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Article In: English World-Wide: Online-First Articles

The multilingual embedding of English in Nigerian pop music

A diachronic corpus study

 | University of Cologne
ORCiD logo with link | Kiel University
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
Abstract
Research in World Englishes is increasingly turning its attention to processes “beyond and between the Three Circles” (. 2016. “Englishes Beyond and Between the Three Circles: World Englishes Research in the Age of Globalization”. In Elena Seoane, and Cristina Suárez-Gómez, eds. World Englishes: New Theoretical and Methodological Considerations. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 17–36. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar), including contact among varieties and the interaction of global and local resources. This paper presents a diachronic study of language choice in Nigerian pop music. We draw on the Nigerian Pop Song Corpus, which comprises 485 songs by 95 artists, covering the period of 1965–2025. We study the effects of time and gender on the use of indigenous languages, Nigerian Pidgin, Hip Hop Nation Language, and Jamaican Creole. Statistical modelling shows that there is a rise of local languages, change in how they are combined, and a statistical preference for Pidgin by male artists. The use of global resources peaks for hip hop performances of the 1990s. We show the benefits of multilingual corpora and argue that World Englishes must be studied more closely in terms of their multilingual embedding.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Pop songs as glocal bricolages
  • 3.Data and Methods
    • 3.1The Nigerian Pop Song Corpus
    • 3.2Extracting local languages
    • 3.3Extracting hip hop language and Jamaican Creole
    • 3.4Assessing the quality of language contact
    • 3.5Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Local languages
    • 4.2Hip hop discourse and Jamaican Creole
    • 4.3The quality of language contact
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Notes
  • Author queries
  • References
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