Abstract
ABSTRACTThis study investigates errors of English usage among younger and older users of educated Nigerian English. Based on an electronic written language corpus of 64 129 words, written by 60 Nigerians and containing four different text types (academic writing, informal letters, formal letters and novels), several syntactic features described as typical errors occurring in Nigerian English (NE) in previous studies were analysed. The Chi-square test, used for the comparison of corpus counts, reveals that most of the syntactic features occur with a very low frequency rate among both groups of speakers and that none of these features is used significantly more frequently by younger compared to older speakers. It further reveals that the low frequency of errors indicates that the written English of educated Nigerians is minimally characterised by errors and that the occurrences of errors are affected by speakers’ age and level of education.
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