English in Nigeria

Abstract

This chapter describes the history and development of English in Nigeria. Starting from first contacts with English-speaking traders in the sixteenth century, English was firmly implanted in Nigeria with the establishment of schools and British colonial rule during the nineteenth century. By 1960, Nigeria gained independence from Britain, but due to the multilingual nature of the country and the prestige accorded to English by many speakers, English continues to function until today as the preferred language for official and formal contexts. In Nigeria, English co-occurs with Nigerian Pidgin and about five hundred indigenous Nigerian languages, which all have been shown to influence its use. This has resulted into the domestication and acculturation of English in Nigeria, leading to a distinctive variety of English called Nigerian English, which has characteristic lexical, phonological, morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic features and which can be divided into several sub-varieties based on speakers’ ethnicity and educational status.

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