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‘Mehn! This wins the award’

The discourse-pragmatic functions of mehn in Nigerian English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 April 2021

Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah Open the ORCID record for Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah [Opens in a new window]
Foluke Olayinka Unuabonah*
Affiliation:
Redeemer's University, Nigeria
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Extract

Nigerian English (NigE) is a second language (L2) variety of English which has been domesticated, acculturated, and indigenised (Taiwo, 2009: 7; Jowitt, 2019: 26), due to its co-existence with about five hundred indigenous Nigerian languages (see Eberhard, Simons & Fennig, 2019). It is the language of education, governance, law, the media, and formal financial transactions in Nigeria. Based on Schneider's (2003: 271) Dynamic Model of the evolution of the New Englishes, NigE can be located at the late stage of nativisation, while recent studies show that it is on the verge of entering endonormative stabilisation (Gut, 2012: 3; Unuabonah & Gut, 2018: 210). Although NigE is an L2, there is a growing number of young people who speak it as a first language (L1; see Jowitt, 2019: 16; Onabamiro & Oladipupo, 2019). NigE includes sub-varieties which are classified based on different factors such as region/ethnicity, and educational attainment (Banjo, 1971; Jibril, 1986; Udofot, 2003). Although Udofot (2003: 204) suggests that the sub-variety used by Nigerians who have been educated in tertiary institutions should be taken as the standard variety, Jowitt (1991: 47) opines ‘that the usage of every Nigerian user is a mixture of Standard forms’ and non-standard forms. The data used in this paper are a mix of both standard and non-standard forms.

Type
Research Article
Information
English Today , Volume 38 , Issue 3 , September 2022 , pp. 143 - 151
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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