Dr. Mirka Honkanen
University of Freiburg
“Nigerian English in Digital Communication”
Cartesium, 9:15 a.m.
In our globalized world, post-colonial Englishes, such as Nigerian English, now function as mobile and digitized resources in diasporic communities and digitally mediated communication. This talk focuses on the use of Nigerian English on the popular Nigerian web forum Nairaland by Nigeria-based as well as expatriate Nigerians. I will report on how the archive of Nairaland was turned into a large corpus and a Net Corpora Administration Tool (NCAT) was developed for easy access, searching through, visualization, and annotation of these data (Honkanen & Alcón López 2023; Mair & Pfänder 2013). I will demonstrate the potential of NCAT for corpus-based discourse-analytic research and describe how various morphosyntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features of Nigerian English can be investigated in the data. I will also show how some phonological features of Nigerian English are reflected in non-standard spelling on the forum. Finally, the role of Nigerian English alongside other linguistic resources — mainly Nigerian Pidgin, ethnic Nigerian languages, and American Englishes — in the linguistic ecology of Nairaland and the construction of Nigerian identities will be explored.
References
Honkanen, Mirka & Daniel Alcón López. 2023. “Exploring diasporic Nigerian digital writing with the Net Corpora Administration Tool.” In Readings in Corpus Linguistics: A Teaching and Research Guide for Scholars in Nigeria and Beyond, ed. by Foluke O. Unuabonah, Rotimi O. Oladipupo & Florence O. Daniel. Ibadan: Kraft Books Limited. 48–77.
Mair, Christian. & Pfänder, Stefan. 2013. “Vernacular and multilingual writing in mediated spaces: Web-forums for post-colonial communities of practice.” In Space in Language and Linguistics: Geographical, Interactional, and Cognitive Perspectives [Linguae & Litterae 24], ed. by Peter Auer, Martin Hilpert, Anja Stukenbrock & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi. Berlin: De Gruyter. 529–556.
Dr. Folajimi Oyebola
University of Bremen
“Investigating Varieties of Spoken English: Attitudes and Identity in a
Postcolonial Context”
SFG, 12:30 p.m.
In my talk, I will share my findings from investigating attitudes of Nigerians towards five accents of English (American English, British English, Ghanaian English, Jamaican English, and Nigerian English). In the study, I employed a range of direct (direct questionnaire and interviews) and indirect (the verbal-guise test) approaches of attitude measurement in order to elicit detailed information on the perceptions of Nigerian respondents. I will also discuss the possible influence of factors such as gender, regional provenance, and level of exposure on their evaluation of accents of English. Finally, I will discuss the implications of my findings with regard to the choice of a linguistic model in a postcolonial context.