Speakers
Description
Nigeria is a country of considerable linguistic complexity, with approximately 500 languages from three African language phyla. The linguistic landscape is dominated by Hausa in the North, Yoruba in the Southwest, and Igbo in the Southeast, while convergence zones with high rates of contact and multilingualism are situated in between (Jegede, 2024). Although the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria recognises regional languages such as Yorùbá, Igbo, and Hausa as official languages, English enjoys greater prominence and, as in other countries, has continued to expand its spheres of influence. English in Nigeria can be traced back to the era of the Atlantic Slave Trade, which also influenced settlement patterns in the region. The first ‘Nigerian’ English variety is a creole language related to Krio, known as Nigerian Pidgin English. Since English was (re-)introduced in colonial times, Nigerian Standard English owes its status in present-day Nigeria to its mass diffusion through education after independence (van Rooy 2019, p. 219). In modern Nigeria, Nigerian Standard English is the ‘in-official official’ language, the language of the media and the dominant language of instruction at all levels in many institutions. Nevertheless, the status and functions of English varieties and their fluid transitional variations in Nigeria are highly diverse, and the dynamics depend overall on the respective multilingual ecology (Jowitt, 2019). Also, while the dominant roles of English and its bidirectional impact on indigenous languages have continued to draw scholarly attention, to say the least, more still needs to be done in multigenerational analysis to achieve a nuanced understanding of the rapidly shifting multilingual dynamics in the country. In this presentation, using interviews and participant observation involving 180 participants from three demographic groups, we draw on the Dominant Language Constellations (DLC) framework and analyse communicative practices and discrepant language repertoires in nine micro-ecologies within the Egbe-Idimu and Igando-Ikotun Local Council Development Areas (LCDAs) of Lagos, focusing on how linguistic diversity is navigated across diverse conversational contexts. The findings point to intergenerational convergence and divergence and, to a great degree, high preferences for English across all groups. However, the dominant use of English, like Pidgin, is not without an active restructuring of the language to accommodate social values and local cognitive frameworks or thought patterns. Also, the additive bilingualism characteristic of older generations is being eroded and replaced, instead with English and Pidgin-centric linguistic frameworks or constellations, which are largely shaped by fluid adaptation and social-pragmatic transfer. Overall, speakers’ repertoires range from 2 - 7 languages but stratified constellations are formed by 2 - 4 languages, and these constellations not only enable communication with individuals from diverse ethnic backgrounds but also reflect substrate-superstrate dynamism, where the grammatical structure is occasionally derived from indigenous languages, and the lexical component originates from the English superstrate