 Hello and greetings to everyone who's joined us this afternoon or perhaps this evening or morning, depending on where you are, great to see people from all around the world, sending their greetings in the chats from wherever you are, glad you're all able to be here with us today. We're also streaming this now to our Facebook page, hopefully some more people will be able to view us on there as well. Just say a few words of introduction before we get right into our webinar for today. My name is Joey Lefstrand, I'm a British Academy post-doctor fellow at SOAS, University of London, and this is the third in a series of summer webinars that we're doing online. Each webinar has been focusing on a different sub-discipline within linguistics, so for those of you who are there about if you missed it, our first one was on documentary linguistics with P.J. D'Souza, reporting on his collaboration with the Hrusahakal community in Northeast India, and then the second one last week was on variation in language, with a more full syntactic perspective, where Yanthi from Amadjaya University in Indonesia and Asakoshi Harayu from Tokyo University of foreign language, foreign studies presented on their work developing a comparable corpus of variety of Indonesian, and today we're going to look at a different topic, more from a direct sociolinguistic perspective on speakers' attitudes. Each of these talks is also looked at communities of different sizes, so the talk on Hrusahakal concerned a fairly relatively small ethnolinguistic community of less than 10,000 speakers, and one of the themes of that talk was that for that community there's an ongoing fear of language shift, of language loss, moving to other languages, and one of the things that we discussed was that loss of that language to that community would mean in a sense a loss of the identity as well because of the way that language and identity are tied together. Yanthi and Asakoshi's work on Indonesian was focused on larger population, urban groups, where people from several different language groups are in an urban context talking to each other in the regional language, and they are able to document some new emerging varieties that are coming about in this context in the ways that regional languages are being influenced and differentiated, and some of the speakers that participated in their study were quite self-aware of the varieties that they were using, the way that distinguished them from other groups, the way that defined them as a local, they're quite aware that if they chose a more prestigious variety they might be viewed as an outsider by their own community, and so there's definitely this sense of identity as being a part of this urban context versus other contexts within the same country, and today's talk expands even larger to the national level, so now looking at the language identity, the sense of a national identity of nation-state, looking at the use of English or English speakers in Nigeria and asking questions about how they see the use of language, is it a marker of national identity for them to the way people speak English in Nigeria, is it viewed as something that distinguishes them from speakers of English in other countries, whether that be in England or in US or Canada or Jamaica or Singapore or whatever. Our speaker today is Kingsley Uguayani. Kingsley holds a post teaching English linguistics at the University of Nigeria in Suka, but he's currently on leave working on his PhD at the University of Northumbria in the UK. Tomorrow is actually Kingsley's Viva, which is the UK term for the oral defense of his thesis, so this is quite an important week for him, a combination of years of study. We're thankful that we're taking the time out to do this with us as well, and we hope that this hour together is not taxing burden, but hopefully it's an encouraging and engaging, maybe a bit of a practice. Hopefully there'll be some perceptive and insightful questions that will prepare you for tomorrow's more, I'm sure, rigorous questioning of the ideas you've been working on for the last few years. I first came across Kingsley's work online because I was reading about a project by the Oxford English Dictionary last year about cooperating Nigerian English words into the Oxford English Dictionary, and Kingsley was consulted on that project. I think he'll mention it today as well, so that was a really interesting work, and if you're not familiar with that, I would encourage you to look that up, but yeah that's where my first game across Kingsley's work in that project. Before I hand it over to Kingsley this week for about 40 minutes, I'll just mention that we'll take questions at the end, and I think we'll do this again via the chat function, so if at any time you think of a question that you'd like to get some more feedback on, feel free to type that into the chat if you're watching this on Facebook, you can make a comment there, and I'll try to get there to read those comments as well, and whatever time we have left in our hour together, we'll try to get to those comments. I think that's all I need to say is an introduction, so let me hand it over to Kingsley, make sure I can unmute you. Okay, and yeah, so thank you for being with us today, and we look forward to your presentation. All right, thank you so much Joey, and it's my pleasure to be talking about these today, and as Joey has mentioned, perhaps this is going to be like a mock-vival as we're vibrating tomorrow, so to speak. Right, so I'll try to share my screen immediately. Can you all see my screen now? Yeah, we can see that, I can see the powerpoint, it's gone now. Right, yeah, can you see my screen now? Yeah, so I can see the whole powerpoint program, yeah, there you go, I can see the full screen now. Right, yes, let me begin by thanking you Joey for the opportunity to do this and then to the linguistics webinar series team at SOAS, and to also thank everyone of you who have joined this from all across the world, and as you already know today I'll be talking about Nigerian English and national identity, and because I have just 40 minutes and so this is the outline of what I'll be talking about today, and just to some kind of background, what I'm going to present today is just a small aspect of my doctoral research, which I've been conducting for some years now, and I'm looking at Nigerian English from language ownership framework, so to speak, looking at to what extent do Nigerians construct themselves as owners of English, so to speak, considering that English has taken root in Nigeria and I mean it is not, it's not anything new, so I would just start by giving some form of background and talk about the national language debate in Nigeria, and then look at two posing forces, so to speak, of looking at English, English as a national language or English as an international language, right, and I look at the issue I would be addressing, and then just a short one on