The Guiding Principle of Ninglish

Uncovering the linguistic anatomy of the heart of an undefined Nigerian creole

Introduction: Delineation, Definition, and Aims

Considering its population of over 220 million and the abysmal level of education in the country, it’s not ludicrous to speculate that only 1% of Nigerians speak entirely in proper English. The rest, i.e. the majority, are more conversant in either their native dialect, pidgin, or the insidious and yet undefined Ninglish.

Even when Nigerians speak proper English, they express themselves in a contrived form, Nigerian English—categorically distinct, as will be shown later, from Ninglish—defined crudely here as English spoken with a Nigerian affectation. In Nigerian English, the grammar and lexicon are recognizably English, but the syntax, diction, and semantics are suggestively Nigerian. 

As a result, certain phrases or sentences in Nigerian English would sound off—formal, bombastic, poetic, pretentious—and culturally shocking to an American, Aussie, or Brit. In the same way Elizabethean and Victorian English differ and are distinguishable from each other by the linguistic preferences people from both eras made within the same language, so does Nigerian English differ from that of its colonizers. Think of it as English in a bold font, simultaneously archaic and enchantingly contemporary. 

However, while some Nigerians refer to Nigerian English as Nigerianese, and others can make a clear distinction between English and pidgin, they would be stumped if asked to isolate as few as three major linguistic characteristics of Ninglish. Perhaps this is a wild leap. What, in the first place, is Ninglish?

Ninglish is a creole spoken in Nigeria that makes colourful use of rhythmic emphasis¹. It is distinct from English, Nigerian English and pidgin in many categorical ways. For example, a typical sentence in Ninglish is often chock-full of demonstrative pronouns, which makes even the simplest communication heavily dependent on context. And, in other instances, its lexical and syntactic structure overlaps surprisingly well with the ubiquitous mispronouncing and confusion of standard similar English words—“it’s” vs “its”, “I’m” vs “am”—by everyday Nigerians.

Although linguists and philologists might find this essay useful in many ways, my main aim is to guide and open the eyes and ears of Nigerian writers at large. Novelists, scriptwriters, and poets stand to benefit from the musicality and reasonable idiosyncrasies of Ninglish. Hopefully, moving forward, writers involved in mass media will incorporate proper Ninglish into their books, films, essays and plays rather than a caricature version that mocks, flattens and mischaracterizes the beautiful, florid language. I hope to see a Morrisonian treatment, where the text, the story itself, although written in English, switches to Ninglish during dialogue without a significant loss in narrative rhythm or authentic characterization.

The Breakdown

In a blogpost I made last year, I naively stated that “…the words in the unorthodox lexicon of Nigerian English [which I’ve reconceptualized here as Ninglish] rarely combine to form phrases.” This sentiment is flawed and unfounded. Just as in English, pidgin and other indigenous languages, phrases, sentences and entire paragraphs can be written in Ninglish with little to no loss in comprehensiveness.

However, instead of analyzing types of sentences according to the standard English tradition—simple, complex, compound, complex-compound, and imperative—Ninglish’s grammatical structure is best understood and uncovered by looking at how rhythmic emphasis plays out in figures of speech and their subclasses. Punctuation in Ninglish is a whole nother aspect that would require a different intellectual labour and scholarly consensus, which, for now, is beyond the scope of this essay. 

Nonetheless, using punctuation preferences of mine in the exemplary sentences, I will breakdown Ninglish under the following figures of speech:

1. Pronouns

2. Verbs

3. Exclamations

4. Adverbs & Adjectives

Pronouns

In Ninglish, several crucial deviations are made from standard pronoun use in English. While I’ll spare you the grammar lecture, things will eventually get technical. I will analyze pronoun usage in Ninglish under the following headings:

• Double personal pronouns

• Relative pronouns

• Demonstrative pronouns

• Reflexive pronouns

• Interrogative pronouns

Double Personal Pronouns

Trust me, it looks like what it sounds like. Instead of using I, the first person singular, and me, the form of I that’s often the object of a verb or preposition, separately, both pronouns are used simultaneously in a single sentence to refer to the subject. This is the principle of rhythmic emphasis at play, and nothing is more emphatic and Nigerian than the double personal pronoun. Below are a few classic examples:

1. Me’am not there, oh. 

2. Me’ya’ve said my own.

3. Me’yai don’t even know for him.

In the first sentence, ‘me’ and ‘I am’ are not only used simultaneously, but both are fused together. If you listen closely to rapid Ninglish, you can even hear an invisible ‘y’, so the sentence would read: “Me’yam not there, oh.” Breaking it down, the sentence more likely evolved from ‘me, I am’ to ‘me’am’ and, finally, ‘me’yam’. 

So, instead of “I’m”, which would be the proper contraction, giving the sentence more semblance to English, we see ‘am’, a deviation that correlates with how the word is pronounced in that sentence.

