Nigerian pidgin was/is discouraged in the school system, if comedians are reclaiming pidgin, or if writers have made their dialogue bounce off the page with pidgin. You know, all the things that pidgin do.
The diversity of Englishes that populate the world make me salivate. Even the varietals I am familiar with like the milquetoast mildness of Middle America newscaster English are strange and awful to Brits outraged by American English innovations. Ooh and don’t get me started on my fetish for corporate contortionist language.
If colonialism gave the globe anything good in addition to flavor in Britain (anyone would start a maritime empire if their national food was that bland) and coffee in Southeast Asia, I think it is the ingeniousness with which colonized & post-colonized people have adapted the English language.
*Seoul also has terrible traffic but I mostly took the subway which was crammed full of people napping, primping, and studying their English vocabulary flash cards. My Korean might be better if I had stayed within earshot of a radio for all my crosstown commutes.
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