methods, and then I'll dwell on my findings and I'll summarize with one or two points of discussion or conclusion. Right, now beginning with the background, Nigeria is an extremely complex, has an extremely complex multilingual configuration with about 200 and 524 languages, even though I think about seven or nine of these are not leaving, so so to speak, you will see that it's only third to Guinea, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia have about 800 and 700 languages respectively, in Nigeria it could be said to be the the third country in the world with the highest number of languages, and that's from Ethnologue, and English has been a co-official language, right, of the countries since around 1900s when when colonialism is said to have begun officially, but today however English seems to be the de facto official language, and I am careful with the use of the word, I'm intentional with the use of the definite D, right, right, so that in terms of even though, I mean for official speaking it's it's only a co-official language, co with the other three indigenous languages as it were, but in reality actually it is the only one, and the portion of English, the portion of English now occupies in both the privates and public lives of Nigerians, suggests that there's an increased use of English as as in today's Nigeria, and however generally even though English is generally regarded as an answer in Nigeria, evidence shows as we will see here and from other research sources that there is now a fast growing number, fast increasing number of L1 speakers of English in Nigeria, and there's been debates on debates on whether what is the time to capture these ones, L1 speakers of Nigerian English, and somebody at Ethnologue who said there are first language speakers of English as a second language, very something very ironical to say, right, but that's just an indication of the debates around how to capture this great number of L1 speakers of Nigerian English, which is how I prefer to put it, right, so this this gives you an idea of the number of languages and their official, their status so to speak, you will see that there's English there, there's French there surprisingly, to be very surprising to many people, to see that French there is the official language, the debate I don't want, I would not want to dwell on so much, right, yes, but sometime in 1996 when the country was still under a military regime, the military head of state then, General Sané Abacha, because there was that there was some diplomatic war going on between Nigeria and English-speaking Western world, so just in a way to spike the English-speaking Western world, the military head of state made a fluke pronouncement that French will now be one of the official languages, but it just ended there, so it's very controversial to even mention with some some language, it shouldn't even be mentioned at all because it didn't go beyond that one day one day pronouncement and right, but so you see that there is English, Nigeria, French, of course it's there, but also I have to acknowledge that because Nigeria shares border with French-speaking countries, that the border communities speak French as well, some of them speak to the two languages or even more, right, but that's not what I want to dwell on today, but look there's Nigerian, Pijin, there's Arabic which is more or less a religious language, and then the what's in literature is called the majors, the three majors, there's Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba, right, they are called the majors for basically two reasons, right, one is the number of speakers, they have the highest number of speakers in comparison with the others, that each one of them has at least 18 million speakers according to Louise at all, right, so but then also they are called majors because they are the three co-official languages, officially speaking, the three co-official languages that shares that official space with English so to speak, right, but you also see that they are designated as the national languages, so while the three of them Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba are called, they are co-official but as well they said they are designated the national languages, which English is not designated and that's what we'll be looking at today and then the other minorities and what is called the major minors and the rest of them, so I move on to looking at the the national language debate in Nigeria, which has been very hot, right, but I must acknowledge that it is no longer as hot as it used to be, maybe in the the 60s, 70s, 80s it is dying down, the debate is dying down with beats now and maybe the findings I'm going to present today and also maybe without research evidence in the case that Nigerians may be on their way to settling for one of the languages, so the status code says that, so there are at least four schools of thought regarding which language or languages, regarded as the national language in Nigeria, the status code official designation of today is that the national languages are Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba, all right, but then what I have in the in parenthesis there is the major criticism against the status code that there's some element of linguistic imperialism because this is a country that has over 500 languages, right, and only three are designated national, what happens to the other speakers of over, over, still over 500, there's bound to be complaints about linguistic imperialism, right, so the second school, so to speak, is the use of English or Nigerian English, more specifically, right, but one criticism against this is that some people who think that this shouldn't be because they do not feel that Nigerian English is truly English, right, I remember one of my participants, I just remember it now, it's not what I have in this in my slide today, one of my participants mentioned to me, see, I know we have Nigerian English, I believe we, I use Nigerian English, but because the word English is still attached to it, I do not think, I'm not comfortable with it, that was how, I'm not putting in verbatim, I'm not comfortable with the word that English is still there, it means, it still reminds me that this is coming from somewhere, right, so there is, there is still that lingering that even if it is Nigerianized, even if English is Nigerianized, it is not, is it really truly Nigerian, all right, so the third school is, have proposed that Nigerian Pijin, the Pijin variety spoken in Nigeria, with very close variety spoken across the other neighboring West African countries like Ghana, like Cameroon, all right, but one argument also is that this is also too close to English, especially in terms of vocabulary, in terms of its vocabulary is also too close to English, so that's one debate, and then another debate, another criticism against it is that it may not really be written, in terms of written