English in selected Local Government Areas of the multilingual ecology of Lagos (Nigeria)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Henning Schreiber
• Subject Area: Individual Linguistics, Historical Linguistics ; African, American and Oceania Studies
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 528506225

The project explores the position of English varieties in the complex multilingual ecology of the Nigerian metropolis of Lagos, which has since long been a destination for African internal migration from many regions of Nigeria. With an estimated population of about 20 million people, Lagos is the economically strongest region in Nigeria, being itself a complex linguistic ecology with about 500 languages. In the urban linguistic ecology of Lagos, Nigerian Standard English plays a key role in everyday communication, but also in the fields of education, media, business and administration. In Lagos, Nigerian Pidgin English is also very dominant due to its function as an inter-ethnic means of communication and its popularity in the media and popular culture. Other factors in the urban multilingual ecology such as ethnicity, religion and the "hidden" social status of class also have an impact on the development and status of "English" in this environment. The research will be conducted in Ikotun-Igando and Egbe-Idimu, two neighborhoods in Alimosho district of Lagos, which are inhabited mainly by middle-class people. While Standard Nigerian English and the use of English by the social and academic elite in Nigeria, and more recently Nigerian Pidgin English, are much scrutinized in research, there are few studies that deal with the sociolinguistic situation and use of English varieties by middle-class speakers and their language attitudes. The aim of the project is to determine the status and role of the respective English varieties in relation to the other languages within the complex linguistic ecology of Lagos. The focus here is on the motives of the speakers that lead to the expansion of the Dominant Language Constellations or to shift to a variety of English (nativization). Furthermore, endonormative tendencies and the extent of contact-induced changes in the varieties of English but also the problems of hybridization and variety levelling between exoglossic and local varieties of English will be addressed. Using the Research Unit’s canonical methodology, a questionnaire study with 180 participants and semi-structured sociolinguistic interviews with a sub-sample of 60 participants, the influence of socio-demographic parameters on the aforementioned research questions will be analyzed. This project contributes to the research group by focusing on postcolonial English in a highly diverse and dynamic African urban environment. As part of the research group, the project findings will be compared with those from Cyprus, Northeast India, Tanzania, the Kurdistan Region, Botswana and the Philippines, and integrated into a theoretical model.

• DFG Programme: Research Units
• Subproject of: FOR 5728: Convergence on Dominant Language Constellations: World Englishes in their local multilingual ecologies (CODILAC)
• International Connection: Nigeria
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Herbert Igboanusi; Dr. Clement Odoje