By Farooq Kperogi My erudite lawyer friend Kenneth Ikonne’s Facebook comment yesterday about a certain Erica Nlewedim (an Igbo woman who spe...
By Farooq Kperogi
My erudite lawyer friend Kenneth Ikonne’s Facebook comment yesterday about a certain Erica Nlewedim (an Igbo woman who speaks English with an Igbo-inflected accent but reportedly can’t speak Igbo) has inspired this reflection on a linguistic phenomenon known as “substrate influence” or “L1 phonological transfer.”
This concept explains how our English (or any second-language) speech patterns can absorb the phonetic habits of the adults around us, or of the dominant language in our immediate environment, even if we never learn to speak that native language ourselves.
In his typically witty and satirical style that sometimes disguises the profundity of his insights, Barrister Ikonne wrote of Nlewedim:
“The backlash against Erica Nlewedim is not because she couldn’t speak Igbo, but rather because she thought her feigned inability was flex. If truly she can’t speak Igbo, from where then did her accent when speaking English derive its crude mother tongue interference? From Washington?”
Although framed humorously, it’s a valid question. It provides a good springboard for some general-interest sociolinguistic education. While I’m not a trained linguist, I’ve read widely in the field and have a working familiarity with some of its core concepts.
It’s entirely plausible that Ms. Nlewedim doesn’t speak Igbo, even though she was born to Igbo parents. In past columns, I’ve written about a growing generation of urban, Nigerian-English-only Nigerians who feel little attachment to the older generation’s ethnic and linguistic identities. She seems to fit squarely into this demographic.
When we learn to pronounce and enunciate words, whether in a first or second language, we do so through what linguists call a phonetic filter. This filter is shaped by the first adult voices we hear. According to researchers, these phonetic categories usually stabilize between the ages of five and seven and tend to remain unchanged into adulthood.
If the English spoken around a child is already infused with the rhythms, tones, and phonemes of a native language like Igbo, the child’s speech will inevitably reflect that, even without learning a single word of Igbo. In Ms. Nlewedim’s case, it’s entirely possible that her parents’ Igbo-accented English shaped her phonetic filter in childhood and that it has remained frozen ever since.
In other words, people’s speech patterns often reflect and inflect the dominant sounds, syllable timing, and intonations of the ethnolect ( examples of ethnolects in Nigerian English, broadly speaking, are Igbo English, Yoruba English, Hausa English, or Niger Delta English) that shaped the auditory environment in which they were raised, even if they don’t speak the languages behind those ethnolects.
That’s why linguists talk about ambient phonology, which is the idea that our articulatory habits are based on the sounds we hear around us, not just the languages we actively speak. You might pronounce “village” as “filleij” because everyone around you says it that way, even if you don’t speak Yoruba, which lacks a /v/ sound.
There’s also the phenomenon of unintentional reinforcement through cultural identity. That is, subtle, almost imperceptible but nonetheless potent, pressure on people to “sound” like people from their ethnic group. This can push their accent toward what linguists call the family substrate, which fosters a kind of phonological solidarity with their roots, even when the linguistic knowledge itself is absent.
Add to that the influence of the broader speech community. If one attends school in an area where a particular ethnolect dominates, the cumulative weight of that phonological environment may reinforce the accent, leaving little incentive, or even opportunity, to develop a more neutral, pan-Nigerian, or standardized accent.
And this isn’t unique to Nigeria. It’s a common pattern in multilingual societies. Many of my Hispanic students in the U.S., for example, speak English with noticeable Hispanic accents despite having limited or no fluency in Spanish.
I’ve also met second-generation Korean Americans who can barely understand Korean but speak English with Korean-timed syllables.
Linguists have documented similar cases in rural Texas, where children from German-heritage families spoke only English, but with distinctive German intonation, well into the 20th century.
So, Erica Nlewedim speaking English with an Igbo accent, despite reportedly not speaking Igbo, is not necessarily evidence that she’s pretending to be less fluent than she is for clout, or “flexing,” as some critics allege, unless we have actual proof to support that claim.
It may simply be a textbook case of phonological transfer from her family’s heritage language into her spoken English.
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