form, even though, I mean, evident research shows that this is not, this is not a valid argument, but that's one of the things that people say, right, again, there have been other debates about using other indigenous languages apart from the first three, the argument being that if you choose a minority language, so to speak, and I do not use that word minority, with the sense of a value judgment, so to speak, I do not, right, but in terms of number of speakers, so using other minority languages, because their speakers are so small and they are not as powerful as the other, they will not, those languages will not seem to be domineering other ones, all right, and a lot of proposals have been made in Gala and all that have been proposed, but then one key argument about this is that if you use a language just opened by maybe a few hundred speakers, the language may not be widespread, may not be developed, and this, so there's an ongoing debate about which one it should be, and right, so English it seems, is English now the preferred language, language, so to speak, so Afolian has for a long time said that it is unrealistic for anybody in Nigeria today to think that national unity can be forged in this country without recourse to the utilization of the English language, the fact, the fact that it is now functioning as the language of Nigerian nationalism cannot be denied, right, so much of this debate, however, has remained as public opinion, even though there has been some academic engagement with it, so there are no studies available at the moment indicating the degree to which Nigerians in the 21st century may continue to associate English with British imperialism, especially as a writer of English, instinctively Nigerian has emerged, in other words it has yet to be in prickly investigated what attitudes Nigerians would have towards English in terms of accepting it as a language of their cultural national identity, so in my study I wanted to investigate, I mean this aspect of the study as I've mentioned, this is part of a broader, a bigger, a larger study I'm doing on Nigerian English, right, so I wanted to investigate the extent to which Nigerians will regard Nigerian English as expressive of a true Nigerian identity, and as some scholars like Unebu mentioned is that English has become a necessary evil to speak, so even though one argument as I've mentioned is that as an colonial language, English carries with it a symbolic value that is directly opposed to nationalist idea so to speak, so as I've just mentioned I one of my participants pointed out, so this creates some kind of tension between two schools, those who think that no matter what English cannot carry the cultural identity of Nigerians and those who believe that it can, since English can be meted by, right, so moving on, so why does the national language question seem so partly debated in Nigeria and I mean also maybe also elsewhere, one reason I found is that there's a lot of ethnic politics in Nigeria, and Nigeria apart from the numerous languages there are also over 250 ethnic groups and this is a country that is divided along the lines of ethno-linguistic and religious identities, so these things matter a lot, so seeing for instance that, seeing for instance that Nigeria as it is, it can be argued a little polarized ethno-linguistically does this make sense in any way to talk about Nigerian identity even when some people would think of themselves primarily as Igbo or Ausa or Yoruba, so whether there is some kind of affiliation towards Nigeria, right, so when I talk about nation here I do not intend to use it in a very strict sense, in a very personal sense in which nation refers to a group of people with shared ancestry, shared history, and even shared language, no, I use it in the sense of a nation state, nation state identity because having brought these groups of people, these ethnic groups together under one national identity called Nigeria, is it possible to talk about national identity in that regard, so that when I mention, when I talk about national identity I use it in that more liberal sense of nation state rather than the traditional way of understanding nation which we would see many nations, maybe over 200 nations in Nigeria, right, so so nations may be viewed as imagined, arbitrary, but through texts, through myths, through narratives and attitudes, a sense of national identity sustained, and this idea of imagined or arbitrary is even more important in a multi-lingual, multicultural society like Nigeria where there may be that kind of tendency to go to affiliate towards the more local, more regional, more ethnic identities rather than the national identity, however the national language is the ultimate as Joseph argues, is the ultimate unifying narrative because it helps to rescue national identity from its arbitrariness, and that's why countries spend a lot to maintain in a sense what is called national language, so this gives us a background about what national language debates, why it's important, and particularly why it's important in the Nigerian context, so I move on to talk about the two broad ways in which English is perceived, one is English as an international language, the other is English as a national language, and one time which some word English's researchers have used to capture these two broad perspectives is glocal, glocal English, right, and I borrowed that time from Erdogan, others as well as like Robdy as well, so English is local and global, right, because English, well, I'll say it's the language of globalization, right, and people when they want to communicate at the global stage, the default language, generally speaking, is likely going to be English, and there's been debate for and against this situation, so when English is perceived as an international language, it is perceived in the sense of that monolithic sense of one standard international standard English, right, but then when English is perceived as a national language, it is, it comes with a pure eccentric sense of having diverse norms, diverse standards, and where the centers seem to be disintegrating, so to speak, all right, and then we'll begin to talk about English in some brutal time, and Crystal mentions, gives example of how nations perceive these two broad perspectives of looking at the development of English, so Crystal says, a nation when English is considered an international language looks out from itself, that kind of outward looking at the world as a whole, and tries to define its linguistic needs in relation to that world, but on the other hand, when English is perceived as a national language, the nation looks within itself at the structure of its society and the psychology of its people, which for me, pertains to attitudes of people, which is what I'll be looking at today, and tries to define its linguistic needs in relation to its sense of national identity, so I saw this quote from Joseph