The Usage and Deployment of Nigerian English in Prose Fiction

Abstract

The rationale for a Nigerian variety of the English language, a variety that will exhaustively catalogue the things, events and processes in the Nigerian environment; this mode of expression to give prominence to the core symbols, shared meanings, norms and values which may only find expression in the Nigerian variety of English. This works look at the various features that are evident when Nigerian prose fiction writers are writing any text. We analyzed these feature with regards to : Code-mixing/code switching, loan words in text, acronyms, transliterated/ translated local idioms and culture-bound expressions, Syntactic innovations and Discourse particles, Coinages, Proverbs, Reduplication, Reference to religious overtones, and use of pidgin, the standard form or standard English, fidelity to oral tradition like the folklore and through the adoption of traditional story telling devices, we have them in expressions such as “once upon a time”, “as our people say”, “it was our fathers who said”, “our people have a saying”. We look at these features as evidence of Nigerian English in the texts we analyzed such as Purple Hibiscus, Half of yellow sun, Odiuko, the General Army, Americanah etc. these are just a few and they were used to represent the Nigerianess or the way we speak our own English. We thus realized that the English that Nigerians speak daily isn’t devoid of the factors we used in analyzing them and also these features have continued to gain prominence and will continue to as more persons use these and more writers are produced. Thus we encourage us all to continue to use our standard as it is gaining more and more prominence.