A Sociolinguistic Study of Meaning-Making in a Nigerian Linguistic

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A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF MEANING-MAKING IN A NIGERIAN LINGUISTIC

LANDSCAPE: THE EXAMPLE OF ÌBÀDÀN

A Dissertation

AKINBIYI ADETUNJI

Submitted to the Office of Graduate Studies Texas A&M University-Commerce in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY December 2013

A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF MEANING MAKING IN A NIGERIAN

LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE: THE EXAMPLE OF ÌBÀDÀN

A Dissertation

AKINBIYI ADETUNJI

Approved by

Advisor: Robert Baumgardner

Committee: Donna Dunbar-Odom Shannon Carter Maria Hinojosa

Head of Department: Hunter Hayes

Dean of the College: Salvatore Attardo

Dean of Graduate Studies: Arlene Horne

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Akinbiyi Adetunji

ABSTRACT

A SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUDY OF MEANING-MAKING IN A NIGERIAN LINGUISTIC LANDSCAPE: THE EXAMPLE OF ÌBÀDÀN

Akinbiyi Adetunji, PhD Texas A&M University-Commerce, 2013

Advisor: Robert Baumgardner, PhD

Although much research has gone into the sociolinguistics of the linguistic landscape

(space for and language of public signs) in the "peripheral," non-native contexts of English

Language use and users, none has been specifically devoted to a Nigerian context. This dissertation is intended to fill this wide gap. Focusing on the Ìbàdàn linguistic landscape and sampling photographic data from its 11 local government areas, the study addresses three main concerns—how meaning is made by the producers and expected to be understood by the consumers of this linguistic landscape, what is communicated about the status of English in

Nigeria, and how this linguistic landscape provides valuable sociolinguistic information about

Nigerian English in the context of World Englishes. Drawing heavily on Backhaus' (2007) sociolinguistic framework, as inflected with insights from Scollon and Scollon's (2003) linguistic semiotics, the study combines quantitative and qualitative research methods to identify the significances of the meanings made on the linguistic landscape, as related to sign-production

(agency), sign-consumption (readership), and the dynamics of the languages on signs.

Results show two clearly demarcated types of signs, top-down (official) and bottom-up

(non-official). In both types, the linguistic landscape is used to perform both informational and symbolic functions, English is the preferred and dominant language, and the preferred code is usually placed at the top of sign. However, there are more bottom-up than top-down signs, top- down signs are almost entirely non-commercial and contain six languages, and bottom-up signs show a variety of commercial and non-commercial content expressed in three languages. The findings unveil a reader-orientation anchored in six languages, a prevalence of monophonic signs and overt multilingualism, and idiosyncratic uses of English and Yorùbá. The English on this landscape is varied, containing Standard, non-Standard, and localized forms, thereby confirming the existence of a Nigerian variety of English. Given the fact that Yorùbá is the language predominantly spoken in Ìbàdàn, this dissertation claims that the linguistic landscape does not reflect the reality of language use in Ìbàdàn, and suggests that the boundaries between native and non-native uses of English may be more blurred than thought.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

To God be the utmost glory, for a great thing He has done.

The primary thanks go to the members of my dissertation committee, Drs. Robert

Baumgardner (my main advisor), Donna Dunbar-Odom, Shannon Carter, and Maria Hinojosa who midwived this dissertation, despite their naturally-tight schedules, in a speedy yet pain- staking manner. Without you and your scholarly diligence, this dissertation wouldn't have been a success story. I am eternally grateful.

The contributions of Dr. Salvatore Attardo are also note-worthy. But for his kind-heart, I wouldn't have found my way to the U.S., let alone procure a doctoral degree. He not only facilitated my coming to America (like the title of that classic movie), he also provided all that would ease the initial worries of a stranger in a different "world." I appreciate.

I acknowledge dearly the moral and spiritual support of all the members of my family, nuclear and extended, who contributed one way or the other to this happy ending: a special mention is made of Deola (my sister) and FTJ (her husband) who gave me the moral and financial support when the going began getting tough; a very special recognition is accorded my parents, abiyam tòót (parents indeed), who gave everything to make this happen; the most resounding gratitude goes to my wonderful and understanding wife, Gbemisola, who told me to proceed from the very first day and made sure that our lovely children, Omolade and Adedoyin, did not suffer the lack of a father-figure.

I acknowledge the magnanimity of my employers, Emmanuel Alayande College of

Education, , who granted the study-leave which enabled me embark upon this three-odd years of academic sojourn. I am also grateful to the members of the College's Management and the College's Governing Council who used their good offices to influence the financial support

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that enabled a successful completion of this doctoral journey. I pray the Almighty God meets you at the points of your need. My friends, classmates, and colleagues, too numerous to mention, also provided the valuable emotional support, especially when I had serious health issues. Finally, I must not fail to mention the support of Tola, my sibling and research assistant, who eased some of my worries regarding data collection.

You are all highly appreciated. May God bless you all.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ...... xii

LIST OF FIGURES ...... xiii

CHAPTER

1. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

The linguistic landscape and the English language ...... 1

The place of the English Language in the world ...... 3

A sociolinguistic profile of Nigeria ...... 9

A sociolinguistic profile of Ìbàdàn ...... 21

Sociolinguistics and meaning-making ...... 24

Aims and objectives of study ...... 25

Significance of study ...... 25

Research questions ...... 26

Outline of chapters ...... 27

CHAPTER

2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE ...... 28

Operationalizing the linguistic landscape ...... 28

Definitions ...... 28

Scope ...... 31

Introduction ...... 31

Sign ...... 32

Sign-Producer ...... 37

Sign-Consumer ...... 40

Functions ...... 43

Other methodological issues ...... 44

Theoretical approaches to linguistic landscape research ...... 47

Backhaus' sociolinguistic framework ...... 57

Summary ...... 59

CHAPTER

3. METHODOLOGY ...... 60

Survey area ...... 61

Specific decisions ...... 62

Prolific LLs ...... 63

Local or (inter)national landmarks ...... 63

Sorting of signs ...... 64

Data collection procedure ...... 68

Unit of analysis ...... 69

Analytical framework ...... 71

Sign-production ...... 71

Sign-consumption ...... 73

Linguistic dynamics ...... 76

Constraints ...... 77

Summary ...... 79

CHAPTER

4. DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS ...... 80

General picture ...... 80

Meaning-Making in sign-production ...... 83

Top-Down ...... 83

Bottom-Up ...... 87

Code preference ...... 99

Code preference as language prominence ...... 99

Code preference as materiality of sign ...... 103

Meaning-Making for sign-consumption ...... 106

Mobility of carrier ...... 108

Monolingualism/Multilingualism as visibility ...... 111

Monolingualism/Multilingualism as structure ...... 117

Monophonic signs ...... 118

Homophonic signs ...... 120

Mixed signs ...... 123

Polyphonic signs ...... 125

Meaning-Making as linguistic dynamism ...... 128

Introduction ...... 128

Idiosyncrasies ...... 128

Layering ...... 136

Summary ...... 141

CHAPTER

5. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS ...... 148

Summary of dissertation ...... 148

Discussion of findings ...... 149

Concluding statements ...... 156

Implications of study ...... 158

Limitations of study ...... 159

Recommendations ...... 160

REFERENCES ...... 163

VITA ...... 182

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LIST OF TABLES

TABLE

3.1 Survey area and number of signs ...... 62

4.1 Distribution of signs ...... 82

4.2 Top-down signs ...... 84

4.3 Bottom-up signs ...... 89

4.4 Distribution of monolingualism/multilingualism as structure ...... 118

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LIST OF FIGURES

FIGURE

2.1 Relationships among the three components of the LL ...... 32

3.2 Traffic sign (without linguistic content) ...... 66

3.3 Traffic sign (with linguistic content) ...... 66

3.4 Parasitic signs, bottom-up on top-down ...... 67

3.5 Health sign of unspecified producer ...... 67

3.6 Non-commercial sign on commercial carrier ...... 68

3.7 Two different warning signs on same carrier ...... 70

3.8 Neighborhood regulatory sign ...... 74

3.9 Bilingual sign ...... 75

3.10 Toponymic sign ...... 76

3.11 Bilingual, not toponymic, sign ...... 76

4.1 Pie chart showing sign types according to production ...... 82

4.2 Another interpretation of sign-production ...... 83

4.3 Top-down warning sign ...... 85

4.4 Top-down hospital sign ...... 86

4.5 Top-down sign, dual purpose ...... 86

4.6 Top-down admonitory sign (single producer) ...... 87

4.7 Top-down admonitory sign (dual producer) ...... 87

4.8 Bottom-up commercial sign, showing owner and content of business ...... 90

4.9 Commercial sign showing contact numbers and business content ...... 90

4.10 Commercial sign showing contact numbers, business name and content ...... 91

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4.11 Commercial sign showing contact numbers, business name, content, slogan ..... 91

