Nigerian languages

Language is an extremely important tool in any society. Its’ indispensability nature
always necessitates the continuous development. Apart from using language for
communication, language is also used for education. In fact, without language, there is
no education. A library is one of the tools that thus preserves and keep language for
education. The objective of this paper is to examine the role libraries play in the
preservation and development of languages in any society. This paper explains how the
library functions as “language bank” by preserving the linguistically
documented/recorded information, ideas, history etc. The paper laid much emphasis on
the crucial roles of libraries in preserving languages, especially the endangered ones.

Postcolonial varieties of English, used in countries such as Nigeria, India and Singapore, are subject to both local ("endonormative") and external ("exonormative") forces, the latter often in the form of British/American English. This gives rise to a stylistic continuum, where informal speech is more endonormatively oriented than formal/educated speech, which, nevertheless, is clearly distinguishable from British/American English. The formal end of the continuum is often regarded as the incipient local standard. Nigerian English (NigE) is the most widely spoken African variety of English, but empirical/quantitative descriptions are rare. In this pilot study, we present an acoustic analysis of eight phonological diphthongs produced in formal contexts by nine educated speakers of NigE with L1 Yoruba and drawn from the ICE Nigeria corpus. Results show that the NigE speakers produced more monophthongal realisations of English phonological diphthongs than speakers of British English (BrE) do, as measured by trajectory length in F1-F2 space. Phonetically, most of these vowels can be considered monophthongs. The results can be explained through two factors at work during the foundation phase of NigE: (1) historical L1 influence and (2) the native English input present in the country, which involved more monophthongal realisations of some phonological diphthongs than in present-day BrE.

ABSTRACT
The average Tiv-English bilingual or student encounters a number of linguistic challenges in his attempt to speak in, or learn the English language. This situation is obviously occasioned by the (linguistic) contact between the English and Tiv languages especially in Benue state of Nigeria. There has been an assumption that in such linguistic situations, the first language (L1) or mother tongue (MT) usually interferes with the second or foreign languages (L2/FL) especially if there are significant differences between them. In this study titled “A Contrastive Linguistic Study of the Sound Systems of English and Tiv Languages: Implication for Teaching English in Secondary Schools”, the researcher has contrastively examined the phonological features of English and Tiv languages with a view to identifying the areas of similarity and disparity between their sound systems; to establish or point out the areas of conflict or phonological difficulties which the Tiv-English bilinguals often encounter when functioning in the English language; and to examine the educational (teaching and learning) implications of this situation for both the language teacher and the Tiv-English bilinguals/students. This also serves to either confirm or disprove the hypothesis that L1 interferes with L2 when there are significant differences between them, given that there are many significant differences between the languages studied as well as many distortions in the Englishes of many Tivs. The phonetic principle for analysing speech sounds was adopted in carrying out the study, and the data generated, using a recording device, for this analysis was the utterances of randomly selected Tiv-English bilingual students (15 of them) across three selected public senior secondary schools in Gwagwalada Area Council of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja. It has been found that there are more differences than there are similarities between the phonological features of English and Tiv languages and that the major source of sound conflict (phonological difficulties) for the Tivs when they attempt to speak in/learn the English lies with those sounds or features of disparity, thus, the many linguistic deviations that often characterize the Englishes of many Tivs have consequently been linked to those differences. In the light of the above findings, it has been particularly recommended among others that: studies of this nature, i.e., comparative or contrastive studies of the features of the two languages should be encouraged among linguists and language teachers for their efficiency and effectiveness in bilingual education; the Tiv learners of English should undertake serious sound drill exercises/training on English (RP) accent in order to become conversant with its sounds, and further master it; there should also be provision of relevant teaching/learning resources, especially the language laboratory facility, to enhance quality teaching and learning of the English sound patterns; finally, funds should be made available by the government for researchers and language teachers to embark on thorough study of Nigerian indigenous languages.

