ANGLICIZATION OF INDIGENOUS NAMES ON SOCIAL MEDIA BY YORUBA-ENGLISH BILINGUALS: PEDAGOGIC IMPLICATIONS

Abstract

Anglicism and Nativization can be said to be closely knit as both linguistic phenomena are attempts to portray one language in the form of another. Whereas, Anglicism is the attempt to make an indigenous language sound English, Nativization is trying to make English sound indigenous. This study investigates Anglicization of names on social media, a practice among some Yoruba-English bilinguals (YEBs), with a view to finding out its linguistic features, sociolinguistic imports, the motivation behind such practice and its implications for pedagogy and language teaching. Data for the study, which were sourced from the WhatsApp group of SSIII students, Demonstration Secondary School, Ondo, Nigeria, contain one hundred indigenous profile names of the students as anglicized on the group’s platform. Using Dell Hymes’ Ethnography of Communication, William Labov’s Variability Concept as well as Descriptive Method of Data Analysis, the data were purposively selected, carefully grouped and applied for the analysis. The investigation reveals that the theory of word-formation processes in English was adopted by YEBs to anglicize their indigenous names at both phonological and morphological levels, with apparent disregard for both semantic components and sociolinguistic functions of their indigenous names before Anglicization, thereby leaving the product (anglicized) to appear as mere cant or jargon of the bilingual youths. The paper submits that the motivation for Anglicism might not be mainly attributable to linguistic dexterity or innate morphological competence on the part of YEBs, but largely to exuberance and idiosyncrasies emanating from identifying with the global practice of specialized youth communication on social media, a phenomenon that should be noted by the EL2 teacher while teaching this set of youths.  Article visualizations: