STANDARDIZATION AND CODIFICATION OF NIGERIAN ENGLISH: BLUEPRINT FOR GRAMMATICALITY AND ACCEPTABILITY

Abstract

The existence of the Nigerian English (NE) has been a topical issue amongst scholars, and this has birthed scholarly research into its nature and structure. This paper seeks to look at what constitutes a Standard Nigerian English and ways to codify the Nigerian English variety which has been accepted as standard, as steps towards ensuring its grammaticality and acceptability. Dynamic Model and Triangle of Three determinant theories by Edgar Schneider (2003) form the theoretical bases of this paper while four hundred questionnaires were used to extract data and SPSS analysis was used to analyse the data. The findings showed that Nigerian English is a unique and meaningful variety for the citizens of Nigeria and that the compilation and codification of the Standard Nigerian English would give this unique variety a sense of belonging; a home and deep root in the linguistic ecology of Nigeria and in so doing make its existence concrete and generally acceptable. Language experts and language policy makers are hereby enjoined to use a corpus-based approach in codifying expressions peculiar to the Standard Nigerian English in dictionaries and books.

Keywords: Nigerian English, Standardization, Codification, Grammaticality, Acceptability