4.12 All-inclusive commercial sign ...... 93

4.13 Non-commercial bottom-up sign ...... 95

4.14 Landlords' traffic sign ...... 96

4.15 Dual functioning bottom-up sign ...... 96

4.16 Graffiti as warning ...... 98

4.17 Graffiti as chastisement ...... 98

4.18 Graffiti as political campaign ...... 99

4.19 Illegal sign, semiotically marked ...... 100

4.20 Illegal sign, semiotically and linguistically marked ...... 100

4.21 Top-down quadrilingual sign ...... 102

4.22 Bottom-up bilingual sign ...... 102

4.23 Yorùbá-dominant bilingual sign ...... 104

4.24 Latin-dominant bilingual sign ...... 104

4.25 Sports sign ...... 106

4.26 Commemorative sign ...... 107

4.27 Botanical name as Latin sign ...... 107

4.28 Top-down sign on mobile carrier ...... 109

4.29 Signs on a mobile carrier ...... 110

4.30 Job advertisement on mobile carrier ...... 111

4.31 Airport sign on stationary but mobile carrier ...... 112

4.32a Covert monolingualism, first pair-part ...... 113

4.32b Covert monolingualism, second pair-part ...... 113

4.33a Yorùbá sign, covert multilingualism, first pair-part ...... 113

4.33b Yorùbá sign, covert multilingualism, first pair-part ...... 114

4.34 Overt multilingualism, "make-believe translation" ...... 115

4.35 Health sign: overt multilingualism (Dugbe) ...... 116

4.36 Health sign: overt multilingualism (Sabo) ...... 116

4.37 Monophonic sign in NigP ...... 119

4.38 Multi-worded English bottom-up commercial sign ...... 119

4.39 Homophonic, bilingual sign ...... 121

4.40 Homophonic, quadrilingual sign ...... 122

4.41 Mixed sign, semantically marked ...... 124

4.42 Mixed sign, pragmatically marked ...... 125

4.43 Polyphonic tourist sign ...... 126

4.44 Polyphonic sanitation sign ...... 127

4.45 Sign showing standard Yorùbá orthography ...... 130

4.46 Sale sign showing lettering in upper and lower cases ...... 131

4.47 Sign, showing lexical idiosyncrasy ...... 133

4.48 Commercial sign containing neologism ...... 135

4.49 Commercial sign showing semantic re-assignment ...... 135

4.50 Gas station sign showing layering ...... 137

4.51 Layering in a restaurant sign ...... 139

4.52 Chaotic parasitism ...... 140

4.53 Discursive parasitism ...... 140

4.54 Peculiar parasitism ...... 141

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4.55 Allusive mobile sign ...... 144

4.56 Barely communicative sign ...... 145

4.57 "Non-communicative" sign ...... 146

4.58 Financial sign displaying false information ...... 146

Chapter 1

INTRODUCTION

Language matters to us because it is a vehicle for meaning—it allows us to take the

desires, intentions, and experiences in our heads and transmit a signal through space that

makes those thoughts pop up in someone else's head. (Bergen, 2012, p. 5)

The Linguistic Landscape and the English Language

The terminology, linguistic landscape (LL), is usually traced to Landry and Bourhis'

(1997) conceptualization: the "visibility and salience of languages on public and commercial signs in a given territory or region" (Landry & Bourhis, 1997, p. 23). Although signage, that is, the use of language to mark public environments, has been researched in various forms before the year 1997—especially, Rosenbaum, Nadel, Cooper & Fishman's (1977) and Spolsky &

Cooper's (1991) studies of the languages of Jerusalem—Landry and Bourhis were the first to use the term, "linguistic landscape." From being a technique for studying vernacular literacy

(Spolsky & Cooper, 1983), the LL has been conceptualized (especially since Landry and

Bourhis' seminal article) in various but related ways, including, inter alia, "use of language in its written form in the public sphere" (Gorter, 2006a, p. 2), "linguistic objects that mark the public space" (Shohamy, Ben-Rafael, & Barni, 2010, p. xiv), and "language in the environment, words and images displayed and exposed in public spaces" (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009, p. 1). These brief definitions—which will be expanded and problematized in Chapter 2—converge to paraphrase the LL as the words (and images) which are used for marking public spaces. The focal point of this dissertation is sign "emplacement," following a melding of the three senses of Scollon and

Scollon's (2003) definition of the term as "the act of placing a sign in a physical location to activate its meaning; the meaning that derives from such an action; the study of such meanings"

(p. 210). And as related to the Bergen (2012) quotation (above), meaning-making in the LL is, at once, physically and cognitively processed, an act through which emplaced language connects a meaning-producer and a (real or imagined) meaning-consumer in and across a given space.

The English Language is one of the major languages spoken in the world today. Although an Anglo Saxon language whose "home" is England, it has since become a global or world language—the world's largest lingua franca—not just because of its "presence in nearly every country in the world," but also because it "is the only international language without precise geographical boundaries or clear coordinates" (Saraceni, 2010, pp. 1-2). As such, the language has been put to various uses—formal, informal, major, minor—according to the communicative intentions of its users. Although a relatively recent field or subfield of sociolinguistics

(Malinowski, 2009; Spolsky, 2007), LL research has become one interesting vista for investigating language use in (especially) multilingual societies.

According to Bolton (2012), "[t]he intrusion and use of English in the public spaces of the world's cities alongside national languages and local languages has received increasing attention over the last fifteen years or so" (p. 31), an obvious analogy to Landry and Bourhis'

(1997) publication. And so, many of the LL st udies have identified the intralingual and interlingual manifestations of English, when (the language is) used with one or more other languages to mark public signs. These manifestations have been founded within the larger picture of World Englishes (WE), simply, "the localized forms of English found throughout the world" (Bolton, 2005, p. 69). Accordingly, Bolton (2012) interpreted the direct relevance of

English-based public signage to WE as evidencing two probable facts about the world: (1) its economic and cultural globalization and "glocalization" (the interdependence of local and global acts and phenomena [Robertson, 1995]) and (2) its socio-historical development. Additionally,

he posited that LL research, "may help us understand the rapidly changing urban landscapes, and the increasingly multilingual worlds, in which we live or experience through travel" (p. 32).

The growing interest in the LL has been traced to many factors. These include (but are not restricted to) the advent and affordability of digital photography and the effect of globalization (Gorter, 2006a), the surge of interest in sociolinguistics since the 1960s (Gorter,

2006b), and the recognition of the increasing media presence in social life coupled with the growing interest in the language/space interface (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011). The key terms in each of these factors—"globalization," "sociolinguistics," "language/space interface"—are all related to the situation of the English Language, world-wide.

The Place of the English Language in the World

The prevalence of English world-wide is attributed to two factors: the use of the language beyond Britain and the US (Crystal, 1997; McArthur, 1998) and the emergence of the US and

Great Britain as global political and economic powers in the twentieth century (the former, more prominently, since the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s [Mufwene, 2010]). Before then though, English had been a popular (essentially) European and North American language, spread chiefly by trade and colonialism (Mufwene, 2010), supplanting Latin which had been Europe's

"global language" (Crystal, 1997) and Western Europe's language of learning (McArthur, 2000) for ages. The prominence of English as a world language owes less to the size of its speakers

(estimated as over one billion people but still lagging behind Mandarin Chinese [Mufwene,

2010, p. 42]) but more to its "globalizing" identity, which makes it visible in all parts of the world (Blommaert, 2012a), and its predominance as the language of communication in diverse fields of human endeavor (especially including technology) and by speakers of different languages in various regional and cultural contexts (Mufwene, 2010; Rubdy & Saraceni, 2006).

