Io sono Nigeriana

I find accents and languages fascinating. I l have often thought that most people speak faster in other languages – my Spanish and Italian friends seem to speak at rapid fire pace. My friend E is probably the only person I know who speaks English as rapidly although my sister speaks pretty quickly too if she’s not deliberately slowing herself down. You’d think that I would be fluent in 2 or 3 languages at least given my fascination with words, having learnt 3 languages in primary and secondary school and coming from a family with bi and multi lingual members. Sadly this isn’t the case.

I think my English is fluent, almost native, and I could speak Igbo (well the Ohafia dialect) pretty fluently before I turned 7. What happened then, you might ask. We moved from Aba in South East Nigeria, part of the Igbo stronghold to Lagos in the South West, former capital and very much dominated by the Yoruba tongue even though it’s technically the most diverse and tribe neutral city in Nigeria. While vernacular was forbidden in school, the Yoruba kids spoke sometimes.

We had to learn Yoruba in school as well as French but from my young and very prejudiced perspective it seemed that the language was for the seriously uncouth, involving opening the mouth to incredible widths and much yelling. If you know me, you’ll know I have a small mouth and tend to mumble. Thus Yoruba was the only lesson in which I performed consistently below par as I wanted nothing to do with it. The differences in the two languages also meant that my siblings and I often got laughed at for the way that we said particular words – owing to our Igbo influenced accents. Things like oya, favourite, said, and ate come to mind. Gradually I went from speaking Igbo very well to, twenty years later, being barely able to scrape together a coherent sentence.

I am often sad when I’m in the company of my Nigerian friends or family and want to say something in public that I would prefer that no one else could understand and I can’t. I am often sad when I think about the possibility of having kids and having no hope of raising them with Igbo and/or Yoruba at the heart of their cultural heritage. I am often sad when attempts to converse with my siblings in Ohafia result in our dissolution into fits of laughter. The two people who forced me to speak these languages are now dead – my next-door-neighbour and great grandmother who were both unable to speak any English.

I bet you’re wondering why I am suddenly nostalgic about a skill lost and opportunity missed. I saw a video today that put me to shame.

Titi does a fabulous job of speaking Yoruba there. I mean I didn’t even know ferese was window. She’s right that many people mix in a lot of oyinbo these days and we probably need a body of academicians and elders to help us retain the richness of the local tongues.

Anyway, I am in love with Italian, Spanish and French – and their accompanying accents. I studied French for 9 years in school but lost hope when we started conjugating intransitive verbs. The R is also a massive problem so I’m leaving the tackling of that till I get a chance to do an intensive and resident course for 6 months in Paris. Spanish seems easy enough – like what you see is what you say - but so is Italian and that’s the clincher for me. It also turns out that I have a great Italian accent (according to a lovely Milanese family I know) so I’m currently on a mission to make a video in a similar vein as the one above by the end of the year. I’ll also squeeze in getting fluent again in Ohafia but alas, I fear that might be one plan too many.