Beyond the gender binary: Variation and the social meaning of rhoticity in Nigerian English

Abstract Although Nigerian English is characterized as non-rhotic, this article combines variationist and linguistic anthropological approaches to show how rhoticity (non-prevocalic /r/) is employed across different gender identities in Nigeria. Of these gender identities, attention is paid to feminine-presenting male speakers locally referred to as crossdressers. As these crossdressers are vehemently vilified in the country, this article shows how they recontextualize rhoticity as a register shibboleth (Silverstein 2017) to index American-ness that is constitutive of glamorous cosmopolitanism for purposes of indexical inoculation. The article further argues that rhoticity has colonial entailments and that it is its colonial entailments that contribute to its symbolic capital in Nigeria’s linguistic marketplace. Given that Nigerian crossdressers’ gender practices get labeled as un-African, this article also argues that transgressing normative gender practices in Nigeria may evoke coloniality, when colonial intertexts are used to resist Western colonial (bio)logics of gender ideology and African languages. (African languages, colonialism, coloniality, gender in Africa, Nigeria, Nigerian crossdressers, Nigerian English, rhoticity, social meaning, stance, variation)