The conceptualization of the status, forms, and functions of the English Language in the world has been tagged in two major ways, English in the World (EIW) and World English (WE), the second tag (and acronym) being the more popular. Both tags, in different ways, underscore the prominence of English as a global language but also function as perspectives for contemplating, confirming, and confronting what has been viewed as the "dislocation"

(Blommaert, 2012a) or "relocation" (Saraceni, 2010) of English from its Eurocentric origin.

Positing EIW as the broader tag, Saraceni (2010) located the surge of scholarly interest in

English, "especially since the 1970s," in two inter-related factors—"(a) the affirmation of

English as the language of global currency, and (b) the many varieties of English that emerged as a result of British imperialism"—which he related to four over-arching descriptive and analytical themes: (1) the historical and geographical issues of English in the world, (2) the political aspects of the spread of English, (3) the formal delineations of the varieties of English, and (4) the plurality and equality of the world's Englishes (p. 3). He believed that EIW would be more revelatory if socially perspectivized, that is, viewed as essential parts of the lives of its users.

Based on the widely-held view that the description of EIW needed to be more decentralized from its historical base and thus, democratic (Blommaert, 2012a), Saraceni canvassed for a relocation of English, and linked this to the development of World Englishes (WE) and English as a lingua franca (ELF). Subsequently, Saraceni (2010) founded the relocation of English on two narratives: the academic discourse narrative and the public discourse narrative; while the former is positively valued and highlights the various processes of acculturation which English has had to undergo wherever it has been transplanted in the world, the latter has a negative import, since it is focused on the tendencies of local languages and cultures to defile English. He submitted that since the English Language was no longer the exclusive preserve of the Anglophone West

and since local cultures globally were daily finding expression in English, EIW would be better approached if "the English Language becomes instrumental to a re-balance of the ideological flows in the world and plays a central role in countering the possibility of the ideological and cultural domination of one group over everybody else" (Saraceni, 2010, p. 143).

WE (World Englishes) is a term coined in "with (an advocacy for) the recognition of diverse modern English varieties as legitimate, wherever they are spoken, as long as their speakers abide by some local communal norms" (Mufwene, 2010, p. 43) or the localized forms of English found throughout the world, particularly with reference to the Caribbean, West and

East Africa, and parts of Asia" (Bolton, 2005, p. 69) or the recognition of varieties of English in postcolonial contexts, as being at par with British and American Englishes (Saraceni, 2010, p. 4).

This implies that WE's interest is English as used worldwide, though with special focus on its situation outside its perceived origins.

Notably, Mufwene (2010, pp. 43-44) identified a three-way distinction of the evolution of

English since the 17th century: native Englishes (in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and the

US); Creole or Pidgin Englishes (in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands); indigenized and nativized Englishes (in the former exploitation colonies like India and Nigeria). He then rooted these varieties in three ecological factors: "the kinds of input varieties that the new speakers were exposed to, the modes of language 'transmission' involved, [and] patterns of interaction with native speakers [or] … among non-speakers" (p. 44). While indigenized English developed from speakers' choices between formal and vernacular English, the Creole varieties evolved from their speakers' interactions more among non-native, than with native, (English) speakers. For "'native

Englishes,' English mostly became a kind of koine—or koine-ized—among its traditional

speakers, who found themselves interacting regularly with speakers of other dialects" (Mufwene,

2010, p. 44, emphasis in the original).

Although he initially identified six broad approaches to research in WE, Bolton (2005) later zeroed in on three, more specifically:

[those approaches] whose objectives are largely linguistic in orientation (e.g. English

studies, and corpus linguistics); approaches that share both linguistic and sociopolitical

concerns (e.g. most sociolinguistic approaches, and the [Kachruvian] world Englishes

approach), and those approaches that are primarily sociopolitical and political in

orientation (e.g. studies of linguistic imperialism, and other critical approaches). (pp. 70-

75, emphasis in the original)

Sergeant (2012) interpreted the three approaches in the same sequence: (1) the description of the

English Language begun in the late 19th century, especially as led by Randolph Quirk and

University College London in the 1960s; (2) works in the sociology of language and sociolinguistics, which midwived the Kachruvian approach; (3) a convergence of political and linguistic theories traced to Marxism and the Frankfurt School (p. 122).

Braj Kachru is probably the most-documented researcher of the plurality of English, world-wide. Kachru (1985, pp. 12-14), in his famous categorization of the uses and users of WE, identified three concentric circles: the "Inner Circle," where English is spoken by the majority of the people either because of its historical basis (e.g. the United Kingdom) or replacement of local languages (e.g. the United States); the "Outer Circle," English as a Second Language (ESL) and

English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) postcolonial contexts where English co-exists with other local languages but is used intranationally for official and administrative purposes (e.g. India,

Nigeria); and the "Expanding Circle," English as a Foreign Language (EFL) environment, where

English is used traditionally for specific purposes but is becoming increasingly important as a foreign language (e.g. China, Taiwan). Additionally, Kachru (1985, pp. 16-17), as cited by

Saraceni (2010), linked the three circles to three norm-related varieties:

… norm-providing varieties, usually regarded as ideal models of the language, in the

Inner Circle; norm-developing varieties, in the process of establishing their own norms

but still to some extent looking up to Inner-Circle varieties, in the Outer Circle; and

norm-dependent varieties, which relied completely on Inner-Circle models, in the

Expanding Circle. ( p. 36)

Kachru's distinctions thus underscored the reality and instrumentality of varieties of English or, simply, "Englishes," advancing the position that it would be unrealistic to think that a singular form of English could address all the needs of the variation of users and uses of the language.

As noted by Rubdy & Saraceni (2006), a major concern with global English has been the issue of standardization, since there is no body or institution officially invested with the right to prescribe and determine the language's norms. As such, much of the debate over the years has demarcated between scholars who canvassed for some form of stability or convergence in the language's norms (Prator, 1968; Quirk, 1985) and those who preferred and advocated for its diversity (Blommaert, 2012a; Halliday, McIntosh & Strevens, 1964; Kachru, 1976; Saraceni,

2010). The latter school of thought grew to be the more popular, inducing a rich harvest in sociolinguistic research and world-wide English. Accordingly, the functional variation of the world's Englishes can be coalesced into three types, Standard English (SE), World English (WE), and English as a Lingua Franca (ELF).

SE, often equated with Standard British English (SBE) or Standard American English

(SAE), is the most popular formal variety. Despite the fact that it is seen by many non-native

users as ideologically motivated, that is, as transmitting Anglo-American values, it is the most widely used for institutional functions, generally accepted for pedagogical purposes, and is used to project the native speaker as the superior user and/or teacher of the language (Rubdy &

Saraceni, 2006). Moreover, as noted by Gupta (2006), although "[t]here is no central control of

Standard English at either national or international levels" (p. 97), written SE is less diverse than spoken SE.

WE is a paraphrase for the variety of English predominantly used in Kachru's Outer

Circle, where English has been made to conform to local cultural norms—"nativized" (Rubdy &

Saraceni, 2006) or "indigenized" (Mufwene, 2010)—and is becoming increasingly institutionalized for intranational and inter-cultural communication. Because WE is endonormative, its use not only undermines the authority of SE (as the recognized internationally comprehensible variety used especially for pedagogical purposes), it also fuels the fear of

"linguistic fragmentation" which could lead, not to different dialects of English but, to mutual unintelligible languages (Rubdy & Saraceni, 2006, p. 7), most notably at the level of phonology

(Jenkins, 2000).

ELF (or EIL, English as an International Language) dovetails from WE (Saraceni, 2010;

Seidlhofer, 2006), identifies the English identified with Kachru's Expanding Circle, and is concerned with the situation of English in all contexts where it functions as a foreign language or lingua franca (Saraceni, 2010, p. 4) or "between speakers for whom English is neither a first language or an institutionalized second language" (Rubdy & Saraceni, 2006, p. 11). It is the variety of English focused on the exchange of information and used as a shared code between and among business people and international travelers (who are non-native speakers of English)

(Rubdy & Saraceni, 2006). Since it panders to non-native "speakerdom," it de-emphasizes the

language's (English) culture (unlike WE) and frees its speakers from exonormative (native speaker) tendencies (Rubdy & Saraceni, 2006, p. 8).