S/N

Ninglish is rife with phonetic contraction and contractions of contractions. As Angel Okoro identified in a TikTok of hers, in Ninglish ‘we are’ is shortened to ‘wa’, ‘you are’ to ‘ya’; ‘is’ is pronounced as ‘iz’, and ‘our’ is transformed into ‘awu’. Also, we ask, ‘Whoz your own?’ instead of ‘What’s your own?’ The Nigerian accent is to blame for this evolution, yes, but I speculate it’s a linguistic pattern borrowed from pidgin. In pidgin, for example, ‘make we’ is contracted to ‘mu’wu’, ‘how far?’ to ‘afa’, and ‘no problem’ to ‘no p’.

The tendency for doubling pronouns in Ninglish is carried over, in the same formulaic pattern, to both the second person singular and third person plural. It’s hard to spot and incredulous to us when isolated because of how rapidly we enunciate both pronouns when we speak Ninglish. For example, in the second person singular we say:

1. You, you cannot greet somebody?

2. You, you’ve started, ba?

And, in third person plural:

3. Shey², them, they did not see us coming?

4. Them, they’ve come again.

The sentences are not always accusatory, concerned with perceived insolence, confrontational, or even require both pronouns to sit side-by-side. For example:

• You when are you going to the market?

This doubling of pronoun fulfills a rhythmic rather than semantic purpose as Ninglish is often spoken in a Nigerian accent where all the usual high stresses in English are displaced, in most instances, for a downward stress pattern. Thus gui-TAR is stressed as GUI-tar and CHRIS-tian is flipped into chris-TIAN.

Relative Pronouns

In the case of relative pronouns—which, that, who, whom—things follow a seemingly familiar syntactic structure to English. Or not.

1. Who and who came to look for me?

2. Who is that? (when used to ask ‘Who is there?’)

3. Which one is that, abeg?

4. You and who is doing that one? (This sentence shows an example of improper tenses, which will be treated better in verbs.)

5. When did all that nonsense even start?

This is what has made Ninglish difficult to isolate as a creole for so long: looking at most of these sentences, a typical Nigerian would think they are grammatically correct. But both in standard and colloquial English, these sentences are, in very subtle ways, grammatically incorrect and would be jarring to anyone who isn’t Nigerian and tries to decipher meaning using the words alone as context markers.

Demonstrative Pronouns

Tell me, what is a sentence in Ninglish without a little this, that, these, and those? As will become apparent from the examples in this section, many common sentences in Ninglish rely heavily on demonstrative pronouns to convey meaning. 

The proliferation of demonstrative pronouns is extreme to the point where the phrase ‘that one’ can be used to shame arrogance—as in, ‘You mind that one that is always raising shoulder?’—or to refer to an actual object—as in the reply to the question ‘Which of the oranges, ma?’ being ‘Yes, that one. Enhe.’ Below are translations of a few English sentences into Ninglish sentences complete with demonstrative pronouns.

English: That man there killed my father.

Ninglish: Is that man there that kill my father. (As mentioned earlier, the ‘is’ here is pronounced with a ‘z’ rather than an ‘s’. And instead of conjugating the verb ‘kill’ to its past form, Ninglish prefers it in the present, without the ‘-ed’.)

English: That makes two of us.

Ninglish: So, you’re my twin like this?

English: There goes that dream.

Ninglish: Like this, like this, that chapter has close and finish.

In some extreme cases, there can be as many as three–four demonstrative pronouns in one sentence. 

E.g: 

• That’s how this other person said this other thing about that other guy. 

Since rhythmic emphasis is the guiding principle of Ninglish, it’s not far-fetched to assume the language will provide ample context, but that isn’t the case.

More often than not, Ninglish obfuscates context by favouring sentences where it’s easy to lose track of what pronouns represent either the subject or object. Nigerians always assume you know the context of a given conversation. They expect that you pick up subtle clues on your own, which is why it was a running joke at one point to reply sarcastically when someone asked a question with a painfully obvious answer.

Reflexive Pronouns

By now, you can tell that Ninglish and English share many grammatical structures; the former, after all, branched out from the latter. So, I won’t dwell much on this. However, it is worth noting that Ninglish doesn’t favour intensive pronouns. The underlined words below are the reflexive pronouns in the sentences.

E.g.:

1. You think you’re doing me? You’re doing yourself.

2. Sorry for yourself.

3. Is not you that I blame; I blame myself.

Interrogative Pronouns

There isn’t much to say here. This part is largely self-evident. 

1. What time did she come? (Used to ask ‘When did she arrive?’ or ‘At what time did she arrive?’

2. As how? or As, as how?

3. From where to where?

4. My sister, this one that you’ve not been answering my call, when will that money come, nau?

5. My brother, this one that you’ve come today, I hope all is well?

6. Hey-you-boy what is your name? (Hey-you-boy/hey-you-girl fall under a special category which I call compound pronouns).

