THE FUNCTIONAL ROLE OF RUSSIAN LANGUAGE IN NIGERIAN LINGUISTIC MINORITIES

Abstract

The present work is a psychosocial linguistic research designed to survey the functional role of Russian language in a non-linguistic environment like Nigeria. It is an attempt to present a comprehensive account of the Bilingual and Bicultural orientations of a minority social group of people in our society, that use the Russian Language in one way or the other. The work tries to provide the concepts needed to understand what it means for two languages to come into contact. What happens in communities or countries like Nigeria where several languages are spoken with daunting complexity. Here, special attention was focused on the fate of Russian language in a complex situation with the absence of linguistic environment. Its application in Nigeria by members of a social linguistic minority groups. Emphasis are focused on Nigerian-Russian mixed families. As a psychosocial linguistic research, the work applied a general analysis of socio/psycho linguistic conceptions, such as language functions, linguistics situation/politics linguistics personalities, bilingualism dialectism and ethnolinguistics problematic. We made attempts to prove the ways in which sociolinguistic findings and its insights can be of assistance in the tackling of real-world problems. Especially the survival of Russian Language in the midst of the hundreds of
languages spoken in Nigeria.