![]() ![]() “Chook.” This is the word Nigerian children use where their counterparts in America and Britain would use “poke” or “jab.” Where Nigerian children would say “I’ll chook you with this pencil,” their American counterparts would say “I’ll poke you with this pencil.” ![]() Others Pidgin English and mother tongue terminal intensifiers that interfere with the spoken English of Nigerian children are “ko,” “fa” “sef,” “o,” “nau.” Like all intensifiers, these words have no meaning except to heighten the meaning of the sentences that precede them.Ģ. However, Nigerian children are growing up speaking like this without any awareness that they aren’t speaking proper English.Popular intensifiers from our native languages that interfere with the English of our children are“shebi” (as in: “Shebi our teacher is from Jamaica?” instead “Isn’t our teacher from Jamaica?”), “ba” (as in: “You will give it to me ba?”instead of “You’ll give me to me, right?”), etc. These kinds of constructions are usually intended to achieve comical effects and are confined to informal contexts. Bobo is the Nigerian Pidgin English word for “man,” “wan show say” is the lexical equivalent of “wants to show that” in English, and the rest of the sentence is standard, idiomatic English. ![]() Look at this sentence, for instance: “Shebi the bobo wan show say he is the best thing that has happened to the world since sliced bread.” Shebi is a Yoruba word that appears to be an intensifier used at the beginning of interrogative sentences. In Nigeria, even highly educated speakers of the English language routinely-and deliberately- mix codes, that is, speak Standard English, Pidgin English, and Nigerian native languages all at once in one speech act. Fusion of Pidgin English and Standard English. ![]()
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