This book investigates the phonology of Eleme. It is divided into nine chapters.
Chapter I gives information about where the Eleme people live, their origin, beliefs, socio-cultural background, occupations and the linguistic classification of the language. It also presents an overview of the literature on and in the language and the model used for this description. It reassesses the internal
classification of the Ogonoid group and suggests that Yeghe be considered a distinct language not a dialect of Kana or Gokana. Secondly, Gokana has Bodo, Bomu, Dere and Kibangha as dialects contrary to Vobnu (1991: 34) who identified southern, western and central. In the same vein, Kaani is also a dialect of Kana contrary to Kobo ( 1991: 42) who recognises only Babbe, Bo 'ue, Ken-Kana, Nor-Kana, Tee and 'Yeghe' dialects for Kana.

Chapter 2 argues that,' unlike many Cross-River languages, Eleme vowels contrast [-nasal] and [+nasal]. In other words, Eleme has significant contrastive nasalization. Nwolu-Obele ( 1998: 139) claims that [a] is a front vowel in Eleme. This study through phonetic experimentation has shown that [a] is a central not a front vowel in Eleme. Contrary to the assertion that, there is no vowel harmony in Ogonoid (cf Faraclas 1989: 388 and Ikoro 1996: 25), this study demonstrates that, vowel harmony is an active synchronic process in Eleme.

Chapter 3 identifies and describes four very unusual phones in Eleme [ S w ] • [ t S w ] , [ d3 w ] and [ pj] . It uses combined phonetic evidence and phonological argumentation to resolve that [ tl ] , [ cfa], [ kp], [ gb], [kw] and [ gw] are single segments not sequences.

Chapter 4 notes a significant distinction in the syllable structure of the western Ogonoid (Ban and Eleme) and the eastern Ogonoid (Gokana, Kana, Tai and Yeghe) languages. The western branch has only open syllables, whereas the eastern branch has close syllabics. The syllable types in Eleme are V, N, CV, CVV and CVCV. These contrast with the archetypal syllable types for
Cross-River languages, which are CVC, CGV, CVN, CVVC and CVV.

Chapter 5 discusses nasality, nasal harmony and nasal spread. The directions, constraints and conditions of application are also discussed. It demonstrates that, unlike most Cross River languages, Eleme is characterised by the presence of syllabic nasals.

Chapter 6 analyses the phonological processes, which affect various vowels and consonants. It argues that these processes are very systematic rather than 'indiscriminate' (Bond 2002: 24). It argues further that the phonological processes affecting vowels highlight the functional unity of phonological rules
that are driven by the enforcement of the Eleme syllable template.

Chapter 7 argues that, in the Eleme verbal system, the tone pattern of verbs roots does not follow from the usual dichotomy of infinitive versus imperative, as many Benue-Congo tone languages do (cf Cook 1985, Zee and Inkelas 1990 and lkoro 1996), but rather on a trichotomy of infinitive, imperative and indicative moods.

Chapter 8 discusses language endangerment and the need for detailed documentation and revitalisation of Eleme.

Chapter 9 summarises and concludes the work.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Towards the turn of the 20th century, a new wave of hip hop music emerged in Nigeria whose sense of popularity activated, and was activated by, the employment of complex linguistic strategies. Indirection, ambiguity, circumlocution, language mixing, pun, double meaning, and inclusive pronominals, among others, are not only used by artists in performing the glocal orientations of their music but also become for them valuable resources in the fashioning of multiple identities. In this paper, I interrogate some of these linguistic markers, using four broad paradigms: " Signifying, " " slangifying, " " double meaning, " and " pronominals and ghetto naming. " Under each of these areas, I show how Nigerian hip hop music is creating—through the mediation of language—sub-identities and a new subculture for a generation of urban youth.

