Bilingual pragmatic markers in Nigerian English

Abstract This paper examines six bilingual pragmatic markers: jare, biko, jor, shebi, shey , and fa which are borrowed from indigenous Nigerian languages into Nigerian English, with a view to examining their sources, meanings, frequencies, spelling stability, positions, collocational patterns, and discourse‐pragmatic functions in Nigerian English. The data for the study, drawn from the International Corpus of English‐Nigeria and the Nigerian component of the Global Web‐based English corpus, are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively from a postcolonial corpus pragmatic perspective. The findings show that jare, jor, shebi , and shey are borrowed from Yoruba, biko is from Igbo while fa is from Hausa. Jare , jor , and biko function as mitigation and emphasis markers, shebi and shey serve as agreement‐seeking markers while fa is an emphasis pragmatic marker. The study, thus, contributes to the growing research on bilingual pragmatic markers in second‐language contexts.