Standard Yoruba morphological patterns as variation markers of the Nigerian Pidgin English
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Date
2022
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Yoruba: Journal of Yoruba Studies Association of Nigeria. Department of Linguistics and African Languages, University of Ibadan.
Abstract
The Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) is a contact language that has the English Language as its superstrate and Nigerian Languages as its substrates. With the former contributing the bulk of its lexicon, this paper seeks to show the influence that the grammar of Nigerian languages, in this case, the Yorùbá Language, has on the structure of the NPE to the extent that the meaning of Yorùbá words have a greater reflection on the compounding patterns of the NPE than that of the English Language. The grammatical influence of the Yorùbá Language on the NPE equally makes it possible for a morphological pattern such as reduplication that is non-existent in the English Language but which exits in the Yorùbá Language, to feature prominently in the grammar of the NPE. Being a descriptive work, this paper seeks to shed light on the points of convergence between the operations of these morphological patterns in the NPE and the Yorùbá Language and the points of divergence between them and the English Language. The paper concludes that the similarity of grammatical structures of the NPE and the Yorùbá Language contributes to its easy acquisition by Yorùbá people in particular and Nigerians in general, when compared with their acquisition of the English Language.