In sum, English has become a global language owing principally to its function as the world's lingua franca (Mufwene, 2010; Saraceni, 2010) and the language that outlines the processes of globalization (Blommaert, 2012b). It is believed that regardless of the functional variety of English used or preferred in a given geographical context, "some awareness of the global roles of English should be achieved by all English users" (Seidlhofer, 2006, p. 48). One of these roles is the marking of the public space, the nub of LL research.

A Sociolinguistic Profile of Nigeria

Nigeria is located in the western part of Africa. It is Africa's most populous country, containing more than 140 million people (according to the year 2006 national population census), who are distributed into 36 States (and the federal capital territory, Abuja) and 774 local government areas (LGAs). Despite the volatility and conflict proneness of language issues in

Nigeria, which preclude the availability of reliable statistics on language items and questions

(Adegbija, 2004, p. 181), Nigeria has been credited with more than 500 languages (Ginsburgh &

Weber [2011] counted 527), spoken in multiple dialects. Added to this multilingualism are the country's multiethnic (most accounts note 250 ethnic groups) and multicultural identities.

Although the dichotomization of Nigeria's majority and minority languages has been sometimes seen as arbitrary, relative, and ideological (Aito, 2005; Bamgbose, 1984), scholars agree that the three most-widely spoken Nigerian languages are Hausa, Igbo, and Yorùbá. As a matter of fact, these languages are constitutionally recognized, alongside of English, as Nigeria's "major" languages (Adegbija, 2004).

According to Adegbija (2004, p. 190), there are 14 main languages in Nigeria. Of these, the three major Nigerian indigenous languages (identified above) are predominantly spoken in the three major parts of the country—North, (South) East, and (South) West, respectively—to parallel, respectively, the former (1960-1963), three-region structure of Nigeria, as demarcated by Rivers Niger and Benue. By this it is meant that Hausa is regarded the native language of the

North (north of Rivers Niger and Benue), Igbo, the language of the East (south of River Benue), and Yorùbá, the language of the West (south of River Niger).

However, immigrant populations often attempt ethnic sociolinguistic homogeneity or

"retribalization" (the adjustment of an ethnic group to new realities "by reorganizing its own traditional customs, or by developing new customs under traditional symbols, often using traditional norms and ideologies to enhance its distinctiveness within the contemporary situation"

[Cohen, 2004, p. 1]): many ethnic groups, notably the Hausas (Cohen, 2004), are usually easily identified in Nigerian cities and towns, simultaneously, by inhabiting close-knit geographical spaces and a localization of their (immigrant populations') indigenous languages. To illustrate this reality (of retribalization), Nigeria will be divided into two parts, north and south. In this wise, while Sabo is the prototypical name for the neighborhoods of northerners in southern

Nigeria, where Hausa is predominantly spoken, Sabo Ngeri in northern Nigeria is peopled by southern Nigerians who choose to live together and predominantly speak their various L1s.

Additionally though, residents of either Sabo or Sabo Ngeri (the former a clipped form of the latter, both Hausa words for "foreigners' quarters") learn, sooner or later, to speak the native populations' indigenous language(s) and/or (some) English. As such, many residents of such neighborhoods, especially the children, turn out to be trilingual, that is, having considerable competence in their L1s, the predominant language of their host communities, and English.

According to a reliable demographic profile of Nigeria's ethnic grouping,

"[f]our major ethnic groups make up about 65 to 70 percent of the population. The largest

group is the Hausa/Fulani, a mixture of two ethnic groups living primarily in the northern

half of the country. The Hausa/Fulani people number about 35 to 40 million. The Yorùbá

in western Nigeria number about 30 million people, and the Igbo in eastern Nigeria

number about 15 million people." (StateUniversity.com, 2013, para. 3)

And although more than 50% of Nigerians live in the urban areas, (Index Mundi, 2013) military to democratic rule in 1999, demanding that more people be involved in governance, must have raised that percentage), and despite the imperial presence of English in these urban spaces, the overwhelming majority of the population uses its indigenous languages (L1s) for most communication functions (Bisong, 1995).

According to Adegbija (2004), the languages recognized in Nigeria are of three main types: "the indigenous or endoglossic languages; foreign or exoglossic languages; and Pidgin varieties of languages …" (p. 183). Apart from the three major Nigerian languages (identified above), other widely-spoken indigenous languages (having more than one million speakers each

[Adegbija, 2004]) are Edo, Ebira, Efik, Fulfulde, Ibibio, Idoma, Igala, Ijo, Kanuri, and Nupe.

There is usually the predominance of one language in a State (like Yorùbá in State and Edo in Edo State), although some States have more than one predominant language spoken by its indigenes (like Ebira and Igala in Kogi State or Ijaw, Ikwerre, and Kalabari in Rivers State). Yet, most Nigerian indigenous languages have dialects, which are hardly mutually intelligible. For example, while Yorùbá is the major language in Ogun State, the dialects spoken there include

Awori, Egba, Ijebu, and Remo. English, Arabic, and French are the major foreign languages spoken in Nigeria: while English is a lingua franca, Arabic is used for religious communication

in Islam (the other major religion practiced in Nigeria, apart from Christianity), and French is popular especially because of its status as the official language of Nigeria's closest geographical neighbors (Benin, Cameroon, and Niger). Almost all other major languages of the world, especially German, Latin, Russian, and (recently) Mandarin Chinese, are minimally used in

Nigeria, as they are mostly taught in the universities (though Chinese has been introduced to

Lagos State high schools) or spoken only by immigrant families for whom these languages are

L1s. Nigerian Pidgin (NigP), the dominant Pidgin variety among Nigerian languages, is spoken in all parts of Nigeria and is especially popular in Nigeria's big cities (including Abuja, Jos,

Kano, and Lagos) and most towns and cities in the Niger Delta region. Notably, NigP is not widely spoken in Ìbàdàn, except in neighborhoods inhabited by non-indigenes who speak different L1s. Given the focus of this dissertation, the special emphasis of the sociolinguistic profiling of Nigeria will be on the status of the English Language in the country.

The English Language found its way to Nigeria primarily through missionary activities

(Akindele & Adegbite, 2005). The missionaries came to Nigeria to expand the frontiers of

Christianity, equipped with the Bible written in English. So, the early converts needed to learn the language of the "new" religion. This in turn led to the establishment of missionary schools where the knowledge of English spread rapidly. Also, there was "the so-called industrial revolution that started in Europe in 1750" which saw the influx of essentially British and

Portuguese traders to different parts of Africa (Akindele & Adegbite, 2005, p. 59). To do business with the Europeans and make their businesses international, Nigerian traders had to learn English (and book-keeping) and/or encourage their children to do likewise. Furthermore, the abolition of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1883 saw the return to Nigeria of former slaves who had acquired some competence in English from their former masters. And then, there was

the partitioning of Africa at the Berlin conference of 1884-1885, where African countries were shared among the (then) world's superpowers.

Accordingly, Schneider (2007, pp. 199-212) delineated the situation of the English

Language in Nigeria into three major phases. The first and earliest phase (early 19th century to

1900) was attributed to the expansion of Europeans' missionary and trading activities, which gave birth to NigP, increased the demand for English, and positioned English as the language of the Nigerian elite. The second phase (1900 to the late 1940s) spanned the British colonial period, which began earlier in Southern Nigeria than Northern Nigeria (until both regions were amalgamated under Indirect Rule in 1914). This period was identified with the ascendancy of

English as the language of administration, commerce, education, and law, and the "exonormative orientation" of Nigerian English, the belief that Nigerian English is and ought to be identical to

British English (Bamgbose, 1992, p. 149), and the recognition of NigP as a counterpart to formal

English, even if restricted to informal contexts. The third phase (1940s till the present), placed within periods before and after Nigeria's political independence (of 1960), was explained by the exponential growth in formal education—and by extension, in the teaching of English—made obvious by the founding of the University of Ibadan in 1948. This was a consequence of the need to make English available to , not just the elite, but the whole population. Since Nigerians lacked any unifying national language, English became the language of advertisement, (formal) business, judiciary, mass media, politics, and science and technology, and this made it the linguistic identity of modernity. This phase not only saw the description of English in Nigeria, generally-speaking (Jowitt, 1991; Ubahakwe, 1979) and according to its degree of deviation from Standard English, in its spoken (Banjo, 1971) and written (Adesanoye, 1973; 1980) forms, it also witnessed a substantial growth in the number of NigP speakers. The period somewhat

dovetailed to a fourth phase (though not clearly identified like the previous three phases), when

English became more nativized in its spoken and written forms than previously, as a result of exponential growths in literacy in Nigeria and Nigerians' (English-based) literary production. For example, speaking like a native speaker (in Received Pronunciation [RP]), which was deemed attractive (in times past) came to be seen as "affected and un-Nigerian" (Jowitt, 1991, p. 40). In the same vein, the literary works of Nigerian writers (notably Chinua Achebe and Gabriel Okara) have unapologetically pandered towards a peculiar Nigerianization of English.

