Morphological Creativity in Contemporary Nigerian English: Patterns of Word Formation, Innovation and Lexical Expansion

The development of English in multilingual societies frequently results in lexical innovation as speakers adapt the language to their social, cultural and communicative environments. Nigerian English provides a particularly productive context for examining such innovation because English functions alongside numerous indigenous Nigerian languages and Nigerian Pidgin. This study examines morphological creativity in contemporary Nigerian English, focusing on the processes through which lexical items are created, adapted, borrowed and expanded. The study adopts a qualitative document-based research design. A purposively selected dataset of 70 Nigerian English lexical items was compiled from published descriptions of Nigerian English and recent scholarly discussions of its lexical development. The items were analysed according to their morphological structure and word-formation processes, including derivation, compounding, borrowing, blending, acronymisation, clipping, back-formation, reduplication, conversion and coinage. The analysis reveals that Nigerian English draws extensively on both internal English word-formation resources and materials from indigenous Nigerian languages. It also demonstrates that lexical creativity is not confined to the invention of completely new words; it includes the restructuring of existing English forms, semantic adaptation, hybrid formation and the institutionalisation of culturally meaningful expressions. The findings further show that Nigerian English lexical creativity is closely associated with Nigerian institutions, education, food, transportation, politics, social relations, commerce and everyday life. The study argues that morphological creativity constitutes an important mechanism through which Nigerian English continues to expand and develop as a variety of World Englishes.