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LAGOS, Nigeria (AP) - In Nigeria, people felicitate the successful, police open cans of worms on cutlass-brandishing miscreants, and the criminal rascals meet their Waterloo.
Touts, urchins, and heaps of calumny: Nigerian English melds Victorian-era vocabulary inherited from long-gone British colonialists with the grammatical structures and syntax that underpin indigenous languages in Africa's most populous nation.
The results can be ornate, oddly understated, or remarkably apt. But in a rapidly globalizing world, some worry that Nigerians will be handicapped by an English that differs from the language of board rooms and Internet bulletin boards.
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