Omo, what are you waiting for? The discourse-pragmatic imports of omo in Nigerian multilingual online interactions

Abstract

This paper examines a borrowed bilingual pragmatic item omo in Nigerian multilingual online interactions to establish its frequency, syntactic features, collocational patterns and discourse-pragmatic functions. The data are extracted from the Nigerian component of the Global Web-based English corpus and analysed qualitatively and quantitatively within the framework of pragmatic borrowing and postcolonial corpus pragmatics. The findings show that omo, a Yoruba loan translated as ‘child’ in English, is routinely found at utterance-initial position in Nigerian multilingual online interactions and has assumed extended meaning and functions. It serves as a vocative among online commenters to single out a specific addressee and gain their attention, and as an interjection that signals various shades of emotions and emphasises different speech acts. The study establishes the continuous interplay of linguistic resources in a multilingual situation.