The expansion of the English-lexifier contact languages of Africa: processes, causes, consequences

Abstract

In the past few decades, the African English-lexifier contact languages (AECs) primarily spoken in Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Equatorial Guinea, and Gambia have seen an exponential growth in speaker numbers and their use in domains once reserved for English and (non-creole) African languages. Based on UN population projections for these countries and present expansion and shift trends, it is well possible that there may be up to half a billion speakers of African AECs by the turn of the 22nd century. The utility of the AECs for communication in highly multilingual societies and their identitarian appeal have led to their conquest of new domains. All AECs nevertheless still struggle with a low sociolinguistic prestige and the absence of corpus and status planning initiatives by state actors. Overall, the potential of these languages remains relatively untapped across the region for education, political participation, economic activity and cultural expression. The impact of the AECs on smaller languages through contact and shift to the AECs will also make itself increasingly felt in coming decades. In this talk, I focus on the sociolinguistic processes, causes and consequences of these trends that I have seen unfold in the past two decades of linguistic research in West Africa.