Gastronomic Vocabulary as a Feature of Nigerian English

Abstract

The World Englishes Paradigm studies various aspects of the English language characterized by specific peculiarities and changing as a result of contacts with indigenous languages and cultures. The history of English in Nigeria embraces 500 years of an interaction between highly different cultural systems and civilizations. Language contacts between English and the indigenous languages of Nigeria have led to its linguistic, cultural and intrastructural diversity. The aim of this article is to analyse the gastronomic vocabulary of Nigerian English influenced by the Nigerian worldview and culture. The research is focused on borrowings from African languages (mainly Yoruba and Igbo) that play a vital role in forming the culturally important lexicon of Nigerian English. The sources of the research material are dictionaries, as well as books by Nigerian writers composed in English. The analysis carried out in the course of the research allowed us to discover secondary nominations that denote Nigerian flora and cuisine, to reveal their metaphorical usage and to study corresponding figurative comparisons, idioms, proverbs and sayings. The investigation of gastronomic symbols in Nigerian speech shows universal processes of employing common gastronomic lexical units from real-life discourse as a basis for symbolization. The results of the study show that the gastronomic vocabulary and the images it creates constitute one of the most impressive Nigerian cultural codes. The knowledge of this vocabulary is instrumental in understanding those codes.