₦airaland Forum

A recent online English proficiency challenge between a Nigerian man and a British man stirred conversations across social media — and not just for the final score.

The viral face-off was triggered by debates around whether Nigerians speak “proper English,” with many defending the country's long-standing fluency despite local accents and dialectal twists.

At the end of the test, the British contestant scored 83, while the Nigerian scored 79. While many took the result at face value, the Nigerian participant clarified that the challenge only covered two out of the four basic language skills — which happened to favour native speakers.


In a follow-up tweet, he wrote:

“Nigerians do not barely speak English and that has been proven.
The challenge was to have the test done in the 4 Basic Language Skills but we couldn’t come to terms on that and only did 2.
Meanwhile, those were the strong forte of native speaker of any language.”

Despite the narrow loss, the Nigerian still stands by his bold statement — that Nigerians speak English, and do so impressively.

“Yes, I boasted and I’m still boasting. If you have a problem at boasting about what you know you’re good at, that’s a YOU problem

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How it started

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If you like, repeat it a thousand times. In our fathers' generation, you could say they spoke good English. In our generation, I did think we spoke good English until I arrived England. I encountered a Zim babe at a night Club in 2015 and we exchanged numbers and started texting. This babe came to see me within a couple of weeks. I was flabagasted and floored when she told me she came because, unlike many Nigerians she had encountered, I write "good English grammar". I couldn't swallow that comment and spent hours on an endless debate about it. Since then I have had similar encounters. Then I began to notice it myself in written english compositions with fellow Nigerians. The jury is still out because we do not have data points on how well we write/speak the English Language. But it seems to me extremely foolish to challenge someone to a test of his native language. The challenger picked the wrong english man. He thought his pick is one of the millions of english riffraffs who litter run down estates across the UK. He went to debate an educated guy. We should stop being emotive about issues concerning Nigeria, myself inclusive. It is this mindset that make us challenge our brothers who tell us the truth about how rotten things have become in Nigeria. It is that blind loyalty to being a Nigeria that is killing us all.

KillahPriest:
Has he fulfilled his promise to deport himself within twenty four hours ?

Treadway:
no mind the loud mouth. Challenge the smelly braggart, no problem, but why include a condition you know damn well and good you won't follow through on?

Great Wole Soyinka sef no follow through on him threat, na Ifedayo go come follow through 🤣