Stasdans, because I love so much the grammatical being called a nation, so that, because nations could be imagined or arbitrary, and I've mentioned in the previous slide, that the, it is language, or I'll say language is one of the key things that is used in terms of narratives of attitude, that is used to sustain that sense of national identity, so it is in that sense that you may begin to look at the nation as a grammatical being, as a grammatical entity, so to speak. So the, I take, I go back to that Crystal statement, because that captures what I'm looking at now, because I'm narrowing down to local national identity, that's English as a national language, rather than English as an international language, it's not out of place really, because you see that, because of English, think locally, so while, while that, right, that local identity is emphasized, that sense of local, using English at a global level, so moving on, I look at Nigerian English and the question of national identity in Nigeria, so the aspect, the aspect of my study presented here considers the extent to which speakers, speakers sense of Nigerian identity might mediate their sense of collective ownership of English, which is a, which the fulcrum of my, my, my overall debate in my thesis, so since it has been suggested that speakers sense of national identity tends to interact with their overall attitude towards the languages in their, in their country, it was thought to evaluate how a sense of national identity might relate to the sense of ownership of English and subsequent consideration as a national language, right, so just to be sure that everybody is still, Joey, am I still being heard? Yes, a lot of people are here. All right, I just did that to confirm so that, to be sure I'm not speaking just to be clear. Sorry, it's a bit awkward, sorry. Sorry, it's a difficult format where you can't see any of us, but we can hear you a lot and clear. Yeah, yeah, I can only see myself and other percentages. So that's fine. Just to confirm that I can still be heard. Right, this is just a quick summary of the methods I use in, and I summarized the overall, the overall methods I use for my, for my, the larger study, but it spans who are usually university students. And then I used a survey, I used acceptability judgment tasks, which is what I find as the most interesting part of my study. And it was yesterday I was just preparing this slide. I said, well, maybe I would have presented something from my acceptability judgment task because it was a very interesting study. Right, but for this study, I'll be presenting some aspects, because well, my acceptability judgment tax relates more to the acceptability of specific features of Nigerian English, which I wouldn't want to mention today, because I want to go to the survey and the interview, as they relate more to what I am talking about today. All right, so this is the first table which summarizes a set of items posed to the, to my participants. And looking at this general, general descriptive statistics, you will see that, well, just some kind of background to help the audience. It was a scale of one to seven, then to five agreements, where one certainly was the lowest and seven was the highest. So we see most of them here are placed above the midpoint, so to speak, and some of them quite very close to the highest point, so to speak. So looking at some of them, for instance, if you take a look at number two, Nigerian English expresses Nigerian things or thoughts better than any other kind of English. The finding here seems to correspond with the view of world English scholars, that the emergence of endonomatic varieties of English tends to be contingent on speakers' desire to have a variety which embodies the local and social linguistic identity. Right, and if I will just call up Schneider's dynamic model here, which says that post-linear varieties of English emerge as a result of a dynamic relationship between the settlers and the indigenous communities, right? Even though in Nigeria, so to speak, there is no settler community in a very strict sense, as Joey 2019 argues, but it is still possible to think about that in this direction. What Schneider argues in that model is that it is identity construction, identity construction is one of the parameters that drives the emergence of new English. So the speakers of English in post-linear societies begin at some point, even while the colonizers or the settler group are still with them or still live with them, begin to realize that it's something about us, linguistically speaking, that is different from how the other, I use that other in terms of identity, the other group that is the colonial group, the colonialist group, use English, and it is this sense of identity construction and that drives the development of local rights of English in post-colonial societies. So if you look at number three, for instance, considering the affiliation in light of this unique role, it becomes even clearer why there is a considerable higher pentification with Nigerian English, because you see that since there is no one language spoken by all Nigerians, Nigerian English can be said to better unite us as Nigerians. And we see more of this once I move to the interview results. And then taking the last one, scholars of world English have argued that a high acceptance of an endowment, that's a local variety, is, as a legitimate variety allows the speakers to grant agency and legitimacy to themselves, as well as to the rights of English to speak, an attitude which has been found to be an indicator of English language ownership. So taking also a set of questions, we see, for instance, here that given this outcome in the first one, first item here, it can be argued that there exists correlation between participant's perception of English or ownership of things and the sense of who they are as Nigerians, because many of them says that when I speak English, I want to retain my identity as a Nigerian, right? So I want to speak English the Nigerian way, so to speak. So one possible interpretation of, for number two, their prevalent attitude is that why participants wish to retain their Nigerianness, why speak English, as you can see in number one, they might be concerned about their English drifting away to the extent that other English speakers around the world might begin to find it difficult to understand them. And that connects to what I've said again, that speakers of English in the non-native, non-native context, or non-inertical, and that's what I prefer to use using Katru's term, the non-inertical context. They tend to project themselves as local users of English, in which they simultaneously aim to project themselves as global, while retaining their local linguistic identities. So number three, for instance, the majority of the participants' bilingual or multilinguals, it was thought that they might exhibit unfavorable attitude towards Nigerians