Nigerian English

David Jowitt

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501504501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Although the past few decades have witnessed growing interest in varieties of English around the world, no study of the Nigerian variety intended for the international market has yet been published.
Making use of well-known paradigms, the book will relate Nigerian English, as a 'Second Language' variety, to other World Englishes. Its chief overall concern, however, is to provide a detailed descriptive account of the variety, seeking to show what is distinctive about it and also, in this perspective, distinguishing between more educated and less educated usage. After giving a sociolinguistic profile of Nigeria, where English today enjoys a more prominent role than ever before, it will examine in turn the phonology, morpho-syntax, and lexico-semantics of Nigerian English, with samples of written texts from the eighteenth century to the present. It will also give a comprehensive summary of academic research carried out in the field over the past fifty years.
In this way the book will provide an introduction to the subject for the benefit of scholars and students in universities in many countries, and will serve as a useful companion to other books in De Gruyter Mouton's Dialects of English series.

1Introduction

1.1Preliminary remarks

Nigeria is one of the biggest ‘English-speaking’ countries in the world today. To say this of course implies including in the list of ‘English-speaking’ countries those that belong to the ‘outer circle’ (Kachru 1985), those where English has the functions of a ‘second’ language. In Nigeria, as in other such countries, English was initially a ‘foreign’ language; it became firmly established during the period of British colonial rule; it remains the language generally used for official communication; it is the principal lingua franca used by well-educated Nigerians, especially when they do not have another language in common; it is the language chiefly used in the education system, especially at higher levels, and in the media. It is the language most commonly used in Christian worship, at least in the cities; it is the principal language of book publication, and of contemporary Nigerian literature; it is the principal language used by Nigerians on the internet and for international communication. In Nigeria, too, a variety of English began to develop in colonial times and has continued to develop since independence.

The expression ‘Nigerian English’ can be taken in a narrow sense to refer to the phonological, grammatical, and lexical properties that distinguish the English used in Nigeria from varieties of English elsewhere. To describe these properties, and to suggest how widespread the use of them is among Nigerians, constitute a major task of this book. However, the broader meaning of ‘Nigerian English’, namely ‘English as used by Nigerians’, can hardly be ignored. Discussion of it cannot, in turn, ignore the still wider subject of the history, status and functions of English in Nigeria.

Werner and Fuchs (2016) speak of the ‘underresearched status’ of Nigerian English, and in view of the size of the country this is indeed surprising. Indicative of the meagre attention Nigerian English has received is the fact that in Melchers and Shaw (2013) it is mentioned on only six pages, comparing unfavourably even with other West African varieties (Ghanaian English being mentioned on nine pages and Sierra Leonean English on seven). In a fifteen-page article by Wolf (2010) on East and West African Englishes in Kirkpatrick (ed., 2010), it is represented by only sixteen lines.

1.2The geographical, demographic, and historical background

1.2.1Geography and demography

Map 1: Nigeria and West Africa

At the outset, some basic geographical, demographic and historical facts need to be presented. More substantial information of this kind is found in Falola and Oyeniyi (2015); in their book of 288 pages of main text, however, only one short paragraph is devoted to the English language.

Nigeria is a large country on the coast of West Africa, shaped roughly like a trapezium (although its politics have tended to be triangular). Its south-eastern corner lies close to the point just north of the Equator where the continent begins to bulge westwards. Its terrain resembles that of several other maritime countries in West Africa: dense forest along the coast, wooded but more open land further north, dry savannah further north still. Two great rivers trisect it, the Niger and the Benue, which after their confluence flow together down to the Atlantic Ocean, first branching out into a great delta. Except along the border with Cameroon to the east, Nigeria has no really high mountainous areas.

Nigeria’s land-mass is not the biggest in Africa, but its population undoubtedly is. The claim is not so easy to prove, because although several censuses have been carried out over the course of time, the publication of the results has on each occasion been a matter of controversy. The most recent census, carried out in 2006, reported a total of slightly more than 140 million, with males exceeding females by over 3 million. According to the United Nations estimate of 2017, the total population of Nigeria is nearly 191 million and Nigeria is the seventh largest country in the world. Some other recent figures are that nearly two-thirds of the population is aged 24 or under; life expectancy is 54.5 (WHO 2017), Nigeria being 177th on the list of 183 countries; 59.6% of the population is literate (UNESCO 2015). However, these figures conceal considerable disparity between one part of Nigeria and another. Moreover, the gender breakdown of the quite impressive literacy rate is that, while 69.2% of males are literate, only 49.7% of females are.

