Here in South Africa, eventhough the white stayed a long time enslaving them and are still with them, they believe more in their own language than English.As long as we exhaut white people this way they will continue to enslave us. Here people are never ashamed if they make mistake in Eng lang. Here you hear people greet,' How is you? 'What matters to them is that the message is successfully conveyed and I think that is the primary essence of using any language.Granted it helps to communicate with people of another language. We cud have picked any other language and used it for that purpose. We are still under slavery if we keep on abusing people because they cant speak the language of people who came to Nig to tell us that English is better than our language and that we will not enjoy good treatment from them except we start seeing English dresses as superior to our native wears. It was Lagos that first took it and they made it a capital ,according to literature.

Secondly about phonetics, I made an observation that when people become rise to the height of prominence, they care less about their phonetic. Some people are able to speak with good phonetics in Nig but I ve learnt that as soon as they speak in a white man' hear he recognizes their accent as not original.
No matter how well you can twist your tongue and sound to us like you are perfect at it, the native speaker would still need to adjust their hears to get what you are saying because you were not born and bread there!Why not relax and use English as only a medium of communicating ur mind and stop faking things.
Funning enough the more you try to change your tongue to talk like them the funnier you sound to them just embarrassing yourself sending only one message about yourself and th message is,'I am pretending to you to be who I am not because I have for no reason accepted that my mother tongue is inferior.

In a multi-lingual society as Nigeria, without English language, you can as well re-name us Babel.

HopeAtHand:
In a multi-lingual society as Nigeria, without English language, you can as well re-name us Babel.

You should rather have said without a lingual franca instead of saying without Eng. We chose to accept it. We could have used another.

HopeAtHand:
In a multi-lingual society as Nigeria, without English language, you can as well re-name us Babel.

that's true. most write up I have seen in this section concentrate more on the three main languages thereby neglecting other tribes. English language was adapted as lingual franca because we speak different languages and so going by what you said, I completely agree with you.

asuustrike2009:

that's true. most write up I have seen in this section concentrate more on the three main languages thereby neglecting other tribes. English language was adapted as lingual franca because we speak different languages and so going by what you said, I completely agree with you.

Nigeria is a country of very proud tribes, you cant pick a Nigerian language and force every other tribe to learn it. It is impossible, it is not workable.

Only the colonial power can ensure a language is spoken allover the country. And that language must be the language of the colonials.

HopeAtHand:


Nigeria is a country of very proud tribes, you cant pick a Nigerian language and force every other tribe to learn it. It is impossible, it is not workable.

Only the colonial power can ensure a language is spoken allover the country. And that language must be the language of the colonials.

but how come India were able to speak one language?

asuustrike2009:

but how come India were able to speak one language?

India do not speak one language. Hindu is widely spoken but not the only language in India.

In dealing with this you have to look at the percentage distribution of the various languages in any given multi-cultural society.

If there is an overwhelming majority, their language may become dominant. But if the percentage distribution is fairly equal, a difficult situation will arise if one is given the advantage over others.