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Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2008

Shelome Gooden-France
Shelome Gooden-France
Affiliation:
Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA, [email protected]
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Extract

Dagmar Dueber, Nigerian Pidgin English: Language contact, variation and change in an African urban setting. London: Battlebridge, 2005. Pp. xiii, 273. Pb £25.

This is a corpus-based study of Nigerian Pidgin English (NPE) among the educated in the urban center of Lagos. Deuber's report on the use of NPE in Lagos makes for interesting comparison with the spread and use of other contact varieties in urban areas in Africa (e.g., Sheng in Nairobi; see Fink 2005 and references therein) and its impact on indigenous languages. It is also comparable with the discussions of urban varieties of creoles reported in Patrick's (1999) work and more recently in Hackert 2004. One of the obvious issues is the functioning of the variety in new public formal domains. Issues related to both corpus and status planning are discussed (cf. Devonish 1986). To help the reader navigate the vast amount of data, there are several maps, sample questionnaires, and complete transcriptions from elicitations and interviews. The included CD contains sociodemographic data for all the informants and background information on the texts, translations, and sound samples. The book should prove beneficial to sociolinguists of varying persuasions, especially creolists, variationists, and discourse analysts.

Type
BOOK REVIEWS
Information
Language in Society , Volume 37 , Issue 1 , February 2008 , pp. 131 - 134
Copyright
© 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

REFERENCES

DeGraff, Michel (2003). Against creole exceptionalism. Language 79:391–410.Google Scholar
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Fink, Teresa (2005). Attitudes towards languages in Nairobi. MA thesis, University of Pittsburgh.
Hackert, Stephanie (2004). Urban Bahamian Creole: System and variation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRef
Patrick, Peter (1999). Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the mesolect. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.CrossRef
Thomason, Sarah, & Kaufman, Terrence (1988). Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Winford, Donald (2003). An introduction to contact linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell.