9ja Language Network Conference

Between the 2^nd and 5^th of October the 9ja Language Network Conference took place at the Institute of African Studies of the University of Ibadan, IFRA-Nigeria is a sponsor of the event since many years. This conference was essential as Naijá (a.k.a. Nigerian Pidgin) has evolved over the last few decades to become the largest spoken and perhaps the most influential language in Nigeria. The current estimate of its speakers and users is placed at about 150 million with distribution across various continents.

Since the turn of the Millennium, contributions in studies related to Naija have been made in the areas of syntactic shifts, prosodic paradigms, discursive trends and ideologies. These are observable in its use in literature, entertainment and Nigerian Stand up Comedy, broadcast media for news/sports commentary and on air presentations, in Nigerian Hip Hop or Afrobeats as a revivalist trend reminiscent of Fela’s Yabbis songs of the 70s and 80s, religious literature including Bible translations, and now as a language of the monolingual offline Naijá Dictionary, and its online version Naijionary.

In the course of the last decades, the interventions for sustaining the growth of Naijá have been more individuated than coordinated through a synergy among users and practitioners in the different domains mentioned above. The institution of the Naijá Language Project (now defunct) in a 2009 Conference has until now been the major collaboration that brought its users and practitioners under an umbrella to forge the development of Naijá. More information available here.

Tags: Linguistics