Online workshop 5: "Nigerian Pidgin (Naija), a major African language" by Prof. Bernard Caron (CNRS)

IFRA-NIGERIA ONLINE WORKSHOPS PROGRAMME 

As you may know, in accordance with the latest government statement regarding measures to contain the COVID-19 virus, IFRA-Nigeria's offices are closed until further notice, library included. However, IFRA’s team has come up with alternative solutions to continue its training activities.

We are hosting a series of online events using Facebook Live as a platform.

5TH ONLINE WORKSHOP: "NIGERIAN PIDGIN (NAIJA), A MAJOR AFRICAN LANGUAGE"

This fifth online workshop on "Nigerian Pidgin (Naija), a major African language" was facilitated by Prof Bernard Caron. It will be held on Tuesday 12th  of May 2020 at 1pm (Nigerian time) on our Facebook page. 

Prof. Bernard Caron (Directeur de Recherches @ CNRS, Paris) presented the current results of the ANR-financed research project NaijaSynCor, that started at IFRA in Ibadan in 2017. 

What is the workshop about?

NaijaSynCor (A Corpus-based Macro-Syntactic Study of Naija, aka Nigerian Pidgin) takes an exhaustive and in-depth look at the structure of Naija (Nigerian Pidgin) in Nigeria today. Spoken by educated Nigerians, it has been proved to develop in Lagos as a discrete language, separate from Nigerian English. This study proposes to assess whether this holds true for the rest of Nigeria where Naija is spoken by over 75 million speakers. It examines diachronic, diatopic, diaphasic, diastratic, and genre variation.

The project is a collaborative effort of two Nigerian leading experts on Naija (Profs. F. Egbokhare & C. Ofulue) and two research units that have proved their expertise in corpus annotation in previous programs: Llacan, on lesser-described languages; Modyco, on the interaction of prosody and syntax in French and the development of large treebanks.

Through the creation of a deeply annotated 500,000 word corpus collected from Lagos to Port Harcourt and Kano, the project documents the emergence of Naija as a language at the national level. The corpus will be available online in 2021 for the general public to browse, read and listen to, and for researchers to query with dedicated tools, in the areas of morphology, syntax, prosody and socio-linguistics. 

Re-watch the workshop: 

A recorded video of the workshop is still available on the links bellow

Watch the video