Analysis of Elements of Africanism in the Nigerian Linguistic Landscape

This study attempts to assess how much of africanism is ingrained in the Nigerian linguistic landscape, specifically, in the language of commercial signs of shops in two of her major cities. It is premised on the multimodality approach that assumes communication and representation go beyond language. It focuses on analyzing and describing the full repertoire of meaning-making resources that people use (visual, spoken, gestural, written, three-dimensional, and others, depending on the domain of representation) in different contexts, and on developing means that show how these are organized to make meaning. Therefore, the Nigerian linguistic landscape is examined in this study to identify elements of africanism contained in the language of commercial signs of shops to determine the languages that have the indication of becoming locally relevant among the existing languages in Nigerian major cities. The influence of English on the African culture in Nigeria is also examined through the symbols and pictures presented in the selected commercial signs. Two major Nigerian cities, Lagos and Port-Harcourt are purposefully selected mainly because of their heterogeneous linguistic nature. The study is qualitative and explorative and since it examines symbols in commercial signs to ascertain elements of africanism in them, semiotic resources are employed in its analysis.