I sincerely post this message in good faith to seek your knowledge regarding a most important matter.
I wish to humbly and properly introduce myself to you. My name is Dr. ELMWOOD, an urban planner with a local government agency in the Cleveland, Ohio area. I came to you in my private search for a reliable and reputable answer to a most pressing and urgent question regarding the speech patterns of those from Western Sub-Saharan Africa, most specifically those living in the esteemed Federal Republic of Nigeria.
As you may well have noticed, most of the correspondence known as Four One 419 (Four Hundred and Nineteen) scams are written in an extremely formal, stilted, and even laborious form of the language known as English, the form of which I have never encountered in other business correspondence from the United States of America or Canada.
I have decided to seek for the assistance of of the SDMB (Straight Dope Message Board) to determine whether English speakers in Nigeria do indeed converse in this most formal manner. If this proposal is acceptable to you, please post a followup response to this thread.
Please endeavor to provide a response to this post indicating the knowledge with which you wish to share regarding this more urgent matter. Please treat this posting with the utmost urgency. I wait in most eager anticipation of your fullest cooperation.
I haven’t met too many Nigerians, but none of them have ever spoken like that. I don’t think anybody I’ve met speaks like that.
I think it’s a case of “fill-in-the-blank” writing. The form’s original author must have had a very tenuous grasp on the English language. Later users (who were probably thinking, “I’m about to try to scam people out of millions of dollars–heck, what’s a little plagarism between friends?”) neglected to fix the errors, or added their own.
OTOH, the errors could just be intentional, all the better to make the e-mails look like they really are written by a down-on-his-luck Nigerian prince.
Narrowing it down to Nigerians might not be entirely fair, as I’ve received pleas for help in moving large amounts of money while receiving a generous commission (at no risk to myself) from citizens of Ivory Coast, Lagos, Liberia, and Ghana. Apparently, there are billions of dollars in desperate need of transfer into my bank account. I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, now, since I sent them my bank account numbers weeks ago.
All this talk of e-mail reminds me that I have to send my credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and PINs to EBay and PayPal because my records are incomplete. I was planning to use the “How to Make Big Money on EBay” book I bought yesterday to turn my expatriate African millions into a vast financial enterprise (And I really need the money: How else would I ever be able to afford all the mail-order Viagra I’ll need to please the thousands of single women in my area just dying to meet me?). Unfortunately, Amazon wouldn’t take my credit card for some reason. I really need to call the bank …
(BTW: I know nothing about the way actual Nigerians talk, but that was one damn fine parody of the average 419 letter.)
It’s not made up just for the spam. It’s formalized, ultra-polite style that is (IMO) directly connected in form to Victorian english of the post-colonial era. The tone of the spam letter is very similar that of the the letter my father received from his ex-houseboy, Sabid Peter after we moved back to the states. Sabid Peter had gotten this girl in Lagos pregnant and needed some cash to handle the situation.
This was in the mid sixties and I didn’t read the letter until years later in the late 80’s after my father died. The tone was very sincere and polite and quite similar in language style to the spam letters. The style is not made up out of thin air.
When I was in Nigeria in the mid 60’s there were quite a few professional letter writers who would , for a small fee write letters for anyone without the necessary skills . These were usually middle -aged and old men who , I suppose , had learnt their formal style of English from the colonial schools probably staffed by people who were almost Victorian. Maybe this very formal and old fashioned style of letter writing has persisted , even after all this time.
The Nigerian folk I knew in law school did seem to tend slightly toward the formal in conversational speech, although nothing nearly as stilted as the OP. Where an American asked how he ws doing might say “fine” or “great”, the Nigerian guys might say “I am truly blessed today!” Just my highly unscientific impression.
I have seen a non-scam requests for assistance from English as a second (or third) language speakers from Tanzania in the last 15 years. Most of them had a similar style to this. Very formal, very respectful, very “textbook” English.
Excessive formality can be related to poor English skills, but there are other reasons too. The formulations used in 419 letters are clearly modeled after pretty good, but extremely formal, business English. Clearly an older style of correspondence has survived in formerly colonial areas, much as many of the British colonies in North America preserve the “r” sound at the end of syllables in speech, while the former colonial masters lost this archaic device.
I’ve also taken it to be a way of painting a certain picture of the sender: Someone who is poor, and while not very educated, is educated just enough to try to be very polite. IOW, someone who is sincere and not to be feared.
I have been to Nigeria a couple times, heck I even married one.
We’ve received much written correspondence from Nigeria and I can attest that even personal letters from family members are written in a more formal slightly odd to an American tone. So it’s not just a 419 thing, I think it’s a written word thing.
Speaking, though, isn’t nearly as formal as the writing. You just have to get used to people saying “You are welcome” to you over and over.
Do they still have professional letter writers as mentioned above ? When I was in Nigeria in 1966 they were in every town and village . They usually had a battered old typewriter and were doing a roaring trade both writing business and love letters. I suppose they us PCs and word processors now.
Like John Mace, I’ve always assumed that that the 419ers are sophisticated enough to jazz up the style, but want the marks to feel that they have nothing to fear from such quaint, polite foreigners. Has any 419er ever come clean with tricks of the trade, as some con men do between prison stretches?
Most decent sized cities in Nigeria now have Internet cafes, from which 419ers can ply their trades, I assume. But I don’t know if the professional letter writers still exist.
I shared a flat with a Nigerian guy, who was studying law as a mature student, while at university. He was forever complaining about the English standard of his fellow undergraduates. He once turned to me after a particularly unsatisfying phone call with one of his British classmates and said: “In Nigeria we speak proper English. Oxford”. I wish I had it on film.
What Xash, Astro and Rayne Man said. I occasionally see correspondence between Indian lawyers, and it can be stilted and incredibly formal and very similary to 419-speak.
I have been on friendly terms with only two Nigerians and both of them spoke English a little formally and with enormous charm. I’m don’t think that either would have addressed a letter to “Dear Sirs” unless she or he knew for certain the gender of the person who would be reading the letter.
Surely there are rude NIgerians out there somewhere. I hate stereotypes.