Pichi is an Afro-Caribbean English Lexifier Creole spoken by some 150’000 people on the island of Bioko, Equatorial Guinea. Pichi is an offshoot of Krio (Sierra Leone) and shares many characteristics with its West African sister languages. However, insulation from English and Krio, extensive contact and hybridization with Spanish, language shift involving the Bantu language Bubi, as well as koineization through the prolonged coexistence of Pichi with closely-related languages like Nigerian Pidgin and Cameroonian Pidgin have given the language a character distinct from that of the other English Lexifier creoles of the region. The study of Pichi and its comparison with other West African AECs therefore offers fresh insights into the role that language contact has played in the differentiation of the Afro-Caribbean English lexifier Creoles.

No one knows for certain the precise origin of poetry. What we do know, however, is the fact that, it is the most ancient of arts. It had existed since human beings created language. Primitive cultures without written languages integrated rhythmic patterns of words into their ritual ceremonies. These were in the form of chants accompanied by music · of a simple beat and the dance of a measured step. The urge to create and appreciate poetry is as basic to human experience as language itself (Meyer 769). My father once told me that Eleme poetry echoed the concerns of the poets and that of the listeners. It chronicles acts of bravery, fearsome foes, .natural disasters, mysterious events, births, deaths, things that brought pains or pleasure, bewilderment or revelations. As time progressed poetry became an integral part of religion. This informs Meyer's claim that from its very beginnings, poetry has been associated with what has mattered most to people. Its concern - whether natural or supernatural - can, of course, be expressed without vivid images, rhythmic patterns, and pleasing sounds, but human beings have always sensed a magic in words that goes beyond rational, logical understanding (769).

Island constraints are syntactic phenomena that check and limit the excessive expressive powers of the move-α rule which generates both well-formed and ill-formed sentence structures. Existing studies have attested to the presence of island constraints in several natural languages (such as English, Turkish and Igbo), but no noticeable work has been done to explore this syntactic concept in the Edo language. This study therefore investigates, through contrastive analysis, the island constraints in English and Edo. The Bounding sub-theory within the Principles and Parameters Theory is adopted as the theoretical framework based on the general conditions and constraints it places on movements within sentences. The data include church sermons and market discussions recorded with the aid of a phone enabled for such purpose. Relevant English structures were borrowed from the English textbooks also. The study finds out that the operations of island constraints manifest in both English and Edo. The application and outcome of some island constraints are similar and some operate differently in both languages. The violation of complex noun phrase constraint in English leads to ungrammaticality and loss of meaning, whereas in Edo, certain movements that occur in the complex noun phrase determine the grammaticality or otherwise of the sentence. In English, violation of the sentential subject constraint leads to ill-formed sentence constructions, but in Edo, the presence of the pronoun residue allows for grammaticality and makes the sentence meaningful. Other constraints such as the coordinate structure constraint and Wh-island constraint operate in the same manner in English and Edo. Therefore, this study provides insights for both Edo learners and teachers of English in salvaging the learning difficulties that may arise due to the differences in both languages.

Language as a tool for logical thinking and planning is unavoidable in every developmental effort. Nigeria is among the countries that were not able to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among the reasons given for Nigeria's low performance level was communication barrier. To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the government has planned a transition strategy and hopes that it would be people-centred. Hence, she hopes to leave no Nigerian behind. As a multilingual nation, many Nigerians cannot function in English language but rely only on their various indigenous languages. Accommodating them in the SDG plans would require communicating with them in the languages that they understand. This could enhance collaboration and minimise a repeat of the previous failure. Unfortunately, there is no language plan in the government's transition strategy. If development is about helping people to help themselves, then there must be collaboration among the planners of the SDGs and those for whom it is planned. But collaboration is only possible where there is a free flow of information. This paper is an attempt to reposition the indigenous languages at the hearts of all effort to achieve the 2030 agenda in Nigeria.

