Nigeria: 12 Popular Misusages in Nigerian English (II)

20 April 2014

Every English-speaking nation on earth has its repertoire of idiosyncratic solecisms. I have written about common errors in American English. Several writers have written about the errors that typically occur in British English. And so on and so forth. In this article, I am concerned with 12 most popular, regularly occurring errors that appear in written and spoken Nigerian English. This is an addition to the scores of other errors I've identified in previous writings over the past couple of years. So here goes:

5. "Hotel." Nigerian English speakers, especially those with low- and mid-level proficiency, habitually interchange "hotel" with"brothel" both because "hotel" and "brothel" kind of sound alike and because, well, many Nigerian hotels are glorified brothels. But a hotel is a building that provides temporary accommodation to travelers while a brothel is a house of prostitution. A non-Nigerian lady once told me that she caused a stir among her Nigerian hosts when she said she had stayed in a hotel for days during a previous visit.

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