Additionally, the prominence of NigP as a Nigerian language, need be noted. As observed by Faraclas (2004) and Schneider (2007) there has been, in recent years, a considerable increase in the number of NigP speakers, especially among the educated elite who used to treat the language with much disdain. Though originally a contact language between Nigerians and

British colonizers, missionaries, and traders, prompting its identification as "Anglo-Nigerian

Pidgin" (Mann, 1996) or an English-based pidgin, that is, Nigerian Pidgin English (Agheyisi,

1988), NigP has since the end of the colonial rule (in Nigeria) added so much linguistic baggage from the various Nigerian languages and shed so much of its English superstrate identity. Also,

NigP has been conceptualized as sub-varietal, with formal categories ranging from acrolect

(affected by Nigerian English) to mesolect (the most widespread) to basilect" (Faraclas, 1991) to the point of creolization in the Niger Delta regions (Mann, 1996; Elugbe & Omamor, 1991).

There is no explicit, autonomous document on Nigeria's language planning or policy: all research in this direction has referred to the nation's constitutional provisions and educational policies. Since the colonial times, English has been made an official language in Nigeria.

Notably, while the 1947 (Richards') Constitution recognized two official languages—English in the South and Hausa in the North—, the 1954 (Macpherson's) constitution focused on the

functionality of language use in Nigeria, by making English the official language at the national level but made regional concessions by recognizing English the official language in the South but Hausa and English in the North. After independence till the present, the role of English has remained unchanged as the Nigeria's official language at the national level.

The National Policy on Education (NPE) and the Nigerian Constitution are the two documents which profile the status of languages in Nigeria, somewhat. These documents are the reference points for the two broad stipulations on Nigeria's language policy, "mother tongue medium policy (MTM) and the multilingual policy" (Adegbija, 2004, p. 210). Two major provisions of the NPE, in Sections 1(8) and 3(15) respectively, indicate the place of the major indigenous languages and English, chiefly in education and politics:

Section 1(8)

In addition to appreciating the importance of language in the educational process, and as

a means of preserving the people's culture, the Government considers it to be in the

interest of national unity that each child should be encouraged to learn one of the three

major languages other than his mother tongue. In this connection, the Government

considers the three major languages in Nigeria to be Hausa, Ibo and Yoruba. (NPE, 1985,

p. 9)

Section 3(5)

Government will see to it that the medium of instruction in the primary school is initially

the mother tongue or the language of the immediate community and, at a later stage,

English. (NPE, 1985, p.13)

Nigerian schools are founded on a four-tier system of education, christened "6-3-3-4." By this is meant that a student is expected to spend 6 years in the primary (or elementary) school, 3 years

each in the junior and senior secondary (or middle and high) school, and 4 years in the university. The student could opt out only at the end of any of these four levels to earn a certificate. The NPE subsequently made statements about the indigenous languages, specifying that every Junior Secondary School (JSS) student should study two Nigerian languages, "the language of their own area in addition to any of the three main Nigerian languages, Hausa, Ibo and Yorùbá, subject to availability of teachers" (NPE, 1985, p. 17) and that every Senior

Secondary School (SSS) student must study one Nigerian language. Notably, that these provisions (of the NPE) apply to government schools alone, because many privately-owned schools have their students taught in English, even from the kindergarten (or pre-primary) levels of education (Schneider, 2007).

The Nigerian Constitution (1979), specifically its Sections 51 and 91, stipulated the languages to be used in the national and state parliaments: "[t]he business of the National

Assembly shall be conducted in English, Hausa, Ibo and Yorùbá, when adequate arrangements have been made therefore" (Section 51); "[t]he business of the House of Assembly shall be conducted in English but the House may in addition to English conduct the business in one or more languages spoken in the state as the House may by resolution approve" (Section 91).

Much has been said about Nigeria's language policy as documented, above. However, the practicality of this policy raises some issues. For instance, the period meant by "later stage" in primary school education remains unclear. Thus, teachers in most public schools, because of their desire to be understood by all their students, "oscillate from the first languages to English"

(Adegbija, 2004, p. 200). Notably too, the NPE is silent about the language of instruction in secondary and post-secondary schools, although the use of English is assumed, since it has been specified that English should be the medium of instruction "at a later stage" of primary

schooling. Conventionally, all students of Nigeria's universities, polytechnics, monotechnics, and colleges of education (their majors regardless) are compelled to take and pass specified courses in the Use of English (English for Academic Purposes) before graduation.

Again, given Nigeria's linguistic diversity, the literacy programs are determined by the languages spoken in each state. Owing to their special recognition as the country's majority languages, Igbo, Hausa, and Yorùbá are the first languages of instruction in formal schooling, as well as of basic and mass literacy (for these purposes, the minority languages are totally neglected). Subsequently, English takes over. However, many educated (and, nowadays, even non-educated) families prefer to send their children and wards to privately-owned schools

(especially for primary and secondary education) where they would be quickly immersed in

English, a language that Nigerians have seen as the language of modernity and globalization

(Adegbija, 2004; Schneider, 2007). Thus, language spread and maintenance in Nigeria is based on utilitarian concerns, showing a shift towards English (especially in official domains) and the three dominant indigenous languages (generally speaking).

Again, English is dominantly spread in Nigerian media. As noted by Adegbija (2004),

Over 90% of newspapers and magazines in Nigeria are published in English. The

majority of programmes on radio and TV, perhaps over 60%, are also in English.

Virtually every one of the 36 States in Nigeria has an English newspaper

published daily or weekly. (p. 204)

As such, although there are a few newspapers in indigenous languages (like Alaroye ["The

Talkative"] in Yorùbá and Gaskiya Taafi Kwabo ["Truth is Worth More than a Penny"] in

Hausa), I could not lay my hands on any magazine written in any major or minor indigenous language.

Nigeria is awash with both private and government media outfits, whose language of publication is mainly English or English combined with Nigerian indigenous languages and

(sometimes) NigP. The first Nigerian newspaper, a Yorùbá daily, Iwe Irohin Fun Awon Ara

Egba Ati Yorùbá (meaning, "Newspaper for the Egbas and Yorùbás") was established in

Abeokuta in 1859. The first, English-medium, Nigerian newspaper was Lagos Times, founded in

1880. Of the about 100 newspapers and magazines published in Nigeria, only five are published in the indigenous languages (Ifeduba, 2012). Also, the Western Nigeria Television (WNTV),

Africa's first television station, was established at Ìbàdàn in 1959. Ever since, the Nigerian

Television Authority (NTA), a network of federal-government-owned television stations (which eventually included the WNTV) has had a presence in every State. There are also television stations owned by States and private individuals, all broadcasting programs in English and other languages (including NigP) which are widely spoken by the local populations where the stations are located. Moreover, as at December 2011, more than 45 million Nigerians were online—

(about 29% of the population), mostly educated, urban, and young were online, Facebook being the most popular social media platform. (BBC News Africa, 2012).

Bamgbose (1995, pp. 9-11) identified five dimensions of the influence of English in

Nigeria as educational, political, cultural, sociolinguistic, and linguistic. The educational dimension highlighted the institution of English as the sole language of instruction from the upper primary school and the insistence on a credit pass in English as a prerequisite for admission into most humanities-based programs in Nigerian tertiary institutions1. Politically, there emerged an English-speaking Nigerian elite who took over the reins of administration such

1 Since the late 1990s, credit passes in English Language and Mathematics (at the High School Certificate level) have become basic requirements for admission into Nigerian tertiary institutions, especially the universities, for almost all disciplines.

that English soon became the language of political participation. The cultural dimension focused on the effect of English culture and language on Nigerian languages, leading for example, to lexical borrowings (e.g. in Yorùbá, ojo Monde for "Monday," since although the word for

Monday in Yorùbá is Aje, very many L1 speakers of Yorùbá are unfamiliar with this (Yorùbá) word). At the sociolinguistic level, there not only emerged many bilinguals, who could speak

English and their L1s, but there was also the dominant presence of English in the realization of many social relations. Finally, the linguistic dimension captured how English influenced (and invariably got influenced by Nigerian languages), essentially through code-mixing.

