“Someone has been coronated” Nigerian English lexical innovations in the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

This sociolinguistic study explores lexical innovations and variation in the lexemes of Nigerian English formed during the COVID-19Pandemic. The emergence and spread of the virus have significantly altered the societal norm to becoming what is called the new normal. The Nigerian linguistic landscape is not spared from the impact caused by the virus. Some new words peculiar to Covid-19 have been introduced into the day to day use of Nigerian English (NE) in some sectors of the society, such as education, social media, health, religion, and markets. There have also been lexical innovations as well as variations in the use of these vocabularies. Using the variationist model, this research investigates these COVID-19 vocabularies and how factors such as region, class, and situational contexts bring about linguistic variations in daily use. In doing this, it identifies and compiles the lexemes as being used and also describes their contextual usages in Nigerian English. This study adopts a descriptive survey design and collects data using questionnaires from two hundred Nigerian English speakers in SouthwestNigeria. The research shows that NE speakers use diverse morphological processes to create new lexemes based on the COVID-19 context. It also produces a COVID-19 vocabulary corpus that reveals Nigerian speakers’ linguistic and innovative ability of the English language and the effect of social experiences on language use. It will also help provide the correct contextual meanings of the new words related to COVID-19.