Ajégúnlè is a suburb in southern mainland Lagos, near the international harbor of Àpápá. In Ajégúnlè, the PMAN (Performing Musicians Employers’ Association of Nigeria) meetings are reunions of the young Reggae artists of the area and are held in Nigerian Pidgin. I recorded and analyzed around eight hours of speech produced during the meetings and interviewed 17 PMAN members. In this paper I deal with language shift occurring among the young PMAN members who are abandoning the heritage African languages of their parents and concurrently show ideological investment in the Nigerian Pidgin language. I also claim that solid sociolinguistic evidence of the emergence of a creole variety of Nigerian Pidgin exists in this area. The emerging identity of this community of practice is shaped through the discourse patterns elaborated in their regular meetings, where clearly Nigerian Pidgin serves as the main symbol of community membership and engagement. In fact, the expansion of the language is consciously conceived by some leading members of the PMAN collective as a means of elaborating a positive Ajégúnlè history and identity, with the concurrent aims of rooting this identity within the Yorùbá territory and waving ties to the global market of black and diasporic music.

The archaeological map of Africa and hence its economic and environmental history remains extremely patchy. Central Nigeria remains largely unexplored, with the exception of the excavations in the Nok region. One tool available for filling some of these lacunae is comparative linguistics. This has remained largely unexplored due to the large number of languages and the absence of lexical and descriptive data.

Since the year 2016, the authors have surveyed the A3 West Chadic language area with a particular focus on plants and animals. It is now thought that there are around 23 languages in this group, all located in Plateau state, Central Nigeria. Some of these were encountered for the first time during the survey (Blench 2018). Some of the better-known languages include Ngas, Mwaghavul and Goemai, but even for these, lexical documentation remains weak. It is now possible to present reconstructed terms for a wide range of economic plants and animals, both wild and domestic, as well as key economic terms such as ‘iron’ and agricultural tools.

The A3 languages form a coherent territorial bloc and it therefore seems likely they began their expansion in their current area. Linguistically, they are remarkably different from their Chadic neighbours, having undergone massive reduction of morphology as well as showing significant lexical innovation. From the reconstructions we can conclude that;

a) given the levels of similarity between the languages, their expansion is likely to have begun in the last 1000 years
b) at this point they were well-established rainfed subsistence farmers, cultivating the crops typical of the subhumid zone; millet, sorghum, cowpeas etc.
c) they also kept cattle (dwarf taurines), goats, sheep and chickens, but horses and donkeys were subsequently introduced
d) smelted iron was already known to speakers, together with the principal types of agricultural tool

The conclusion looks out to beyond A3 to the other branches of West Chadic to explore the ultimate time-depth of reconstructed forms.

This paper provides a preliminary analysis of a few aspects of the phonology and morphosyntax of Kyak [bka], a largely undocumented Adamawa language spoken in the northern part of Taraba State in Nigeria. The paper is divided into four main sections. The first section deals with the phonology, focusing on consonant and vowel inventories, some phonetic processes, and syllable structure. The second section looks at nominal morphology, particularly nominal modifiers and possessive constructions, which show a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession. The third section describes the verbal morphosyntax, identifying the various forms that encode the expression of tense-aspect and person-number. The fourth part looks at a couple of clause/sentence level features, namely the clitic-ŋ, which is associated with the marking of assertiveness, and the use of logophoric pronouns. This is the first description of the phonological and grammatical features of the language, and one of the first for the Jen cluster. It thus adds to the knowledge of the cluster and to the evaluation of genealogical and areal hypotheses which involve languages of this region.

South-Bauchi West (SBW) languages build a dialect continuum spoken in Northern Nigeria that has been classified as West-Chadic B. Their internal classification reveals a split between two subgroups: the northern subgroup (Geji, Polci) and the southern subgroup (Zeem, Dass, Saya). This genetic split is completed by a grammatical heterogeneity that surfaces in the morphological complexity of the Saya cluster, a subset of the Southern sub-group. The aim of this paper is twofold: (i) see if these differences are corroborated by the study of number; (ii) shed new lights on the genesis of SBW. To that effect, the first section presents an overview of SBW grammatical structure and genetic classification. The following two sections study number in Noun Phrases (noun plurals, modifiers), and in Verb Phrases (imperatives, pluractionals, and plural suffixes). The last section examines the relationship in SBW between number and related categories such as honorifics, associatives and singulatives. The conclusion introduces some nuances in this vision of a division between the northern and southern sub-groups, with the Dass cluster (e.g. Zoɗi) behaving like the Northern languages in that they share the same absence of nominal and adjectival plurals and pluractional derivation. The presence of those plurals in the other members of the southern sub-group (i.e. the Zeem and Saya clusters) seems to be an innovation departing from a situation where number is expressed only by the personal pronouns, the modifiers within the nominal system, and the imperative. Pluractionals, although they are widespread in many Chadic languages, seem to be an innovation of Zeem and Saya as well. These innovative features may have developed through the influence of plateau languages. The innovation has gone one step further in the Zaar language with the optional marking of number on noun modifiers. Finally, a marginal case of subject-verb plural agreement on the right periphery has appeared in four languages (Zaranda, Geji, Pelu and Diir), first in the 2nd plural, and then has spread to the 3rd plural in one of the languages (Pelu).