who are monolinguals of English, in relation to their Nigerian identity. But contrary to this assumption, the main score indicated that overall they seem to preferably perceive this class of speakers of English in Nigeria. Even though the main score does not indicate a clear majority, it suggests that the participants tended to view monolingual users of English as no less Nigerians. In fact, one of the interviewers stated that to be truly Nigerian, one should be able to speak English, since it is the only language which unites Nigerians with non-linguistic groups. And the last attempt here, Veskete, where the participants considered the effect of their speaking to other Nigerians in English on their Nigerian identity. And of course, we can see this indicates that more than half of them did not consider speaking English, makes anyone less Nigerian. Right. So moving forward, I performed Manova on the moderately correlated groups of variables, as I was seeing in table one items, and we just saw in previous slide. And to find out if there were some kind of difference according to groups of, according to participants, L1 and identification, especially as there may be that affiliation, as I mentioned earlier, towards more regional or more ethnolinguistic identity, right? But incidentally, there was no, there was no difference found, as you can see by the illustrious test, the statistic test, that there was no difference found, participants did not differ on ethnic and L1 affiliations. But I must mention here, even though I'm not presented here, that I consider this as macro ownership of English in the largest study, but in the micro ownership, and the micro affiliation towards English, which I conceptualized as attitudes towards the individual, the languages they speak in terms of preference, language preferences. Some groups, particularly the L1 speakers of the house, tended to demonstrate a weaker sense of ownership in that dimension. But that's not what I'm presenting here. I'm looking at the collective macro ownership, so to speak. So, also as you can see here, there was also no difference among these groups. So, what does this mean? It suggests that when it comes to linguistically defining what it means to the Nigerian, L1s and ethnicity do not seem to matter as such. Right, then we'll see very shortly that it was actually at the interview stage that the reasons behind a participant's orientation towards Nigerian English as a hubbinger of Nigerian identity began to emerge. And as one interview we clearly put it, it says Nigeria, Nigerian English, it gives you a sense of identity in Nigeria. And you will see the use of double subjects there, which is a key feature of the key semantic feature, sorry, morphosyntatic feature or clearly syntactic feature of Nigerian English, the use of double subjects. Nigerian English, it gives you instead of Nigerian English gives you or Nigerian English or it gives you, right? So, which is, I mean, even the key feature of the standard variety of Nigerian English. Right, so ethnic pluralization might be one of the reasons many people seem not to accept the current designation of only, of only trained languages as national languages. Those who do not speak any of these three languages tend to express resentment towards the language policy. Then also even those, even people who speak one of these languages might still resent the use of the other languages in national discourse. As one interview it puts it, our president, our president because he's Afsha Fulani cannot just come and give presidential talks in Afsha language or maybe the Fulani language. So English is like the bedrock for everything in Nigeria. So without English, just like Thor of Babel, you know. So the other interviewer says you have to learn and speak English or let me say English is like the connecting language I guess, the language that we use in place of a national language. So in place of a national language we make use of English and it's 70 proposed, it's working, 70 proposed, it's working well I guess. In fact, English is our national language. Right. And this draws me to an example of what happened in Nigeria in 2017 during the one of the Islamic holidays, Islamic celebrations. The president was not in the country. The president was receiving medical treatment, his blood tension outside the country. I think that was UK at the time. So during that event, which is an international holiday and it's a Nigerian thing, even though we have two key religious group Christians and Muslims in Nigeria. The president himself is Muslim and he's from his house. So the president sends an audio message to Nigerians in Hausa and that received a lot of backlash from Nigerians, a lot of backlash from Nigerians. And I just tried to get a few of them, right? A few of what people were saying about it in from Twitter, right? Even from what that's a social media platform. So that's what that's what I got evidence from. So let's accept that Buhari sent a voice message. Sounds ridiculous. Yeah. So he did it in Hausa. Buhari is a threat to national unity. All right. And we can see all these people complaining, right? And if you look at the the second one by your left, by Harman. So imagine how I would have felt if a Basan jaw addressed the nation in Yoruba or Jack, that's good luck Bella Jonathan in a jaw. Whoever told Buhari to speak Hausa is shallow, right? This person speaks Hausa and maybe should have been comfortable. She didn't have been complaining, right? But he's reflecting what have happened with previous presidents, mentioning two previous presidents. If they have spoken to the nation in their own regional languages, how they would have felt and he felt he would have felt so, so bad. And they are shackled there says, of course, says president of the North. How nice president of the North. And remember that Hausa is one of the national languages, right? So it begins to make sense to me that if the use of any of the national languages in national discourse is like the president did in 2017, for tense crisis, why the use of English brings national unification, it seems safe to claim that English is considered more national, more Nigerian, so to speak, than other languages. Suggesting that English is indeed the language which conveys participants sense of national, that Nigerian national identity, such a connection between English and Nigerian English. And the sense of national identity, it can be argued, demonstrate some sense of micro ownership of English. So looking at the other interview findings, another reason which people gave that it is not just English, there is that the unique ways in which Nigerians speak English connects also to this sense of being Nigerian. And commenting on whether Nigerian English can be accepted as the language which you present once I paint it as a Nigerian. One interview he said, yes, it's can, it's can if we are ready to embrace it. That's the thing. To