By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter:@farooqkperogi After I wrote my January 24, 2016 column titled “Those Annoyingly Fake Trans-Atlan...
By Farooq A. Kperogi,
Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
After I wrote my
January 24, 2016 column titled “Those Annoyingly Fake Trans-Atlantic English Accents at Nigerian Airports,” I got feedback from readers that our airports
had made changes and that announcers were now natural—and Nigerian—in their accents.
However, on July 8,
2018, Waziri Adio, Executive Secretary of Nigeria Extractive Industries
Transparency Initiative (NEITI), wrote the following viral tweet that shows
that the improvements that took place in the aftermath of my column were a damp
squib: “FAAN needs to do something urgently about flight announcers at our
airports. It is not just that their accents are strange, it is difficult to
hear or understand what they are saying. Won't be surprised if some travellers
miss their flights bcos of this.”
Scores of people
called my attention to the tweet and requested that I republish my column for
the benefit of people who missed it when it was first published. What follows
is a shortened version of the column:
I developed a heightened sensitivity to the frustratingly
incompetent affectation of a trans-Atlantic English accent (that is, an awkward
hybrid of American and British accents) among Nigerian airport announcers when
I traveled to Nigeria in November 2015 at the invitation of the British Council
to train journalists.
In fact, to call the accents I heard on airport
announcements—and on FM radios—inept affectations of a hybridized
Anglo-American accent is to undeservedly humor them. I know most people who
travel through Nigerian international airports—and listen to Nigerian FM
stations— know what I am talking about. The accents are neither American nor
British. Nor are they, for that matter, Nigerian—or anything; they are just
abominably inaudible babbles that mindlessly grate on the hearer’s auditory
sensibilities with their exaggerated but spectacularly incongruous nasalization
of every sound.
Apparently, Nigerian airport announcers and radio DJs have
led themselves to believe that all you need do to sound “foreign” and
“cosmopolitan” is to speak every English sound through the nose.
I don’t care for the bungling, babbling disc jockeys on our
FM stations who speak through their noses like people with bad respiratory
infections. I do care, however, about airport announcers because their
pronunciational imbecility has far-reaching consequences for both Nigerian and
foreign users of our airports. Many people have missed their flights because
they couldn’t figure out what the heck the announcers were saying. As you will
read shortly, I also almost missed my flight recently because of Nigerian
airport announcers.
On all occasions I was at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International
Airport in Abuja last year, I found many Westerners, for whose sake airport
announcers speak through their noses, asking Nigerian passengers what the
airport announcers were saying; they couldn’t make sense of the irritating
blare of nasal cacophony that passed for announcements. But they got no help from Nigerians who
thought affected nasalized accents were a competent mimicry of Western accents,
which should be comprehensible to Westerners. One Nigerian who was approached
for help by a white man encapsulated this sentiment when he said: “Na wa o. See
as Oyinbo dey ask me to interpret him language for am. The way the announcers
dey speak, no be so una people too dey talk—through una nose?”
I would have rolled
on the floor laughing (to use Internet lingo) if I wasn’t insanely incensed at
my own inability to make out “Kano” from “Cairo” from the announcer’s voice.
Yes, it was that bad: Cairo and Kano sounded exactly alike in the announcer’s
nasalized babble. I would have missed my flight to Kano if I didn’t trust my
instincts to go ask a group of resplendently babbar riga-attired gentlemen in a queue if they were going to
Kano. Of course, the pilot’s announcement welcoming us to the “plight” to Kano
assured me that I was indeed on the right plane and that my plight with the
airport announcer with tediously fake and exaggeratedly nasalized accent was
over—at least for that day.
I discussed this issue with several people at the airport
who told me barely audible, affected airport announcers’ accents are becoming a
desperate menace. Someone even jokingly called it “a grave national security
threat!” But this isn’t a joke. I heard stories of Nigerians and foreigners alike
who missed their flights because they couldn’t figure out what the announcers
were saying. And since passengers can neither see the announcers physically to
seek clarification nor have access to even a basic digital airport signage that
shows flight itinerary, they are often condemned to the tyranny of the
pretentious but incomprehensible accents of illiterate airport announcers.
Real Nigerian Accents
There is one other important reason why the Nigerian airport
announcers’ accents are irksome: they don’t represent the range of accents in
Nigeria. There are at least three types of accents in Nigeria. At the top of
the totem pole of Nigerian accents is what I call imported but authentic
foreign accents. These are the accents of foreign-born (or foreign-educated)
Nigerians in Nigeria (such as the crisp British accents of former House of
Representatives speaker Oladimeji Bankole, Minister of Environment Amina
Mohammed, human rights activists Ayo Obe and Ayesha Imam; the American accent
of former NAPEP coordinator Magnus Kpakol, etc.).
You also have what I call the Nigerian broadcasters’ accent,
fully realized in the mellifluous, articulate accents of broadcasters like
Cyril Stober, Kalu Otisi, Yusuf Aliyu Addy, Eugenia Abu, Ruth Opia, etc. And then there is what I call demotic
Nigerian English accent, which has regional variations.
A September 18, 2014 CNN article that identified Nigerian
English accent as the world’s 6th “sexiest accent,” obviously prefers demotic
Nigerian English accents to the first two because it chose the accents
represented by King Sunny Ade and Omotola Jalade Ekeinde as its examples of
“famous tongues” in Nigerian English accent. “Dignified, with just a hint of
willful naiveté, the deep, rich ‘oh's’ and ‘eh's’ of Naija bend the English language
without breaking it, arousing tremors in places other languages can't reach,”
the article said.
But it doesn’t matter even if others don’t like our accents.
Our accents define us, and it is foolish to run away from them. As phonologists
say, “a man without an accent would be like a place without a climate.”
This new trend to affect foreign accents is dumb because
everyone who travels to another country prepares him or herself to hear the
accents of the people of that country. They don’t expect to hear accents they
are used to at home. (I traveled to Paris recently and the airport announcers
and members of the cabin crew on Air France spoke English with an
unapologetically French accent). It is also dumb because neither Nigerians nor
foreigners understand the affected accents, so it is a wasted effort.
Options for Airport Announcers
But if our airport announcers insist on speaking in accents
foreigners would understand, they have at least three options. The cheapest
option is to go for training at our TV and radio colleges where polished
Nigerian broadcasters like Cyril Stober, Kalu Otisi, etc. trained. If that
isn’t good enough, they should enroll for “accent neutralization” training in
places like India and Kenya where call-center business has birthed a massive
accent modification industry. Or they can buy accent neutralization software
and self-train.
If that is still not good enough, they can emulate South
Koreans and commit to what is called lingual frenectomy, which is the removal
of certain tissues in the tongue that hinder the ability to speak English with
native-speaker accents. Yes, I am not making this up; you can look it up. Some
South Koreans cut the skin of their tongues so they can have perfect American
accents. According to a January 18, 2004 Los Angeles Times article, Koreans are
increasingly turning to surgery to correct what they perceive to be their
accent deficit, “underscoring the dark side of the crushing social pressures
involved in getting a highly competitive society in shape for a globalized
world. The surgery involves snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make
it longer and supposedly nimbler.”
I am being tongue-in-cheek, of course, when I said Nigerian
airport announcers should undergo lingual frenectomy like South Koreans. I
don’t wish that on anybody. But anything is better than the pervasive but
exasperatingly unnatural accents of our airport announcers.
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