And it continues today guys!!! Don’t forget to comment and RT the links!! Special thanks to mi man @JamesNdu for letting me use this wonderful material. Take it away ….. ************************************************************************************************************* 
There are several things I as a person could point to as factors responsible for this foreign-accent-mania.
One of them is satellite TV. Almost everyone watches DSTV or some other form of cable pay-TV nowadays as opposed to the 90s, those days of the really huge satellite dishes, when DSTV/Multi-Choice was the major cable provider and it was only for the rich. Cable TV, with its music and movie and lifestyle channels, informs our ideas of what’s cool, of what’s hot and what’s not.
And then, together with cable TV, there’s the increased availability of pirated American movies on DVDs. Many of our trends and foreign speech patterns are from Hollywood movies. It’s like accents people don’t learn from cable, they learn from long hours immersed in DVDs of foreign movie ‘collections’ and ‘season films’
The Internet also helped the foreign accent trend along.
The Internet made sure young Nigerians kept up with the emerging expressions and slang, so much so that foreign coinages like ‘OMG’ and ‘Baby-Mama’ are now used in everyday conversation.
Still, not everyone gets their accents from media.
Some people actually grew up abroad or lived there for a while and a distinction must be made between them and those whose accents were developed from what they heard on TV or in movies.
There are real, original foreign accents and there are fake, counterfeit ones. The problem is that these days, it’s getting harder to tell the difference.
The main factor responsible for the large number of accents, whether real or fake, is that sad, peculiarly Nigerian desire to ‘oppress’.
We always want to oppress. In any Nigerian gathering, there are always people who want to demonstrate their superiority.
People who want to show you that they’re better than you, they have more money than you, they have a bigger car, they live in a bigger house, they have a more lucrative job, they have smarter kids, they have prettier daughters, they are more sophisticated, they live in a posher area, they attend a posher church, their children attend posher schools, they are connected to more powerful people, they are more exposed, they’ve visited more countries, they are connected to more powerful people, they are more exposed, they’ve visited more countries, they are more important, they eat better food; in short their entire lives are superior to your own and the only thing that is required of you is to bow, and accept that you don’t measure up to them.
This is the reason why our country is the way it is, why our leaders act the way they do. It is what we do. It is who we are. Possession of an accent is a part of this oppression. Everyone wants to speak with an accent because they think it tells the people listening, ‘Hey, I’m with it. I’m cool.
I’m exposed. I’m sophisticated. I’ve been abroad’ as if having been abroad automatically makes u wise or knowledgeable or worth listening to It is for this reason, to demonstrate superiority, that we hear accents everywhere today.
In almost every TV advert nowadays, we hear all kinds of strange accents.
Is it in the Etisalat Easy-Starter advert where the guy pronounces kobo as ‘kow-bow’? Or the Easy-Cliq one where the guy in the green T-shirt and black waistcoat keeps saying “Is it ‘be-kiz’ we…” instead of ‘because’.
Or the Sunlight washing powder advert where the women are singing “Happy times are ‘he’ instead of ‘here’; A style which incidentally has been adopted by many church choirs.
Or the Cool FM radio presenter who some years ago, when trying to teach Dan Foster, her co-host, the proper pronunciation of the Yoruba ‘pele’ kept saying “It’s not ‘bele’, it’s ‘kpelay’”. WHAT IS THAT???
But I suppose I shouldn’t bring radio show hosts into this discussion. Lagos radio is inseparable from foreign accents.
Btw… I’m Wazobiafm for life… (Here I just had to scream “That’s whatsup Brother….Whoop Whoop!)
I think it’s virtually impossible to get a job at a Lagos radio station without some kind of foreign accent.
We hear orisirisi accents in church. Apparently, God is no longer pronounced as ‘God’ but as ‘Gad’ and Jesus is now ‘Jeezis’.
From newscasters to talk show hosts to entertainment show anchors to music artistes, everyone has an accent.
We hear things like “now if we criticly analoize the current guvmint polisay” and “Yeah,
ah star-ed wrai-ing songs and rhyming when ah wuz like 13 or so cuz y’know ah always knew music wuz what ah wuz gon’ do”.
“ah star-ed wrai-ing songs and rhyming when ah wuz like 13 or so cuz y’know ah always knew music wuz what ah wuz gon’ do”.
All of it just makes you wonder. Why? Must you have an accent to be taken seriously?
As a music artiste, do you have to be a fake Americana before you have credibility?
An erroneous belief I have discovered that many people and even certain schools hold is that to speak English properly, you must have a British/English accent. This is completely false!
All over the world, in places where English is spoken but not as the mother tongue, people speak English with natural accents derived from their first language. Even in the UK itself, Scottish people speak English with a thick Scottish accent as do the Welsh and the Irish.
When French people speak English, you know that they are French.
It is the same with the Italians, the Spanish, the Germans, the Dutch, and the Chinese, everyone; so how can we, Nigerians, with our multitude of local languages and mother tongues, believe that our English must be spoken with a proper upper-class English accent to be correct?
I personally believe it is a throwback to colonialism and that persisting mindset that the white man’s way is always better. (GBAM….. we are still under the imperialists freaking thumb…licking their assholes… Dang! Sorry! i Just had to let that out. Moving on……)
We should be proud of our Nigerian accents!
The way to speak correct English is not to kill yourself trying to acquire a foreign accent.
It is to make sure that your sentences are grammatically correct and that all your words are pronounced properly.
And you do not have to possess a British or American accent to pronounce English words properly.
**********************************************************************************************************
Stay tuned for the Final piece of the series …….
StandupChic —->>>>> OUT!!!
for now…. :*
Tags: Baby-Mama, Features, Foreign Accent, Foreign Accents
). But the lesson I learnt from this one is that “NOTHING GOES FOR NOTHING. There are no freebies in this world. Most people give you stuff to get stuff and like in the underwear analogy, it’s some sexual favour, it might be something else in another circumstance. So just be careful. As the popular saying goes,
ReCeNt CoMmEnTs