Indigenisation of English and Its Concomitant Effects on Conversational Implicatures: Nigerian Factors

Abstract In Nigeria, English serves as an official language, and also a unifying language because of the complex multilingual nature of the nation. English has undergone domestication to reflect Nigerian socio-cultural realities, leading to a distinct variety called Nigerian English. Therefore, indigenisation of English language has some concomitant effects on conversational implicatures in Nigerian context. The issue is more pronounced in spoken English and perhaps with the manifestations of socio-cultural diversity and its nuances that impact so much on English language competence and performance. This study examines how indigenisation of English in Nigeria affects or influences communication. Drawing on Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle and Conversational implicature, Mey’s (2001) Pragmatic Acts and Levinson’s (1983) Pragmatics, the paper also analyses how Nigerian cultural factors alter intended meaning. Data were drawn from naturally occurring conversations, Nigerian Facebook discourse, and literary text by Jowitt (1991). Findings reveal that kinship terms, religious interjections, proverbs, and indirectness strategies generate implicatures that are very often incomprehensible to non-Nigerian speakers but meaningful and comprehensible within Nigerian context. The paper concludes that Nigerian factors such as phonological reassignment, lexical reassignment, respect for age, religious worldview and proverbial indirectness reshape implicatures from Gricean universality of culturally situated inference. KEYWORD: Conversational Implicature, Nigerian English, Indigenisation, Pramatics, Gricean Maxims