Sociocultural Perspectives on Orthographic Practices: Implications for Standardisation in Naijá1
Keywords:
pidgins and creoles, Naijá, language ideology, standardisation, orthographic practicesAbstract
Naijá Langwej (NL) (a.k.a Nigerian Pidgin), as creolised variety that co-exists with its exoglossic lexifier English, is essentially a spoken language that is yet to have an accepted standardised orthography. This paper explores the emerging orthographic practices of NL speakers arising from the increasing use of the language variety as a written language. These practices are characterised by non-standardised conventions and highly variable spellings, although certain aspects appear to be standardised. This paper discusses the significance of these orthographic practices and their contributions to the standardisation of NL’s orthography. Examples from written texts in NL (e.g. literary texts, sports commentaries, and social media posts), like previous studies (e.g. Deuber and Hinrichs 2007), show that the conventions used in these written texts are typically etymological, following the orthographic conventions of English in contrast with a phonological system of one character per sound. The implication of this competing views in the light of Kloss’ (1967) concepts of ausbau (distance) and abstand (elaboration) inNL’s context are discussed. The study confirms the view that issues of orthography, especially for Pidgins and Creoles, are issues of ideology that go beyond linguistic considerations (Sebba 1998a, 1998b, 2007). From an ideological perspective, the findings illustrate the social value of orthographic practices by the new meanings and social identities they index for their users. Similar to other creoles like Jamaican creole (e.g. Hinrichs 1994) some aspects of Naijá’s orthography that are becoming standardised as a result of mainstreaming of users’ orthographic activities, is indicative of a bottom-up approach which can be adopted for developing an alternative orthography for NL that reflects users’ orthographic practices.
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