me, there is no problem with Nigerian English. I school myself to make sure that if I am talking anywhere, I am talking the same way, because there was a time I would say everybody is welcome, everybody is ready to speak in a typical Nigerian accent. After a while I said, I said, no, I am not happy. It's not, it's not, it doesn't sound like me. I want to be myself. So though this speaker was specifically referring to her accent, to her Nigerian English accent, her session seems to show how much she thinks Nigerian English is the most suitable for her identity as a Nigerian. This view was echoed by other informants who remarked that Nigerians who speak Nigerian English with a non-Nigerian accent are simply being pretentious. And you can see the second interviewer says that I had this friend who traveled outside Nigeria for summer holidays. She just spent two moons and when she came back, we were hearing, oh my gosh, hi guys, oh my, I can't sit here. And I couldn't get his voice to play for us, but the interviewer was changing her accent to reflect this typical Nigerian accent. So everybody was like, why is this one forming? And forming is an interesting Nigerian English word, which means to pretend, to pretend. And as we can see in these tweets from Nigerians, there's also an example of someone using the word form. And I'll give you a background to these tweets. In 2007 edition of BBN Niger, which is Big Brother Niger, and instantly the program is on now for the 2020 edition. It's a very popular reality competition TV series in Nigeria. One of the housemates, yes, the participants in that reality TV show or competition are called housemates. One of the housemates called, this was this 2017 edition, called Gifty, received a lot of criticism from Nigerians for what most Nigerians called her fake accent. That was the hashtag, fake accent was trending at the time because they perceived that her accent was on Nigerian. In fact, in a later interview, Gifty herself acknowledged that her accent may have contributed to why she was evicted because she was evicted quite early there. And you can see these are what people were saying Gifty and her fake accent and nonsense English to go home on Sunday, right? That should be evicted on Sunday, right? So nonsense English here seems to me to suggest any English that is said in a typical Nigerian way or Nigerian accent is not us. So the viewers to this program or Nigerians who are following this program on social media were saying, this one is not really us. It does not really sounding like us, so to speak. So Gifty should try and ditch the locally acquired foreign accent. And if you look at locally acquired foreign accent, the abbreviation there is Lafa. Lafa became very popular. That's locally acquired foreign accent. That became one where people used to associate this kind of accent with. That this is not us. It's not working at all. And a very popular movie star, Funka Kindele, who is popularly known as Jennifer, referred to actress indeed with her funny accent. Let's her get a brighter grammar and learn how to pronounce words properly without adding or add to everywhere. And this calls to mind immediate letter in terms of roticity. Nigerian English is, so Gifty was trying to speak with American English, which is rartic. And as we know, American English is rartic. But Nigerian English is not rartic. So many Nigerians say that this is not really us. And that was, that's the evidence that was imagined. Right. So, and also in two events also, which for that lens presents to the overall positive attitudes that Nigerians have towards Nigerian English, one of the events is that in 2019, Google launched a Nigerian English accent. So in terms of voice selection, you can have Australian, Indian, Nigerian English, and that and that. And that also received a lot of attention on social media and even the traditional media. And because the attention was that of acceptance, so to speak. And Google, as one, as Bolan Le mentioned, Google Maps Lady, that's the voice. Reading it is a female voice. That's what Google Maps Lady now has a Nigerian accent. And there are many, many tweets around this. I couldn't mind all of them. And also, because I'm going to go off this slide to show you the video, what people were talking about, what people were saying about these two events. So I want to talk about the two of them before I show you the video. Another event was in early 2020, early this year, that's very January, February, right? OED, some Nigerian English words made it to the OED. Oxford Dictionary added some Nigerian English words. And as Joey said during the introduction, I was part of this project as the OED's consultant on the project and I learned a lot. And then when this thing was launched, that is in January, when these about nine Nigerian English words were added. Now, a lot of Nigerians are there talking, a lot of things were said. And for instance, UK Nigerians say great news. Oxford English Dictionary OED has added new words from Nigerian English. So it's dictionary. Nigerians have made an extensive contribution to English as a global language. Madhu is a Nigerian English expression, which people just use as an expression, though it's not one of the words that made it. And but a very interesting striking point made there is all those English teachers saying there is nothing like next tomorrow. Next tomorrow means the day after tomorrow. That's one of the words added there. How that day with that speech and really that is what you now say. You have not been searched or something that OED adding this has not made you to shut up, so to speak. So I'm going to show quickly share a video about what Nigerians were saying about these two projects. And Joe, can everybody see my video? Yeah, I can see the video. Let me mention we have about 10 minutes left to get it to you. Right. Yes. I will continue on our journey for one and a half kilometers. The Nigerian accents on that Google map is much more better than the white accents. When I had it, I was very happy and the voice is clear. For the white accents, if you're on all that limits, you won't be able to hear what the lady is saying. The other one, the Igbo voice, that one we call aggression. You hear it clearly, but now the little voice is so wonderful. There's nine-minute congestion on our friend Rewan Igbo in 15 meters. You are still on the fastest route. Right. That's on the Google map project. Then on the Nigerian-English project, this was what people were saying. The Nigerian-English has made its first appearance in the Oxford English Stationery with the inclusion of 29 words and phrases. Chop, quick, quick. So chop, meaning to illicitly make money. Tukumbo. And tukumbo, denoting an imported secondhand product, are among the additions coming after the country's culture exploded globally in recent years. Author T. J. Benson, whose favorite of the new Nigerian terms is severely meaning, repeatedly