I first encountered the expression in the early 1990s from my cousins in Kano, who were born and raised there.
It isn’t only English that has no lexical or idiomatic equivalent to the Hausa santi many Nigerian languages also don’t. Note, though, that santi isn’t delimited by age nor is hyperactivity its marker. There is no scientific basis for the notion that children become inexorably restless when they eat sweets, but the expression exists to describe that condition. The closest equivalent to “santi” that I have found in American English is the expression “sugar high,” which is said when children become hyperactive as a result of eating sugary things. For instance, if, as a consequence of the satiation people derive from eating good food, they wax lyrical or just become uncharacteristically talkative, they are said to be trapped by or in santi. It also encapsulates a whole gamut of attitudes that gastronomic satiation inspires. “Santi.” This Hausa word deceptively looks like the lexical equivalent of the English “satiation” or, more specifically, gastronomic satiation, that is, the joy and gratification that one derives from food. See below other Nigerian expressions that can’t be idiomatically translated into English.ġ. I said the expression has no English equivalent. I made this point two weeks ago-and in previous columns- in response to requests from some readers of this column that I share with them the English rendition of barka da shan ruwa, the special Hausa greeting to acknowledge the Ramadan fast. There are words and expressions that are so culturally specific that they can’t be translated into another language. What message does that send to our secondary school students? Well, that’s not my preoccupation for now.Īs I pointed out two weeks ago, interlingual translation is not always possible in every circumstance. We wail with distress and in national self-pity every year over mass failure in English in school certificate exams, but our president’s official speeches and letters can’t pass muster with WAEC examiners in English. It would get an “F” if a WAEC examiner in English were to grade it. I was almost derailed again by the mortifying grammatical howlers in the president’s June 6 press statement that, among other things, announced June 12 as Nigeria’s new Democracy Day.įrom indiscriminate capitalization, to incompetent use of articles, to inelegant, error-ridden phraseology, to misuse of words such as “distract” for “detract,” and basic proofreading errors, the letter was disappointingly subpar. It is indeed a Nigerian fabrication.I’d planned to write this article last week, but the egregiousness of the grammatical transgressions in President Muhammadu Buhari’s Democracy Day speech was too much to ignore. Many mis-spellings and mis-pronunciations are so popular that they have entered colloquial usage.įinally I must add that Pidgin English is a comical language and spoken with spirit, emotion and a lot of gesticulations. However direct translations of sentences from the local dialets into English without regards to tenses contributes to a lot of the confusing words in Pidgin English. Many English words are used differently in Pidgin English and more research would be needed to find out why. The three major Nigerian languages namely Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa feature prominently in Pidgin English in general, however with Lagos being historically a Yoruba city 'Lagos Pidgin' consists of a disproportionately high number of Yoruba words. In this compilation I have limited myself to what I would call 'Lagos Pidgin' as this is what I am familiar with. With Nigeria having about 250 tribes in all, one finds a lot of variation in the type of Pidgin English spoken by the different ethnic groups. It is a language made up of elements of the Queen's English and the local dialects. Pidgin English is spoken widely across Nigeria. Next Page Babawilly's Dictionary of Pidgin English Words and Phrases.