Arecent 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.”
