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This article explores Nigerian Pidgin English proverbs as a source of cultural conceptualisations that reflect traditional wisdom as well as the modern urban setting of West Africa. A total of 173 proverbs sourced from the BBC News Pidgin's Instagram service were analysed for recurrent lexical keywords and themes (e.g. those relating to food, eating and drinking, and animals) that can be interpreted as source domain lexical material that points to the knowledge of nature, common animals, objects and social situations. The findings suggest that Nigerian Pidgin English proverbs contain a rich inventory of variety‐ and culture‐specific lexis that encodes cultural knowledge and practice, for example knowledge of the local flora and fauna, food items, but also objects of material culture such as clothing, as well as references to social culture.
This article explores Nigerian Pidgin English proverbs as a source of cultural conceptualisations that reflect traditional wisdom as well as the modern urban setting of West Africa. A total of 173 proverbs sourced from the BBC News Pidgin's Instagram service were analysed for recurrent lexical keywords and themes (e.g. those relating to food, eating and drinking, and animals) that can be interpreted as source domain lexical material that points to the knowledge of nature, common animals, objects and social situations. The findings suggest that Nigerian Pidgin English proverbs contain a rich inventory of variety‐ and culture‐specific lexis that encodes cultural knowledge and practice, for example knowledge of the local flora and fauna, food items, but also objects of material culture such as clothing, as well as references to social culture.
In this paper, we explore the role of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) proverbs in language contact settings and their impact on the development of idiomatic phraseology in Nigerian English (NgE). In a set of 100 NPE proverbs, we identified lexical keywords that served as anchors for searches in the large‐scale Nairaland corpus to detect recurrent collocational patterns that in further proximity searches yielded frequent, lexico‐grammatically variable patterns that may be interpreted as innovations at the early stages of idiom formation. The findings suggest that cognitively motivated key lexical items of NPE proverbs may serve as a basis for the formation of variable but also lexico‐grammatically more condensed idiomatic expressions in NgE.
This paper is based on a talk given by the author at the round table discussion on Current Trends in the Development of Language Policy in CIS, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean (MGIMO University, Moscow, October 12, 2023). Geolinguistics in the context of Russian government foreign language policy planning was discussed in terms of languages of the Global South not yet taught in the Russian Federation. Based on the principle that political multi-polarity implies linguistic multi-polarity, many languages of regional importance were identified. Although great-power status for Russia is assumed to apply at present, demographics suggest that this will change in the future. Nevertheless, with proper foreign language education planning, Russia’s soft-power status can be preserved indefinitely. Different approaches with regard to language policy can exist. One approach is that of promoting homogeneity in language use. Another is encouraging transparency in the transfer of information through multilingualism. Yet another one is that of promoting linguistic multi-polarity, where national, international, and local languages are valued equally. Government language education policies, whether idealistic or Machiavellian, must have concrete, usually politically determined, objectives. On the basis of political and economic considerations, Kurdish, Nepali, Burmese, Sinhala, Tamil, Cambodian, and also Tagalog were recommended. A case was also made for the pidgin and creole language studies being taken seriously. Various African languages of national importance were mentioned, as well as Sundanese a language spoken in Indonesia and Cebuano, a language spoken in the Philippines, on the grounds that they are included on Google and/or Yandex Translate. Finally, emoji was introduced as a worldwide pidgin that is rapidly developing into a language for written communication, especially among people who use sign languages. Language education policies can have political objectives which are positive, negative, or neutral. Though there are too many languages of potential importance to teach all, Russian advocacy of multi-polarity must presuppose a commitment to multilingualism and to transparency as to its methods and objectives.
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