Analysis of Discourse in Nigerian Pidgin

Abstract

Nigerian Pidgin (NP) can be described as the widest spoken indigenous language in Nigeria today. From east to west, from north to south, it is the language of choice. Thus it is prevalent in the metropolitan cities such as Lagos, Kano, and Port-Harcourt, especially in the military, police and air-force barracks, stranger-communities, and slum areas like Ajegunle and Mushin. In recent times, NP has been used extensively in the broadcast media for news casting, jingles, and all sorts of adverts in other to reach the masses of Nigeria for whom it is either a first, a second, or a third language. Similarly, in most institutions of higher learning, it is widely used among students, at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels, in their informal communication. This is why it is often referred to as Nigeria’s unofficial national lingua franca. Suggestions have been made by some prominent scholars such as Ben Eluigbe, Nick Faraclas, and Niyi Akinnaso for its adoption as our official national language because of its ethnic neutrality and non-affiliation as well as its currency and wide spread. Owing to the significance of the nature, use and status of NP in our country today, it is interesting to examine and investigate its conversational discourse structure or patterns. It is also useful to explicate features of conversations observable in NP in relation to those found in its superstrate, English, and substrates, indigenous Nigerian languages. In this paper, an attempt is made to analyse the discourse of NP with data collected through participant and anonymous observational as well as tape recording methods using a synthesis of methods, principles, and approaches proposed, employed, and adopted by Munby (1986), Melrose (1995), Fairclough (2001), and Collins & Hollo (2010). Findings from this study tend to buttress the fact that NP is the main lingua franca for the Nigerian masses or the grassroots.