It is also estimated that nearly 50% of Nigeria’s population lives in towns and cities, of which Lagos, the former capital and still the principal commercial centre, has over 11 million people. Other very large cities are Abuja (the present capital), Kano, Ibadan, Kaduna, Port Harcourt, and Enugu. Nearly all Nigerians are adherents of one of three main religious systems: Islam, Christianity, and ‘traditional’ religion. Estimates of numbers are again a matter of controversy, especially as censuses have not asked questions about religion.

At one time Nigeria had a varied economy based mainly on agriculture, but in the 1960s it became a major oil producer while soon lacking the refining capacity to meet its own rapidly expanding needs. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, with the fall in the price of crude, this excessive dependence on oil exports has been called in question.

1.2.2Ethnic groups and indigenous languages

Nigeria contains a large number of ethnic groups, differing considerably in size. Although censuses conducted over the years have not asked questions about ethnicity, the Hausa-Fulani, the Yoruba, and the Igbo are clearly the three largest groups, and one estimate shows them as making up respectively 29%, 21%, and 18%, or collectively two-thirds, of the total population (CIA 2018). According to the same source, ‘minorities’ – Ijo (or ‘Ijaw’), Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, etc. – account for the rest, but the largest of them, perhaps the Ijo, with less than 10%, is much smaller than any of the big three.

Typically, each ethnic group in Nigeria is identified with a particular geographical area and a particular language, although the number of ethnic groups is undoubtedly exceeded by the number of languages; the relationship between language and ethnicity is a complex one. Compounding the complexity is the fact that linguists may argue that two dialects should be regarded as one language, or alternatively that one language should be split into two dialects or even two languages; and sometimes, and not only in Nigeria, political considerations are crucial to any decision finally made. A wealth of information is provided by Blench (2014); the work is his most recent updating of an ‘index’ of Nigerian languages and dialects, listed alphabetically, which was first published in 1977 (the second edition, by Blench and Crozier, followed in 1992).

Map 2: Major cities and rivers of Nigeria

The classification of Nigeria’s languages has undergone revision over time. Three of the four families or phyla of African languages recognized by Greenberg (1966) are represented in Nigeria: the Nilo-Saharan, the Afro-Asiatic, and the Niger-Congo. The first of these is represented by a few languages spoken in the far north-east, close to Lake Chad, notably Kanuri. Afro-Asiatic languages fall into two groups: Semitic, represented only by Shuwa (also in the far north-east), and Chadic, comprising numerous languages, of which Hausa is the most prominent, with the far North as its original ‘homeland’. Niger-Congo comprises a number of groups, and to one or another of them belong the great majority of Nigeria’s languages. Tone (i.e. the use of tone to differentiate lexical meaning) is one of their characteristics (although tone is also to some extent present in the Chadic languages); and among them are such important languages, mostly found in southern Nigeria, as Yoruba, Nupe, Edo, Igala, Igbo, and Ibibio. Opinion has fluctuated as to the classification of these. Greenberg placed them in the Kwa group; by the time of the Blench and Crozier Index (1992) they had been transferred to the Benue-Congo group as ‘Western Benue-Congo’; more recent opinion is that, after all, they should be classified as Kwa languages, ‘Eastern Kwa’, one reason being that, unlike other Benue-Congo languages such as Tiv, they lack noun classes distinguishable by affixation. Ijo, spoken mainly in the Niger delta, is the principal member of another Niger-Congo group; while Fulfulde, the language of the still mainly nomadic, pastoralist Fulani or Fulbe, is almost the sole representative in Nigeria of another.

Estimates of the number of Nigerian languages have steadily been revised upwards, from 395 (Hansford 1976) to 420 (Blench and Crozier 1992) to 526 (Simons and Fennig eds. 2018). The number of speakers of each language as L1 is again hard to determine. The three ‘majors’, Hausa, Yoruba, and Igbo, are certainly in a class by themselves, each being the principal L1 in several of the country’s states. Brann (1990) picturesquely labelled them ‘the decamillionaires’ because even at the time he wrote they were generally agreed to have at least 10 million L1 speakers each. Nearly three decades later, Simons and Fennig assign to them 33.3, 37.5, and 27.0 million each respectively.

