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Old Posted Sep 25, 2019, 9:19 PM
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niwell niwell is online now
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Roncesvalles, Toronto
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Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed View Post
I see no reason why we would assume that most people living in Johannesburg speak English and not the same of Lagos. It is far more likely that most people in Lagos speak English, and people who don't speak English live in rural villages.
I mean I have been directly told that it’s very difficult to get by outside of tourist and expat areas in Lagos without knowledge of Yoruba or at the very least the Yoruba/Igbo/English Pidgin. By Nigerians. If you are there on business you’d probably be fine with English but supposedly it’s difficult to leave that bubble. Also when my filmmaker friends from SA have been there they have had a translator, plus an armed detail.

This isn’t really the case in Johannesburg. While local slang and Township specific dialects exist, it’s perfectly easy to converse with the majority of Joburgers in English. The exception would be in heavily immigrant areas (of which there’s one for almost every population group you can imagine, including a Chinatown) or some informal settlements where the population has recently moved from rural SA.

There are of course also different historical reasons in the way both countries were colonized. The British originally envisioned a united South Africa along the lines of another Australia or Canada (obviously a lot happened with that...), while Nigeria was seen as a state for resource extraction. Hence why they empowered the northern Hausa tribes as opposed to the southern population that already largely lived in an organized agricultural / small urban setting based society and likely would have adopted the British system easily. Of course that’s a whole other thing.
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Last edited by niwell; Sep 25, 2019 at 10:03 PM.
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