said getting such recognition has not been easy, but that it is important. Many people might think for granted, but it forms a large part of our identities. And when it is being suppressed or we are being told that there is a better way, or this is what is correct and then this is what's not correct, I think it affects us and it also demeans us. In number of the additions, he'll literally from Nigeria streets, such as Buka and Mamapu to a roadside street stall. Right. I would stop it there. And then I'll just have one more slide to show and that will be all. Right. So the next question I would ask, I hope everybody can see my screen now. Yes. What does this all mean? And I'll conclude with these two statements from H. M. Amanda, D. J. and OED in the 2020 editions. My English speaking is rooted in the Nigerian experience and not in the British or American or Australian one, even though she lives most of her life in the US. I have taken ownership of English. All right. So I'll summarize and I'll end with this. So since the findings of the present study suggest that there are growing positive attitudes towards English, time might be ripe to redefine the role of English, specifically Nigerian English in Nigeria's national life. For instance, even though official policy documents, such as the constitutional and national policy on education, designate English as an official language, they do so within a monolithic and an exonomatic conceptualization of English, English, and then maybe British English. So it is surprising that in today's Nigeria, with all the evidence presented here and in other studies, much of English language pedagogies remains exonomatic, including public examinations, such as WIAC and NECO and JAM that have continued to test students based on RP. And finally, and perhaps more importantly, it might be time to officially declare Nigerian English as Nigerian's national language. Evidence from this study indicates that some participants already consider Nigeria in Nigerian English, Nigerian's national language, since none of the other Indigenous languages can perform such a role without going some oxygen. And these are my references. I'm going to stop here. Thank you so much for listening and I will take a few questions. That's great. Thank you so much, Kingsley. Very informative and also engaging presentation. Lots to learn and lots of interesting things. So those of you who are watching here on Zoom, please write in any questions you have in the chat. I'll try to get as many as possible. Let me ask one brief question before I get to the other questions, specifically about your methodology and the participants you had. So you mentioned there were university students. Now, I wonder if you would expect there to be variation in language attitudes and identity questions. If you went to, say, non-university students, those in non-urban environments, those are agriculturalists, pastoralists, those in other parts of the country, different regions, would you expect there to be some variation? Most likely, yes. And in my larger study, I specified that my study didn't cover, does age is one of, I didn't discuss because I found that most of the people who considered my study are young people. And one reason why I chose young people is that previous research have indicated that, I mean, found that younger speakers tend to have more positive attitudes towards English. All right. So that if, for instance, another study is conducted among maybe older generation or non-student population, like working population, or a different kind of thing might emerge, certainly. And I recognize that. But the university, I was intentional with my choice of universities, I chose for universities, which operate what in Nigeria is called federal character, in which people from across the country come to study. And there is that, it is not, different universities are not at cost yet. So even the people who are not from very high social media backgrounds are able to attend. So I consider that diversity in my data. But then I acknowledge that if other participants, like the older speakers, a different kind of image might emerge. I have a question from one of our participants here. Has English brought any effect on other Indigenous languages in Nigeria? And what's been the effect? So has English grown in influence? Has there been an effect on the Indigenous languages? Yes. It's a great answer. And we're talking about Englishization and English being imperialistic. Yes, that's the truth. And I'll just use one of my experience when I was translating for Oxford dictionaries in 2017. I was translating for the API project on Oxford English Igbo, which is one of the national languages. So the editor who was coordinating what I was doing said, when I wanted to translate the word car in Igbo, I used the word motor and Ubala. Ubala is the traditional Igbo word for that. But motor, most people speak motor. So I told the editor, if I asked my mother or my grandmother who doesn't speak English, what do you call car? She's going to say motor. And that is the effect of English. And even though most Igbo people know that the traditional Igbo word for that is Ubala, how many people in today's contemporary Igbo, not many people would say that. And because English has been in Nigeria for a long time, there's been a lot of influence from English with a lot of other Indigenous and Nigerian language burrowing. It's an interaction. It's a language contact situation. While English burrows from Indigenous language, Indigenous language also burrows from English. So yes, there is. Another question on this idea of making English natural language, what would be the implications of making English national language in Nigeria for those Nigerians who don't speak English? Right. Now, a lot of implications because one, some people will be excluded, so to speak. And that exclusion is still at play today because even though it is said in principle that there are three official languages, national discourse and national business takes place in English. For instance, the constitution says that the business of government and maybe the national assembly can be conducted in any of the other national languages when appropriate arrangements have been made. But that is hardly the case. There's no, there's no, where any of the national discourse. And I just mentioned evidence of how the president spoke in House and the backlash that he's received. So people are already excluded. But one, one way to do this is when we use a variety of Nigeria because a variety of English that has been Nigerianized, it might help. But then it becomes closer and closer and closer to the people. It's a country with over 500 languages. So unless you make all the languages official and national and that compel everybody to speak and learn it, which is impossible, that is where you can think of not excluding some people. In multilingual societies, it is difficult