Using Kachru's classifications, Nigeria belongs to the "Outer Circle" English-speaking community. As such, any linguistic investigation of the situation of English usage in Nigeria would contain data from both Standard British/American English and "Nigerian English." The situation of the English language in Nigeria has been described in three major ways, in the literature: Nigerian English (NE), Popular Nigerian English (PNE), and Standard Nigerian

English (SNE). PNE is the most popular and considered the basilectal form of NE, since "it is composed of errors and variants" (Jowitt, 1991, p. 47). SNE is the acrolectal NE, used by educated Nigerians, and which contains NE and PNE forms which "have been adopted as

'Standard' for Nigeria, and which have been made prescribable in teaching" (Jowitt, 1991, p. 48).

NE is the mean or aggregate form of English, developed and popularized in the Nigerian non- native situation (Akindele & Adegbite, 2005, p. 144) and used by Nigerians in totality which, according to Jowitt (1991), should be simultaneously internationally acceptable and intelligible as well as dynamic, "with an internal momentum, sustained by literary production, official encouragement, etc." ( p. 27).

Jowitt (1991, pp. 37-51) also identified three parameters for identifying NE—ethnic, educational, and linguistic—all linking Nigerians' English to the levels of mother-tongue (MT) interference, education attained, and degree of deviation from Standard British English (SBE), respectively. And all research on NE can be subsumed within these parameters. Although most of the investigations were on spoken NE (Banjo, 1971; Brosnahan, 1958; Walsh, 1967),

Adesanoye (1973, 1980) focused on the written varieties, while Adekunle (1979) dwelt on spoken and/or written varieties. Broadly speaking then, Nigerian English is a product of bilingualism and multilingualism, the simultaneous situation of English and Nigerian languages, as reflected by the linguistic repertoire of virtually every Nigerian.

Although the existence of a Standard Nigerian English (SNE), an intelligible variety that cuts across all ethnic groups, orienting towards WE at many levels has been observed by many scholars of English in Nigeria, most of these scholars have conceded that the SNE forms

(especially at the phonological level) are not characteristic of every Nigerian user of the English

Language (Akindele & Adegbite, 2005; Jowitt, 1991). According to Akindele and Adegbite

(2005, pp. 144-155), Nigerian English is a blend of native English (i.e. Inner Circle English) and

Nigerian sociolinguistic nuances which can be identified by regional dialects (Igbo English,

Hausa English, Yorùbá English) and social dialects (e.g. Banjo's [1971] demarcation of varieties according to speakers' levels of education). Schneider's (2007) further located NE in a sociostylistic variation, ranging

from a Standard type, where little more than an accent and a few loans differ from

metropolitan norms, via a widespread, non-stigmatized type with localisms which Jowitt

(1991) calls "Popular,'' to rudimentary forms influenced by (but not identical with) Pidgin

which serve limited and very basic communicative needs, as for example associated with

market mammies (who tend to command utterances like "bring money"). (p. 206)

In sum, English is Nigeria's most widely spoken language (Faraclas, 2004) and its ethnically-neutral everyday formal communicative tool (Schneider, 2007). Although it has moved from being a "property of an elite" (Bamgbose, 1996, p. 367) to a language in which the average Nigerian living in the remotest village can boast of a few English words (Udofot, 2003), only about 20% of Nigerians use English in some aspects of their daily activities (Adegbija,

2004; Bamgbose, 1996; Gut, 2004). In sharp contrast, however, as noted by Faraclas (2004), more than half of Nigeria's population (then put at 140 million) speak NigP. As Adegbija (2004) succinctly concluded, "[o]ver the years, English has metamorphosed into a second language by virtue of its functional salience, its official dominance and its role as a national lingua franca in

Nigeria" (p. 183). Yet, while Nigerians' attitude to English is better than their attitude to NigP

(Schneider, 2007), the latter language has become the more popular, ethnically-neutral code used by Nigerians to communicate across the different social, economic, educational, and gender levels. Also, in the process of interpersonal communication, for some time now, speaking an indigenous language has been regarded as a strong intimacy signal while opting for English would suggest "distance and unfriendliness" (Bamgbose, 1996, p. 368).

A Sociolinguistic Profile of Ìbàdàn

Ìbàdàn, the area of survey, is located in the South-Western part of Nigeria. Although there is scant statistical information regarding its sociolinguistic realities, Ìbàdàn is the capital city of State of Nigeria and one of the largest cities in Africa. A hilly area of rural and urban settlements covering a land area of 3,123 square kilometers, Ìbàdàn was "originally founded as a place of refuge ... a kind of no man's land serving as an informal boundary between the

inhabitants of the savannah (Odan), who were the people, and the forest (Igbo) dwellers, the

Ijebu and Egba" (Ademowo, 2010, p. 120). In the colonial era, Ìbàdàn was the political and administrative capital of the old Western Region in Nigeria, a factor which contributed to its development into a major commercial city and one peopled by Nigerians of diverse cultures.

Ìbàdàn is an important commercial center where agricultural, manufacturing, and service industries thrive. Administratively, the Ìbàdàn metropolis comprises 11 Local Government Areas

(LGAs) of which five are urban and six are semi-urban. Ìbàdàn residents are involved in various numerous income-generating ventures and jobs, such as trading and civil service employment. A great part of the sociolinguistic identity of Ìbàdàn has its root in its status as the administrative and economic capital of the Western Region, before the region's delineation into six states in

1967. The Western Region had a high literacy level and was regarded as the most educationally advanced Nigerian region, owing essentially to the free education program introduced by the regional government in 1955 and the location of the earliest press and educational institutions in its major cities (Kolawole & Adepoju, 2007).

Presumably, the level of literacy in Ìbàdàn, especially among the youth population, will be high. Although there are no statistical records specific to the Ìbàdàn metropolis, the figures about the literacy rate of State (where Ìbàdàn is the capital city) come in handy, here.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics (2010) figures on the levels of literacy in

State, while the youth literacy rate is given as 90.9% (literacy in English) and 94.6% (literacy in any language), the adult literacy percentages are 62.6 (for English) and 71.3 (for any language).

Specifically, Ìbàdàn is home to The Nigerian Tribune (Nigeria's oldest surviving private newspaper), the University of Ìbàdàn (Nigeria's first university and originally a branch of the

University of London), and the Nigerian Television Authority (formerly WNTV,

Nigeria's/Africa's first television station).

The Yorùbá Language, a Niger-Congo language spoken natively in Nigeria, Benin, and

Togo, is the indigenous language identified with Ìbàdàn (and the other towns of South-Western

Nigeria) and the second most-widely spoken language in Nigeria (Igboanusi & Lothar, 2005).

Thus, the people of Ìbàdàn would seem to be linguistically homogenous. Owing to two major reasons, however, this is not the case. First, the Yorùbá Language is multidialectal, so much so that a speaker of one dialect (e.g. Ìj ) may not understand a speaker of another dialect (e.g.

Ìj bú), if they both do not speak/understand the "core Yorùbá" (or superstrate Yorùbá, closely approximate to that spoken by Ìbàdàn, , and Ògbóm indigenes). Second, the social, political, and economic prominence of Ìbàdàn, especially for being the (erstwhile) center of regional administration, has necessitated an immigration flow and a population influx by other

Nigerians and non-Nigerians, so that it is possible that every Nigerian ethnic group is represented in Ìbàdàn. Thus, native speakers of other Nigerian languages and non-Nigerians are also resident in Ìbàdàn, though native Hausa and Igbo speakers probably constitute the majority of the non- native population in the metropolis. Notably, the Hausas are the most easily identifiable non- indigenous population in Ìbàdàn, owing greatly to their predominant inhabitation of the appropriated neighborhood, Sabo (Cohen, 2004). As it is in other cities in Nigeria, English is the

Second Language (L2) in Ìbàdàn.

So, in addition to the various native languages and dialects spoken in Ìbàdàn is the

English Language. The English Language is, essentially, a legacy of the British colonial rule in

Nigeria, which was originally used by the colonialists for the basic purpose of officialdom.

