Apologising in Nigerian English

Unuabonah, Foluke; Gut, Ulrike; Oyebola, Folajimi

Abstract

This article provides the first comprehensive account of the forms and functions of apologies in Nigerian English, with a view to examining the factors that condition speakers’ choice of the linguistic forms of apologies in different text types as well as potential differences between apologies elicited via discourse completion tasks and those found in corpus data. Analysing the data from a postcolonial pragmatics approach, the article identifies nativised forms of apologising due to influence from indigenous Nigerian languages and reveals that the linguistic forms of apologies produced by Nigerian English speakers are systematically conditioned by the communicative situation. It suggests that it is the written mode of language production that allows speakers to choose speech acts without time pressure rather than the type of data as such, which influences the choice of linguistic forms of speech acts. Thus, the study contributes to the description of pragmatic variation in Nigerian English.