I’ve gone on and on about accents and dialect in audiobooks. They often drive me nuts as a listener. But I’ve never been as nuts as I became listening to Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice.

Here the problem wasn’t just the dialect and accent, which I found hard to understand. It was the voice.

Distracting Dialect

This gripping and heart-wrenching story is told through the narrative voice of Adunni,  a 14-year-old girl from a small rural village in Nigeria. She speaks in what I believe is a version of pidgin English, which struck me as similar to the speech of many non-native English speakers. Many listeners praised this “Nigerian accent” in Amazon reviews.

I’m all for dialect, too.