However, owing to a number of factors (see above), this language has survived and has

continued to wax stronger in Nigeria, despite the country's attainment of political independence in 1960. Ìbàdàn people speak and use, essentially, forms of NE, most certainly, the regional dialect, Yorùbá- English (a variety identified and researched by scholars, like Banjo [1983] and

Lamidi [2009]).

Sociolinguistics and Meaning-Making

Sociolinguistics, broadly speaking, encompasses the connection between language and society as reflected in such major domains as language planning and policy, language choice, language maintenance and shift, and language variation (from the ends of both uses and users).

Given this width, sociolinguistics leaks into, feeds off, and is sometimes used to cover adjoining disciplines such as discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, pragmatics, social semiotics, and

(aspects of) stylistics. Meaning, in linguistics, is traditionally located within the mutually- reinforcing twin disciplines of semantics (denotation) and pragmatics (inference).

However, the sociolinguistic notion of meaning-making presents meaning as co- constructed and contextual, a context that determines how meaning is made (intended and interpreted) and what grants access to the meaning-making process at various levels, as projected chiefly by the works of Charles Goodwin, Deborah Schiffrin, and Emanuel Schegloff. The primacy of context, which, by the way, predicts the value superiority of pragmatics to semantics in sociolinguistics, nay LL research, makes relevant such factors as occasion, setting, purpose, participants, participants' relationships, interactional goals, power dynamics in interaction, and background. These factors which are usually interacting and interpenetrating are all relevant, to a more or less extent, in LL research.

Aim and Objectives of Study

This dissertation aims at investigating the use of linguistic tokens to make meaning in the

LL of Ìbàdàn, with the specific objectives of identifying how human agents employ the English

Language to produce, and orient to the consumption of, public signage in this city. The central claim of the dissertation is that English is the default language of the Ìbàdàn LL and that this situated prevalence of the language further proves that the boundaries between "core" and

"peripheral" English Language uses are more blurred than noted.

Significance of Study

Nigeria is Africa's most populous nation (estimated 2012 population of 170 million people) and Ìbàdàn is the country's third largest city (estimated 2012 population of 3 million people). Being the seat of the first university in Nigeria (the University of Ibadan was established in 1948) and a major Nigerian city, both suggesting a high literacy level, Ìbàdàn provides a veritable and valuable context for investigating the Nigerian LL. Although (English-language based) LL research has been undertaken in some African countries, like Botswana (Akindele,

2011), Congo Democratic Republic (Kasanga, 2012), Ethiopia (Lanza & Woldemariam, 2009),

Gambia (Juffermans, 2012), Rwanda, (Rosendal, 2009), Senegal (Shiohata, 2012), South Africa

(du Plessis, 2010, 2011; Kayama, Hirsch & Galily 2012; Kapatamoyo, 2007; Kotze, 2010; Kotze

& du Plessis, 2010; Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009), Tunisia (Ben Said, 2010), Uganda (Reh,

2004), and Rwanda and Uganda (Rosendal, 2010), there is no record of a comprehensive study of the Nigerian LL.

Further, most LL studies have been devoted to, using Kachruvian categories, either autonomous Expanding Circle environments (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Bruyèl-Olmedo & Juan-

Garau, 2009; Liu, 2011) or Expanding Circle contexts located within Inner Circle environments

(e.g. Leeman & Modan, 2009; Lou, 2009, 2010), probably owing to the fact that the situation of

English in these environments (are bound to) illustrate some of the most significant economic, historical, ideological, political, and social explanations and motivations for linguistic landscaping. Even the few studies focused on Outer Circle English contexts have attended to other issues—agency and types of signs (Kayama, Hirsch, & Galily 2012), comparative study of language management (Rosendal, 2010), economics of place (Stroud & Mpendukana, 2009), language ideology (Lanza & Woldemariam, 2009), language visibility (du Plessis, 2011; Kotze

& du Plessis, 2010), reader-orientation (Reh, 2004)—rather than a holistic view of meaning- making.

Specifically, however, Ajileye's (2012) investigation of the sociolinguistic situation of

Anglicisms in the naming practices of Nigerians is relevant to this study. She focused on how and why Yorùbá/English bilinguals (YEBs) preferred English language and culture in their choice of personal and business names. She found a significant pull away from Yorùbá towards

English and submitted that YEBs preferred anglicized names with the major intention of

"strengthen[ing] their allegiance to the English Language" (p. 310). Although Ajileye's (2012) focus on onomastics, language attitude, and the Yorùbá sociolinguistic context is remarkably similar to the content of this study, it falls short in many respects: this study is a full-blown, pictorial exploration of sociolinguistic meaning-making in a Yorùbá LL, of which the onomastic realities of language attitude is only an aspect. This dissertation would then be the first comprehensive study of the Nigerian LL. It is intended to significantly add to the literature on the meaningfulness and value of "peripheral," Outer Circle English-based LL research.

Research Questions

This study answers three major research questions:

1. How is meaning made by the producers, and expected to be understood by the

consumers, of the Ìbàdàn LL?

2. What does the Ìbàdàn linguistic landscape reveal about the status of English in

Nigeria?

3. How does the Ìbàdàn linguistic landscape provide valuable insights into the

sociolinguistic realities of Nigerian English in the context of World Englishes?

Outline of Chapters

After the general introduction and the background of this dissertation discussed above,

Chapter 2 is devoted to a review of relevant literature, where the LL is operationalized as regards the definitions of its terms, its methodological content, and an overview of the theoretical approaches to LL research. Chapter 3 deals with the dissertation's design and methodological outlay, especially the processes and constraints of data collection, an outline of the specific decisions which had to be taken in the process of codifying the data, and the data's major categories. The chapter is rounded off with the analytical categories which provide the bases for the analysis to follow. Chapter 4 is focused on data analysis and findings. Here, the study's analytical framework is conceptualized, as it explicates how the signs are used by their producers to make meaning in ways in which the signs might be understood by their consumers, specifically as regards the choices made and reflected by the numbers, arrangement, and visibility of the signs' languages. In Chapter 5, used to round off the study, a summary of dissertation's findings, an answering of its research questions, and its implications and recommendations are offered.

Chapter 2

REVIEW OF LITERATURE

Operationalizing the Linguistic Landscape

Definitions

The meaning of the term, linguistic landscape, is not as transparent as it seems. Although

"linguistic" could be glossed easily as "pertaining to language," "landscape" could be problematic. When used as a noun, "landscape" could mean "an expanse of scenery that can be seen in a single view" (The Free Dictionary, 2013) or "a way of seeing the external world" (point of view) (Cosgrove, 1984, p. 48) or "a place of affect, contemplative looking, gazing, connoisseurship, and its particular significance marked by the increase in people's mobilit …"

(Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011, p. 4). These definitions indicate that "landscape" may be natural or constructed, static or altered, a "physical (built) environment, a context for human action and socio-political activity [or] a symbolic system of signifiers with wide-ranging affordances activated by social actors to position themselves and others in that context" (Jaworski &

Thurlow, 2011, p. 6). All of these three meanings apply to the concept of the LL.

The terminology, "linguistic landscape" (LL) has been conceptualized in two major ways.

In a general sense, it refers to the setting/environment of language use or the presence and use of language(s) in a geographical area (e.g. Bobda, 2007). In this sense, it "can be synonymous with or at least related to concepts such as linguistic market, linguistic mosaic, ecology of languages, diversity of languages or the linguistic situation" (Gorter, 2006a, p.1). In another sense, it means signs/linguistic objects visible in the public sphere (e.g. Ben Rafael et al., 2006; Landry &

Bourhis, 1997). In this wise, an emphasis is placed on written language in a specified area. Most

LL scholars operate within both meanings, simultaneously (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011).

In greater detail, the definition of LL is often traced to Landry and Bourhis' (1997) conceptualization: "the language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings […] of a given territory, region, or urban agglomeration" (p. 25). To them, the LL consisted in the visibility of language—impliedly written language—on signs in specific public places and spaces. For Ben-

Rafael et al. (2006, p. 14), the LL referred to "any sign or announcement located outside or inside a public institution or a private business in a given geographical location." This definition insightfully specifies that a sign would still be regarded as being in the public sphere even if found within the walls of a given place, whether public or private.

