The Relationship of Nigerian English and Nigerian Pidgin in Nigeria: Evidence from Copula Constructions in Ice-Nigeria

Deuber (2006) investigated variation in spoken Nigerian Pidgin data by educated speakers and found no evidence for a continuum of lects between Nigerian Pidgin and English. Many speakers, however, speak both languages, and both are in close contact with each other, which keeps the question of the nature of their relationship on the agenda. This paper investigates 67 conversations in Nigerian English by educated speakers as they occur in the International Corpus of English, Nigeria (ice-Nigeria, Wunder et al., 2010), using the variability in copula usage as a test bed. Implicational scaling, network analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis reveal that the use of variants is not randomly distributed over speakers. Particular clusters of speakers use particular constellations of variants. A qualitative investigation reveals this complex situation as a continuum of style, with code-switching as one of the stylistic devices, motivated by such social factors as formality, setting, participants and interpersonal relationships.