PROTEST AMERICAN ENGLISH INFLUENCE OR PROTEST AGAINST IT? CHANGING PREPOSITIONS IN NIGERIAN TWITTER ENGLISH

Matthias Hofmann

doi:10.5817/DI2020-2-55

PROTEST AMERICAN ENGLISH INFLUENCE OR PROTEST AGAINST IT? CHANGING PREPOSITIONS IN NIGERIAN TWITTER ENGLISH

Vol.13,No.2(2020)

Matthias Hofmann

https://doi.org/10.5817/DI2020-2-55

PDF

Abstract

According to Alo and Mesthrie (2008), Nigerian English (NigE) becomes increasingly more influenced by American English (AmE), due to contact with American-trained professionals among other factors (cf. Gut 2008, Jowitt 1991). The online micro-blogging service Twitter offers potential communication with a vast number of English natives around the globe, using English in a vernacular usage domain, among other domains (or genres such as a news tweet vs a private tweet). With its foundation in 2006, Twitter is a new communication technology, which may indicate that it is used predominantly by “younger” urban people, and which may influence linguistic choices. The question I attempt to answer is whether Twitter influences NigE such that the British English (BrE) heritage of the country is contested by AmE influence. In this paper, I focus on the usage of prepositions and orthographic realizations of lemmata ending in -o(u)r, which can be categorized as BrE and AmE origin, respectively, in a NigE Twitter Corpus compiled in 2016-17 (13 mill. words). These features’ frequencies are contrasted with those of the Nigerian component of GloWbE (Davies 2013). Results from chi-squared tests suggest that AmE prepositions increasingly enter NigE Twitter discourse. Differences in spelling tend towards American English, but are not statistically significant. The only exception is the lemma labour, which is more often used in its British English spelling variant (χ2 = 26.30; df = 1; p one-tailed < 0.001).

Keywords:
Nigerian Twitter English; youth language; prepositions; chi-square test; American English influence; specialized discourse; orthography

References

Hofmann, M. (in prep.) ‘American English and urban Nigerian youth: Investigating the influence in tweets from Lagos to Kano.’ In: Oloruntoba-Oju, T. and Schmied, J. (eds) Indigenous Grammar and the Rhetoric of African Youth Languages (REAL Studies 11). Göttingen: Cuvillier. 101-119.

Adedeji, K. (2015) ‘RP in Nigeria: Prestige vs. intelligibility.’ In: Opeibi, T., Schmied, J., Omoniyi, T. and Adedeji, K. (eds) Essays on Language in Societal Transformation: A Festschrift in Honour of Segun Awonusi (REAL Studies 9). Göttingen: Cuvillier. 29-40.

Albrecht, S. and Schmied, J. (2015) ‘TwitCollect’. Retrieved on 28 November 2017.

Alo, M. A. and Mesthrie, R. (2008) ‘Nigerian English: Morphology and syntax.’ In: Rajend, M. R. (ed.) Varieties of English 4: Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 278-339.

Anthony, L. (2018) AntConc. (Version 3.5.7) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available from http://www.laurenceanthony.net/.

Bamman, D., Eisenstein, J. and Schnoebelen, T. (2014) ‘Gender identity and lexical variation in social media.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 18(2), 135-160. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/josl.12080

Bell, A. (1991) ‘Audience Accommodation in the Mass Media.’ In: Giles, H., Coupland, N. and Coupland, J. (eds) Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 69-102. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511663673.002

Bernardini, S., Baroni, M. and Evert, S. (2006) ‘A WaCky introduction.’ In: Baroni, M. and Bernardini, S. (eds) WaCky!: Working Papers on the Web as Corpus (Studi interdisciplinari sutraduzione, lingue e culture). Bologna: Gedit Edizioni. 9-40.

Burghardt, M. (2015) ‘Introduction to tools and methods for the analysis of Twitter data.’ 10plus1: Living Linguistics 1, 74-91.

Davies, M. (2013) Corpus of Global Web-Based English: 1.9 Billion Words from Speakers in 20 Countries (GloWbE). Available online at https://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/.

Foulkes, P., and Docherty, G. J. (2000) ‘Another Chapter in the Story of /r/: ‘Labiodental’ Variants in British English.’ Journal of Sociolinguistics 4(1), 30-59. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9481.00102

Gries, S. T. (2013) Statistics for Linguistics with R: A Practical Introduction. 2 nd ed. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110307474

Gut, U. B. (2008) ‘Nigerian English: Phonology.’ In: Mesthrie, R. (ed.) Varieties of English 4: Africa, South and Southeast Asia. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. 35-54. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110208429.1.35

Halliday, M. A. K. (1989) ‘Spoken and written language.’ In: Webster (2007) The Collected Works of M.A.K. Halliday. Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press. 63-80.

Heyd, T. and Mair, C. (2014) ‘From vernacular to digital ethnolinguistic repertoire: The case of Nigerian Pidgin.’ In: Lacoste, V., Jakob, R., Leimgruber, E. and Breyer, T. (eds) Indexing Authenticity: Perspectives from Linguistics and Anthropology. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. 242-266. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110347012.244

Hundt, M. and Nesselhauf, N. (eds) (2007) Corpus Linguistics and the Web. Amsterdam: Rodopi. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401203791

Hutchinson, A. (2017) ‘Top social network demographics 2017 [Infographic].’ Online document. Retrieved on 6 November 2017 <https://www.socialmediatoday.com/social-networks/top-social-network-demographics-2017-infographic>.