This study is based on the premise that it is possible to train computers to predict the language of a word (textual or audio) by learning from its character n‐gram pattern, without recourse to the language's dictionary. With the growth of multilingual collections and a need for automatic means of cleaning textual datasets, this paper presents a strategy for language identification of individual words in a body of texts. This strategy is suitable for resource‐scarce languages that do not have large electronic datasets that are required for machine learning and natural language processing studies and whose dictionaries may not be available. In this study, we focused on three African languages, namely Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. A training corpus in each of these languages was used to obtain the probabilities of character trigrams in the language. Given that English is a common language that is often mixed with these resource‐scarce languages in texts, we also obtained the probabilities of trigrams in an English training corpus. These probabilities were then used in identifying the language of each word in test corpora containing bilingual texts. Our strategy achieved average precision, recall and F1 values of about 97%, 91% and 94% respectively.

This study is based on the premise that it is possible to train computers to predict the language of a word (textual or audio) by learning from its character n-gram pattern, without recourse to the language's dictionary. With the growth of multilingual collections and a need for automatic means of cleaning textual datasets, this paper presents a strategy for language identification of individual words in a body of texts. This strategy is suitable for resource-scarce languages that do not have large electronic datasets that are required for machine learning and natural language processing studies and whose dictionaries may not be available. In this study, we focused on three African languages, namely Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba. A training corpus in each of these languages was used to obtain the probabilities of character trigrams in the language. Given that English is a common language that is often mixed with these resource-scarce languages in texts, we also obtained the probabilities of trigrams in an English training corpus. These probabilities were then used in identifying the language of each word in test corpora containing bilingual texts. Our strategy achieved average precision, recall and F1 values of about 97%, 91% and 94% respectively. KEYWORDS Word-level language identification, resource-scarce languages, machine learning, character n-grams, textual pattern analysis INTRODUCTION The languages featured in the study are three West African languages-Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba which are resource-scarce like most other African languages. Speakers of politically and economically relevant global and regional languages such as English can access information on the computer because of the availability of different computer software, hardware and resources in/for these languages. Conversely, resource-scarce languages such as the Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba belong to the have-not of the information divide because they lack computer software, hardware and information resources with which their speakers can access information on the computer. For instance, the have languages enjoy array of complex artificial intelligent (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) tools such as note-taking apps which can convert speech to text, digital personal assistants like Microsoft Cortana that can interpret speech and perform complex task digitally and article summarization apps in/for English through which English speakers can interact with the computer and access information online. The resource-scarce languages grapple with the problem of basic NLP tools such as language-dependent keyboards that cater to their orthographic needs.

This paper sorely examines just an aspect of meaning, the 'Affective meaning' as it relates to Ijo worldview. The significance of this study to know, how the theory comes up with it so that meaning cannot be viewed as an entity, but in the context (here, the data are collected and analyzed in detail). However, by the empirical method, the data collection is consultations from textbooks, internet and competent speakers of the various languages. This paper revolves around on the major research questions, 1. How does 'affective meaning' work in languages? and 2. How does a particular affective meaning have an individual role in African languages? These questions will address with various languages, including 'Igala,' 'Igbo' and 'Kswahili,' and 'Ijo.' These languages are the major focus of this work. In short, it is found that the ways of expressing affection or feeling across cultures and/or languages are sometimes similar.