Verbs

When it comes to verbs, Ninglish makes three deviant conjugations: a) double contractions, b) improper tenses, and c) false gerunds.

Double Contractions

A double contraction is a type of contraction where a contracted verb is further contracted to its singular form by an inflection caused by a mispronunciation or accent change. A typical example, as shown earlier, is using ‘am’ to mean ‘I’m’ and ‘is’ to mean ‘it’s’.

E.g:

1. Is a lie!

2. Abeg, abeg, abeg. Is enough.

3. Is like your not okay. (You’re, you are, is contracted into ‘your’.)

4. Wait for me, am coming.

5. It’ave do.

6. I don’t’ave.

Improper Tenses 

In Ninglish this form of deviant conjugation alters and determines the tense of the verb. While it might seem random at first, this deviation aligns with rhythmic emphasis and makes more sense in a Nigerian accent. For example:

• How did that one now take and concern me?

• How does that now concern me?

Translating these sentences to English transforms them to:

• How is that any of my concern?

• How does that concern me?

In the first sentence, for example, not only is there a doubling of verbs—did & take—but the adverb ‘now’ and the verb ‘take’ both signal that the sentence is in the present tense, undoing the assumption that the verb ‘did’ might suggest.

Other examples include:

• Come and be going.

• You use to have sense before.

False Gerunds

Finally, the false gerund. (A gerund is basically a verb that ends in ‘-ing’.) Ninglish is rife with them, gerunds that seem correct, but, by English standards, are not. Hungrying & angrying are two readily available examples. While words like vexing & eyeing, which sound like Ninglish words are actual gerunds. Then there’s also ripening which is contracted to ‘ripeing’.

Exclamations

Not even exclamations are safe from the contorting hands of Ninglish. Here, there are two major variants:

1. Bookend Exclamations: these are exclamations—similar or different ones—that appear at both the beginning and the end of a given sentence.

E.g: 

• Oh-oh! I told him not to come, nau!

• Dah! What is all this one? Dah!

2. Standalone Exclamations: just as the name suggests, these exclamations can be used on their own to express exasperation, angst, rage, worry, doubt, anger or pain. This, however, doesn’t mean they can’t be used in complete sentences, too. 

E.g: 

• Eh, wey!

• Omo! (Omo is a context-dependent exclamation.)

• Chai!

• Enhe! (This exclamation is a special type of standalone exclamation which I’ll call a context-dependent exclamation. Because, it can have a different meaning depending on how long each morpheme is pronounced, where the stress is placed when using the word, and what is being responded to).

• Abeg, oh!

• Mumu!

Adverbs & Adjectives

There isn’t much to be said about adverbs in Ninglish. You’ll find repetition of words like ‘now’. 

E.g:

• Leave that place now, now, now!

But the way most verbs are modified follows the guiding principle. When we don’t want to say, ‘hurry up’, we say, ‘do fast-fast’ or ‘sharp-sharp.’

As for adjectives, the same formula is retained. Something that’s scattered or in disarray is jaga-jaga, a person that begs too much is beggie-beggie, and one who parambulates is a waka-waka.

See also:

• Water-water

• Sand-sand

• Copy-copy

S/N

There’s an exclamation that works like a greeting. It’s difficult for me to categorize, so I’ll just include it here. Kpam-kpam. Nigerians often use this as an alternative to knocking, especially when we visit a shop or kiosk and find it empty. Overtime, some people have modified it, perhaps out of shame, into ‘knock-knock’, which is one of the few occasions where Ninglish sounds irredeemably grating.

Conclusion

Nigerians are, in many ways, drawn to the bespoke, especially when it comes to culture, food, and language. We end handshakes with a click; we prefer our own twist on the shawarma; and we have bent English into the shape of our dialects and fractured it into pidgin and Ninglish. 

A writer, Susan Sontag once opined, is a professional observer; a linguist, in my opinion, is no different. My hope is that this work gets expanded upon, so our writers can express our people more authentically without falling into prescriptivism, by trying to approximate the speech of those who belong to the class who speak the way I’ve highlighted so far.

A master is never mistaken about their methods. And to tell our stories in their full depth, both on screen and in other forms of media, it is necessary that the writers, if not in this generation, should master English, pidgin, a couple of native languages, and, more importantly, Ninglish. Here’s to telling more authentic stories, making more astute observations, and pointing out more truths hiding in plain sight.

1. I use the phrase rhythmic emphasis to denote the guiding principle of Ninglish instead of tautology, because the latter has pejorative connotations, and, in my opinion, functions as a misnomer when you take into account the many interesting ways Ninglish contorts, reimagines and reclaims figures of speech in English. Rhythmic emphasis is often expressed as doubled personal pronouns, bookended exclamations, and compound nouns, among others.

2. In an earlier version of this essay, this was spelled as ‘Shea’.