Jowitt, D. (1991) Nigerian English Usage: An Introduction. Lagos: Longman Nigeria.

Jowitt, D. (1995) ‘Nigeria’s national language question: Choices and constraints.’ In: Bamgbose, A., Banjo, A. and Thomas, A. (eds) New Englishes: A West African Perspective. Ibadan, Nigeria: Mosuro. 34-56.

Kelly, R. (2009) TwBernardini, S., Baroni, M. and Evert, S. (2006) ‘A WaCky introduction.’ In: Baroni,
M. and Bernardini, S. (eds) WaCky!: Working Papers on the Web as Corpus (Studi interdisciplinari sutraduzione, lingue e culture). Bologna: Gedit Edizioni. 9-40.

Kilgarriff, A. (2007) ‘Googleology is bad science.’ Computational Linguistics 33(1), 147-151. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/coli.2007.33.1.147

Lipsman, A. (2009) ‘What Ashton vs. CNN foretold about the changing demographics of Twitter.’ Online document. Retrieved on 6 November 2017 <http://blog.comscore.com/2009/09/changing_demographics_of_twitter.html>.

Mair, C. (2013) ‘Corpus-approaches to the vernacular web: Post-colonial diasporic forums in West Africa and the Caribbean.’ Covenant Journal of Language Studies 1(1), 17-30.

Mesthrie, R. and Bhatt, R. M. (2008) World Englishes: The Study of New Varieties. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511791321

Milroy, J. and Milroy, L. (1985) Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (Language, Education and Society). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Murthy, D., Gross, A. and Pensavalle, A. (2016) ‘Urban social media demographics: An exploration of Twitter use in major American cities.’ Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 21(1), 33-49. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12144

Nguyen, D., Gravel, R., Trieschnigg, D. and Meder, T. (2013) ‘How old do you think I am?: A study of language and age in Twitter.’ In: Proceedings of the Seventh International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, 8-11 July 2013,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Palo Alto, CA: AAAI Press. 439-448.

Opeibi, T. (2011) Discourse Strategies in Election Campaigns in Nigeria. Saarbrücken: Lampert Academic Publishing.

Osisanwo, A. (2015) ‘A morphological study of the use of pidgin in selected Nigerian electronic media advertisements.’ In: Opeibi, T., Schmied, J., Omoniyi, T. and Adedeji, K. (eds) Essays on Language in Societal Transformation: A Festschrift in
Honour of Segun Awonusi (REAL Studies 9). Göttingen: Cuvillier. 155-172.

Pomikálek, J. (2014) jusText. Brno: Natural Language Processing Centre of Masaryk University.

R Core Team. (2018) ‘R: A language and environment for statistical computing.’ Vienna, Austria. Online document. Retrieved from http://www.R-project.org/ on 22 November 2018.

Schettler, T. (n.y.) Twython. Available online at http://www.ling.uni-potsdam.de/~scheffler/twitter/.

Schmied, J. (1995) ‘National standards and the international corpus of English.’ In: Bamgbose, A., Banjo, A. and Thomas, A. (eds) New Englishes: A West African Perspective. Ibadan: Mosuro. 337-348.

Schmied, J. (2012) ‘Social digital discourse: New challenges for corpus- and sociolinguistics.’ Topics in Linguistics – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis 10, 43-56.

Schmied, J. (2015) ‘Internet English in Nigeria: New data – new discourses?’ In: Opeibi, T., Schmied, J., Omoniyi, T. and Adedeji, K. (eds) Essays on Language in Societal Transformation: A Festschrift in Honour of Segun Awonusi (REAL Studies 9). Göttingen: Cuvillier. 189-208.

Schmied, J. and Opeibi, T. (ed.) (2017) From the Virtual Sphere to Physical Space: Exploring Language Use in Nigerian Democracy (REAL Studies 13). Göttingen: Cuvillier.

Schneider, E. W. (2007) Postcolonial English: Varieties of English around the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511618901

Sousa, A. and Ivanova, A. (2012) ‘Constructing digital rhetorical spaces in Twitter: A case-study of @BarackObama.’ Topics in Linguistics – Approaches to Text and Discourse Analysis 9, 46-55.

Stuart-Smith, J. (2007) ‘The Influence of the Media.’ In: Llamas, C., Mullany, L. and Stockwell, P. (eds) The Routledge Companion to Sociolinguistics. New York and London: Routledge. 140-148. https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0041

Stuart-Smith, J., Gwilym, P., Claire T. and Barrie, G. (2013) ‘Television can also be a Factor in Language Change: Evidence from an Urban Dialect.’ Language 89(3), 501-536. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2013.0041

Tagg, C. and Seargeant, P. (2015) ‘Facebook and the discursive construction of the social network.’ In: Georgakopoulou, A. and Spilioti, T. (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Language and Digital Communication. Abingdon: Routledge. 339-353.

Taiwo, R. (ed.) (2010) Handbook of Research on Discourse Behavior and Digital Communication: Language Structures and Social Interaction. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-61520-773-2

Trudgill, P. (1974) Sociolinguistics: An Introduction. New York: Penguin.

Trudgill, P. (1999) ‘Standard English: What it isn’t.’ In: Bex, T. and Watts, R. J. (eds) Standard English: The Widening Debate. London: Routledge. 117-128.

Wardaugh, R. (1986) An Introduction to Sociolinguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

Metrics