A second tier of languages has been labelled the ‘major minors’, and in Brann’s model they (along with the majors) were those he thought to have at least 1 million L1 speakers each: Fulfulde, Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, and Ijo. Fulfulde has the largest number of speakers in this group (the Simons and Fennig estimate being now 14.4 million), followed by Tiv (with 4 million). To them can now certainly, to judge by the figures provided by Simons and Fennig, be added Ebira, Igala, Nupe, and Berom. There follows the very great majority of Nigerian languages, with less than 1 million speakers each, the ‘minors’, but this categorization is inevitably rather misleading, since there are some languages with hundreds of thousands of speakers (e.g. Urhobo, Idoma, Mumuye, Ngas) and many with less than one thousand or even one hundred speakers. Many of the latter are endangered, and according to Ode (2015) fourteen, all but one of them in the North, face extinction.

Each of the majors has functioned as an L2 in an area beyond its ‘homeland’. This is notably true of Hausa. It has been estimated that there are 15 million L2 speakers of Hausa in Nigeria, so that the number of ‘speakers’ (as L1 or L2) of Hausa would then be far greater than the number of ‘speakers’ of Yoruba or of Igbo. In the North, in fact, minority languages are endangered less by English than by Hausa, which throughout the greater part of the North serves as the ‘language of wider communication’ (Akinremi and Erin 2017). Hickey (2000) describes how in the twentieth century Catholic missionaries in Northern Nigeria promoted Hausa there among minority groups because of its unifying value: with the spread of Christianity among these groups, an indigenous lingua franca was needed. In contrast, Protestant missionaries, who placed less emphasis on manifest ecclesial unity, favoured using the languages of the minority groups themselves, and translation of the Bible into these languages became, and remained, one of their priorities. Much of this work, which has perhaps saved some languages with small numbers of speakers from extinction, has been carried out by the Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL), based in Texas, USA, and by the Nigeria Bible Translation Trust (NBTT).

Map 3: Languages of Nigeria

1.2.3The North and the South, and political developments

(a) General

As must be already apparent, it is difficult for the expressions ‘the North’ and ‘the South’ to be avoided in any discussion about Nigeria. Some facts need stating here because of the bearing that they have on the different ways in which the two different areas (to use this word for lack of a less misleading one) have experienced the English language and on differences in their attitudes to it. The North comprises the whole of the land north of the great rivers and some to the south of them. Kano and Kaduna are its biggest cities; Abuja, the Federal capital, lies approximately in the centre of the whole country. The North is predominantly Muslim (but with a large Christian minority), and the Hausa are its principal ethnic group. The South lies entirely to the south of the rivers, is predominantly Christian (but with a large Muslim minority, especially in the south-west), and its two main ethnic groups are the Yoruba (in the south-west) and the Igbo (in the south-east). In both the North and the South there are numerous other ethnic groups.

(b) A brief history

The North-South divide has much to do with Nigeria’s history, and more is said about this, as well as about the history of English in Nigeria, in Chapter Five.

First, in both North and South indigenous kingdoms and cultures flourished for many centuries before modern times. In some places, notably Nok in the North and Ife, Benin, and Igbo-Ukwu in the South, impressive works of art were produced, in terra-cotta, brass, or bronze. A farming economy was everywhere the norm; but in the extensive savannah lands of the North it was complemented by grazing, especially when the nomadic Fulani moved into the area with their cattle in the eighteenth century.

The North, especially Hausland and Borno, was affected from about 1000 AD onwards by the spread of Islam, which arrived via the Sahara desert. In the nineteenth century the jihad of the Fulani Usman dan Fodio resulted in the subjugation of the Hausas to the Fulanis, the establishment of the caliphate of Sokoto, a more thorough Islamization, and the further spread of Islam, especially to the area now often called ‘the Middle Belt’ (roughly the southern part of the North). Many Fulanis settled in the cities and towns of Hausaland, and began to intermarry with the Hausas. This is the main reason why today the two peoples together are often referred to as ‘the Hausa-Fulani’.

In the South, in complete contrast, the white man made his first appearance on the coast in the fifteenth century. Soon, the trans-Atlantic slave trade began. The indigenous kingdoms decayed. In the nineteenth century, the slave trade was replaced by ‘legitimate’ trade, and Christian missionaries brought Christianity, Western education and the English language.

In the last decades of the end of the century Britain asserted sovereignty over the polities of the entire South and then over those of the North as well. After 1914 there was a single government for the whole area, but the contrast between its two parts endured. In the North, the British operated a system of ‘indirect rule’ (as in India), which allowed the existing ruling-class to remain in place; in the South, where political authority had traditionally been far more fragmented, this system could not work. In the South, an English-speaking educated class rapidly developed, and it was ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Phonetics and Phonology
• 3 Morphosyntax
• 4 Lexis and discourse
• 5 History and changes in progress
• 6 Survey of Previous Work and Annotated Bibliography
• 7 Samples of texts
• References
• Index