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.
A few weeks back, the new permanent exhibit “Pidgin: How was.. how stay” opened at Plantation Village Museum in Waipahu. I confirmed that a home-study course consisting of several hours of Rap Reiplinger (despite the organizers’ acknowledgment that local humorists had helped spread respect for Pidgin) did not make me even a beginning-level speaker. One look at the “Pidgin 100 Test” and I humbly walked my mainland legs back to get more lumpia. Had no clue where to start with questions like “wat da difference between ‘kapalu’ and ‘hamajang’ and ‘kapakahi’…” or “in da sentence ‘… da keiki mai popo stay opa around, as her ratoon crop dat…’, wat da keiki going be to me?” At some point, I’ll pick myself up a copy of Da Kine Dictionary, with community-generated entries so it didn’t only reflect the local usages of one compiler.
I also got introduced to palaka through several asides about Arakawa’s and the executive director’s “Got Palaka” shirt.
The pattern made it’s way in the late 1900′s when Americans ordered tons of checkered-patterned thick cloth from England to make the uniforms for the field workers. Originally a pattern type in England for the sailors, it was seen as plain and therefore cheap. The cloth of Nelson’s navy and Yankeedom’s clipper wasn’t known by any name until the Hawaiians and Issei (first generation Japanese immigrants) named it after the Hawaiian work for ‘frock’ which was also a mistranslation for “checkered.”
One of the many awesome things about Hawaii is how audio and visual markers of working class/plantation culture are celebrated. Especially awesome after spending so many years in Korea, where most everyone seems to be chasing after “yangban” status or at least the modern-day equivalent with brandname baubles. I need to do some reading on local labor history I think.
Accent-location: The ability to detect place of origin (or upbringing) based on accent, slang and enunciation.
I am a bit sad that the hard vowels of my Chicagoland childhood have vanished, along with the “wicked” and “I’m all, like, she’s all…” of my adolescence spent in New Hampshire surrounded by Southern California friends. I don’t say “pop” for soda anymore and am too old to incorporate “tight” or “hella” into sentences despite the four years in Northern California. And despite pronunciation drift that happens when you live amidst clearly enunciated Ts (ImporTant here in Hawaii vs. impor(n)ent in most of the mainland), I fear I have no obvious origins beside “American.”
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Robert McCrum’s book Globish had too much in the way of the history of British and American dominance and not enough nuggets showing how English has morphed into distinct local languages. Still, one anecdote I liked was how publishers of the Coxford Singlish Dictionary pushed back against the Singaporean government’s attempt to discourage the certain phrases and cadences of Singlish: “Save our Singlish! Buy it before the Gahmen bans it!” (273)
He also reiterates some facts and figures that seem inarguable, given the worldwide English-language industry. The Sunday Times (UK) once opined “To be born an English-speaker is to win one of the top prizes in life’s lottery.” After watching Korean nationals stare despairingly at a Thai customs and immigration form written in Thai and English, I remember feeling awfully lucky that my native language was the default second language of bureaucrats worldwide. “According to the British Council, by 2020, nearly one-third of the world will all be trying to learn English.” (276)
Here’s to hoping we keep all the peculiarities of usage (Do the needful!) that ensure even the juggernaut expansion of English-language usage doesn’t have to mean the flattening of regional distinctiveness.