to completely do away with that kind of execution. Yeah. Yeah. So in some, there's always going to be a compromise somewhere, I guess, in all of these situations. I'll try to ask these two more questions here, then we'll let you get back to preparing for your arrival tomorrow. One question is on the use of English in education. Is English used as the medium of instruction across Nigeria and what impact does it have on the quality of education that Nigerian students are receiving? All right. Yeah. The policy officially says that school children at a lower level of primary education, primary education will be taught in English, sorry, in an indigenous language, while when they move on, they will be taught in English. But this also, like the official language situation, is also a policy in principle, where in reality, children begin to speak, to be taught in English as early as primary school. Right. And even nursery, I remember an experience I had with them while I was in Nigeria. I took my daughter to primary school, university staff school. And for me, our home language is Igbo, so we speak Igbo. And the first time, so they asked me, what do you want to mention about your child? Is there anything we need to know about your child? And I mentioned she speaks only Igbo. And then a week later, the teacher complained, no, I struggle to speak Igbo to your child. And can people start speaking English to her? I said, well, for me, I don't have any struggle speaking Igbo to her at home. And I know she would speak English at some point. Right. But the policy says Igbo. So if you want to teach English, you are going to get what the policy says. And so it is your, it is your headache to handle. That was how I put it to the teacher. And said, you are the only one who is saying this. I said, well, that is, that's what it is. And just to say, that's an experience, just to emphasize that in reality, it is English. And the effect is that one, yes, you have said the effect is that the look, indigenous languages are going to really suffer. Yes. But also, if you're talking about Nigerian English as the language of expression, in Nigerian English is not British. Nigerian English is not American. Nigerian English is Nigeria. And today we talk about Nigerian being Nigerian. And every language has a history. So maybe a time will come when Nigerian English, maybe as one of my sponsors mentioned, maybe one day the, the, the word Englishman, not the, the game. All right. But even though American English, the word English is there, Canadian English there, and people still identify as in terms of national identity, these national rights of English define them. So I think once it becomes obviously unique and maybe more recognized by, by the government, and things will begin to change. You just mentioned a Nigerian pigeon. And the last question, there's two people who want to ask you to push it a little bit deeper into this potential contrast retention between Nigerian English and Nigerian pigeon as a more national creole. So one question is, what would the attitudes of Nigerians be towards Nigerian English when placed side by side with Nigerian pigeon English? So if you actually contrast them and say, not just is Nigerian English, Nigerian, but if you say, which is more Nigerian, Nigerian English or pigeon, and if you, if you put those two side to side, when people see pigeon as more Nigeria's, as more indigenous, more, more Nigerian, more Nigerian English. And then the other comment from a former SOAS professor, Federica Luka, she says that Nigerian English and pigeon are exempt from prescriptivism and characterizes standard English. So a lot of this baggage about correctness just isn't there in pigeon. And that makes it easier for this language to be co-owned by multiple speakers and people without access to education. You don't have to learn pigeon in school. So how do you see the role of Nigerian English with pigeon education and media where so far the standard language culture is propelling? Although we do see that now there's BBC pigeon as well. And so you didn't mention in your slide early on those different views of which language. As I mentioned, pigeon as, you know, potential sort of national identity kind of language, but you're, you seem to be emphasizing Nigerian English over Nigerian pigeon. So maybe you can talk a bit more about that choice. All right. Yes. It wasn't one of the part of what I investigated, right? But there have been studies. I, if I remember correctly now by one Iwanusi mentioning that there is generally some kind of negative attitudes towards pigeon because people think it is a defect form of English. All right. And most people think it's bad English. In fact, one of the studies Iwanusi and Boots conducted and they said that most parents tell their children not to speak Nigerian pigeon because they think that the growth or the use of Nigerian English is pigeon might affect their use of English. So generally speaking, that there seems to be that kind of negative attitude towards Nigerian English because people, sorry, Nigerian pigeon. Because people seem to believe one, it is a defect form. That's not linguistically proven, right? And people, for so many people from my study and from other studies do not know the difference between pigeon and broken. They call it broken English. All right. And that idea of broken means echoes images of bad English, images of corrupt English, images of of basic lexical, so to speak, variety of English. So it is not, even though some researchers have tried to classify Nigerian English as the variety of, say, Nigerian pigeon as they write up Nigerian because that's not the reality. But it might seem to me that there may not be in terms of some people, I mean, opinions are usually divided about these people have said that Nigerian pigeon is more Nigerian because it has more Nigerian words in terms of syntax. It is closer to Nigerian languages than English is. All right. Because I mean, what English is and syntax is not that different, so to speak. So there may be. And that's not part of what I investigate. Great. Well, we'll leave it there. Thank you so much for your presentation. Answering all the questions. Wish you the best of luck tomorrow as do many of our participants in our chat. Yeah. So thanks again for joining us. Thanks to everyone who took the time to listen in and be a part and ask your questions as well. I hope this has been encouraging for everyone to continue to explore these complex issues and attitudes and their implications, not just for Nigerians, but for many other multilingual countries around the world as well. Thank you so much, Kingsley. Yeah. I must say thank you, everyone. All of you are just, I just stopped the screen share now to see all the good wishes for tomorrow. Thank you, all of you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Great. Okay. Goodbye, everyone. Thank you for joining. All right. Thank you.