Migration, media, and the emergence of pidgin- and creole-based informal epicentres

Abstract

The paper makes a case for regarding Nigerian Pidgin (Naijá) and Jamaican Creole (Patois) as informal linguistic epicentres in the global English Language Complex. This requires a few modifications to current definitions of linguistic epicentres but leads to a sociolinguistically realistic and more comprehensive account of the profound influence that Jamaica and Nigeria have had on the development of Englishes in their regions and in the world at large. In the absence of large corpora, qualitative methods from linguistic ethnography and interactional sociolinguistics were used for the study of possible epicentral effects of Naijá and Patois. They allow access to speakers’ language attitudes and language ideologies, a shaping factor of epicentral influences that generally deserves more attention in future research.