The doctoral dissertation in the field of English Language and Culture will be examined at the Philosophical Faculty at Joensuu campus.
What is the topic of your doctoral research? Why is it important to study the topic?
My research examines the Americanisation of Nigerian English using digital textual data from corpora, experimental tasks and semi-structured interviews. In former British colonies such as Nigeria, British English is idealised as the standard variety suitable for English learners in the educational system. However, most Nigerian teachers neither speak nor write British English but rather employ a distinctively Nigerian variety of English. In recent years, researchers have observed a growing American influence in this rapidly evolving Nigerian English. This growing influence has been linked to globalisation and the import of American cultural products, technology and media into Nigeria. However, the degree of linguistic Americanisation and how educated Nigerians perceive American influence in Nigerian English remains unexplored. This study fills this gap and highlights the linguistic and extralinguistic factors shaping the development of postcolonial varieties of English.
What are the key findings or observations of your doctoral research?
The results provide empirical evidence for a moderate degree of Americanisation in Nigerian English since Nigeria’s independence from British colonial rule in 1960, and in written contexts, a degree of conservatism towards British linguistic norms remains observable. The findings also indicate that language users perceive Americanisms in markedly different ways. Older speakers are more disapproving of Americanisms, while younger speakers employ more American linguistic features and are less ambivalent towards multiple co-existing linguistic norms. In the dissertation, these findings are discussed in relation to pedagogical implications and English language use in geographical, social and digital spaces.
How can the results of your doctoral research be utilised in practice?
Language policies in postcolonial settings hardly reflect the sociolinguistic realities of everyday life. In an increasing globalised world, a static view of English is becoming less applicable, and pedagogical resources in multilingual postcolonial settings ought to reflect these changes and encourage English learners to embrace variation.
What are the key research methods and materials used in your doctoral research?
This research employs both quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative approach provides empirically grounded perspectives on the degree of Americanisation in written Nigerian English, and the qualitative approach highlights the beliefs and attitudes of Nigerians towards Americanisms. Synchronic data from the International Corpus of English (ICE) and the corpus of Global Web-based English (GloWbE), and diachronic data from the Historical Corpus of English in Nigeria (HiCE) were annotated and analysed in the statistical software R via multiple regression and probabilistic modelling. The group means of elicited data from a Verbal-Guise test (VGT) with 102 respondents were evaluated in SPSS using Analysis of Variation (ANOVA), and 44 semi-structured interviews with three generations of Nigerians were analysed qualitatively via Thematic Content Analysis (TCA).