This paper presents a preliminary report of a survey research on Erohwa speech community. It is based on the field notes from a one day visit to one of the speech communities in which the language is spoken. Erohwa is a south western Edoid language spoken in Delta State and Bayelsa State. Researches on Erohwa are scanty. Besides, the language is never mentioned in any academic fora or studies, hence the visit. The visit was occasioned by the desire to examine the health status of Erohwa. The data underlying the discussion in this report were elicited from six inhabitants of Erohwa community using unstructured interview. Information from secondary source is also employed in the discussion. It was observed, inter alia, that although the Erohwa language exists, and it’s spoken in two communities, there are few speakers of the language left- about 850 contrary to Ethnologue’s estimation of 64,000 speakers. Most of these speakers are already in their sixties (and above). It was also noted that there intergenerational transfer of the language has ceased. The foregoing suggests that the language is severely endangered, and in need of urgent documentation and revitalization efforts.

Nigeria, with 160+ million inhabitants, is a huge and complex multilingual community with over 500 different languages used within the public and private social spaces. Among those, Naija, a creole that is also deceptively known as Nigerian Pidgin, is spoken as a first language by 5 million people, while 100 million people use it as a second language or as an interethnic means of communication in Nigeria and in Nigerian Diaspora communities. Since the independence of Nigeria in 1960, Naija has been rapidly expanding from its original niche in the Niger delta area, to cover two-thirds of the country, up to Kaduna and Jos, and is now deeply rooted in the vast Lagos conurbation of over 20 million people. Apart from its original location, and one Lagos district, where it is learnt as a first language, and can be used as a single language, Naija is learnt alongside and not instead of other Nigerian languages. Naija has become, over the last 30 years the most important, most widely spread, and perhaps the most ethnically neutral lingua franca used in the country today. The presentation describes and tries to explain the emergence of Naija as the 1st Nigerian language over the last 50 years. It gives a brief presentation of the ANR financed NaijaSynCor project which aims at describing the language in its geographical and sociological variations, based on a 500k word corpus annotated and analysed with cutting edge NLP tools developed for corpus analysis.

As a linguistic theory LFG has been extensively used in the analysis of a great.number of the world's languages. The current approach in LFG research field is applying it to language computation, extending from parsing to machine translation. But, there is dearth of the LFG based work in Eleme computing. The present . LFG framework evinces two aspects when applied to computing tasks: it is quite powerful for linguistics representation, but some-what weak for Eleme computing there is an indication from Eleme for improving the formalism of LFG. This. study will examine these two issues, suggesting some possible augmentation on LFG paradigm, though the idea is still preliminary. I accept the fact that linguistic resources, such as annotated corpora, mostly semantics-oriented, are also
needed to trigger manipulations on the augmented paradigm possible. The complete solution is predicated on not only academic research but also engineering realization it will not work without either.

This study was based on the use of scientific educational animations as a learning tool in three southeastern Nigerian villag es. This study was conducted to understand the reception of some specific educational animations that can be watched on cell phones . We conducted a short survey regarding people's perceptions of these animat ions, clarity of the animat ions' messages, lessons lea rned based on remembering key elements from the animat ions and information usage. We also focused on other questions related to cell phones as a way of transmitting and deploying informat ion. Our study revealed that all of the participants liked the animatio ns and the vast majority of participants indicated that they could understand the basic content of the animations. Another a spect of the survey was the use of cell phones as a mode of co mmunication and transmission of educational materials. The majority of the respondents recognized that cell phones can be used as a logical technology for transmitting the animations but they also suggested, in terms of social pathways, that the animations could be deployed through farmer field schools, women associations, churches and youths. In the population surveyed, this study indicates that although cell phones are commun ication devices, th ere was a p ositive perception regarding their use as an educational tool, in trans mitting and sharing educational materials.