Bolton (2012, p. 31) located Landry and Bourhis' definition within "the material form of language in public display and public places." Also, following Landry and Bourhis, Backhaus

(2007) stated:

Every urban environment is a myriad of written messages on public display: office and

shop signs, billboards and neon advertisements, traffic signs, topographic information

and area maps, emergency guidance and political poster campaigns, stone inscriptions,

and enigmatic graffiti discourse. These messages bring together a variety of languages

and scripts, the total of which constitutes the linguistic landscape of a place (p. 1,

emphasis mine).

Even if this definition widened the scope of Landry and Bourhis' LL tokens, it narrowed their conceptualization of the location of the LL to urban settings. More explicitly, Spolsky (2007) claimed that the focus of LL research is "the choice of language in public signs in urban space," and noted that the term "cityscape" would thus be preferable to "landscape" (p. ix). This proposal was furthered notably by Gorter (2006a) and Coulmas (2009), who argued that only cities—

because of their multilingual populations and language contact/conflict situations—provided the best contexts for reading signs. Although a few scholars (e.g. Malinowski, 2010; Pavlenko,

2010) have caught the bug, most scholars have stuck with "landscape," probably because some

LL studies were conducted in geographical areas other than cities, including a combination of urban and suburban contexts (Ben Said, 2010) and wholly rural contexts (Bhatia, 2000; Dal

Negro, 2009; du Plessis, 2011, Kotze & du Plessis, 2010).

More recently, the definitions of LL have been located within semiotics (Jaworski &

Thurlow, 2011; Scollon & Scollon, 2003). Although they applied it to "semiotic landscapes"

(SL), Jaworski and Thurlow's (2011) definition of "any (public) space with visible inscription made through deliberate human intervention and meaning making" (p. 2) also captures the spirit and letter of the LL. This definition foregrounds human agency and deliberate action in marking the LL, although the term "inscription" (which could be a reductive though a more nuanced tag for "sign") successfully locates the definition within the social production of signs' meanings. In their radical and expanded definition, Shohamy and Waksman (2009) viewed the LL as referring to any text displayed in any public space and consisting in "texts situated and displayed in a changing public sphere which is being redefined and reshaped […] be ond 'written' texts and

[including] verbal texts, images, objects, placement in time and place as well as human beings"

(p. 314). This definition emphasizes the dynamic and interactive ways in which the public space is designed by emplacement of texts of various information modes, verbal and non-verbal. It also presents the public space as a site for unending negotiation and contestation.

Although these definitions are, by far, not exhaustive, they represent the major directions in the definition of LL. The definition of LL adopted in this dissertation is that advanced by

Landry and Bourhis (1997) and extended by Backhaus (2007), which conceptualizes the LL as the space where written language functions as sign in the public physical place.

Scope

Introduction. Geographically speaking, LL research has been undertaken in different territorial contexts or environments. Scholars have investigated the linguistic landscapes of

(countries in different) continents (Backhaus, 2009; Scollon & Scollon, 2003), a continent (e.g.

Schlick, 2002), a country (e.g. Bhatia, 2000), border-metropolis (Martinez, 2004), cities (e.g.

Backhaus, 2007), parts of cities (e.g. Lou, 2009), regions (e.g. Spolsky & Cooper, 1997), neighborhoods (e.g. Papen, 2012), and the laboratory wall (Hanauer, 2009). What follows here is an operationalization of the terms used in (English Language-based) LL research, with the intention of simplifying them.

In the global spread, LL studies have been concerned with the meaning and connections of three main components, the sign, the sign-producer, and the sign-consumer. The sign-producer and the sign-consumer are the human participants who process the (non-human) sign. Although

Spolsky (2009 ) canvassed for four participants—the initiator or owner of the sign, the sign- maker, the reader, and language management authority(p. 31)—the consensus among scholars is that the sign's producer and consumer are the two participants in signage, most probably because apart from "the reader," all the other participants can be fused into one.

The two human participants have to be engaged in a symbiotic relationship of meaning dependency for the sign to make sense; a sign-producer gives meaning to a sign and expects a right reading from a sign-consumer. As such, both of these participants are expected to be on the same page (mutually intelligible) for the sign to be meaningful. This relationship is illustrated with Figure 2.1.

As this graphic representation shows, the sign producer directly impacts on the sign (as the arrow originating from the former indicates) by infusing it with meaning. The sign, on the other hand, only indirectly impacts on the sign-consumer (shown by the broken arrow emanating from "sign") since it is lifeless and does not, of its volition, request to be read by the latter. The long, bidirectional arrow, which goes over "sign" and links both participants, foregrounds the symbiosis of meaning between them. In its simplest explanation, while the producer makes meaning with the sign and expects the consumer's understanding of the meaning (uptake), the consumer expects that the sign's making and meaning be predicated upon their prior knowledge

(Collins & Slembrouck, 2007) or real-world knowledge (Kallen, 2009, p. 274) which would be the major foundation for their interpreting the sign according to the sign-producer's intention(s).

And as additionally instructively affirmed by (Malinowski, 2009), the sign-producer is only partially responsible for determining the meaning of the sign: the landscape itself could produce meaning, such that the "author" is "a complex, dispersed entity who is only somewhat in control of the meanings that are read from his or her 'written' utterances" (p. 108).

SIGN-PRODUCER SIGN SIGN-CONSUMER

Figure 2.1 Relationships among the three components of the LL.

Let us now dwell into more details about each of these components, starting with the object under focus, sign.

Sign. What constitutes a LL sign has been an unresolved issue in the literature.

Two semioticians—Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Peirce—were the earliest to conceptualize "sign." In de Saussure's (1916) denotation, a sign is fundamentally a bonding of

the "signifier" (material form) and the "signified" (conceptual content) in an arbitrary relationship. Since by arbitrariness he meant the signifier and the signified had no one-to-one obvious connection, he implied that the meaning of a sign could only be conventionally determined by a society. Being a system of linguistic (verbal and visual) signs, language is then a social phenomenon. However, how the relationship between a signifier and a signified is bonded is one major gap in Saussure's definition. This gap was filled by Peirce (1955), whose operationalization of sign as a triadic interaction of "a signifying 'representamen', a conceptual

'interpretant', and a designated 'object', emphasize the interpretation process and the role of an interpreting entity (hearer, reader, etc.) in making sense of a given sign" (Backhaus, 2007, p. 5).

These two denotations are unimodal (possessing a single mode of meaning explication) in orientation and would thus fall short in describing the multimodal reality of LL signs (Scollon &

Scollon, 2003; Shohamy & Waksman, 2009). For example, a sign could contain significant information about color, lettering, and order of placement, all contributing to how its meaning has been made to be read.

Sign has also been seen as "text." In their famous conceptualization of text as a semantic unit, Halliday and Hasan (1976) noted that "[a] text may be spoken or written, prose or verse, dialogue or monologue. It may be anything from a single proverb to a whole play, from a momentary cry for help to an all-day discussion on a committee" (p. 1). Halliday and Hasan's

"text" is inherently multimodal, as found by Lou (2009) (and I agree with her) for four major reasons: it could involve spoken and written interactions; it must have unity and coherence; it is not specifically definable as an object, and so allows for a variety of interpretations; and it affords a reader some role in the meaning-making process (p. 43). The sign-as-text paradigm not

only characterizes LL as a structured entity (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006), it also emphasizes the dialogue between writer (producer) and reader (consumer) (Malinowski, 2009).

And text implies context. As according to Hasan (1995), "text" paraphrases "language" and "context" paraphrases "human activity" (p. 186). Drawing on Malinowski's works on "how the exchange of linguistic meanings can come about" (Hasan, 1995, p. 185), Halliday and Hasan

(1976) identified two contexts, of culture and of situation, which Halliday (1991) referred to as the same thing seen from two different viewpoints. According to Halliday (1991), "the context for an instance of language (text) is an instance of culture (situation) (p. 7) and "[a] situation … is an instance of culture; or … a culture is the potential behind all the different t pes of situation that occur" (pp. 8-9). So, a text can only be sufficiently evaluated when we know its contexts of culture and/or situation.

Beyond Halliday and Hasan's semantic conceptualizations, the text- in-context paradigm also locates the sign within "pragmatics," "the use of language in human communication as determined by the conditions of society" (Mey 2001, p: 6). And since, according to Mey (2001),

"context is about understanding what things are for" (p. 410), the extralinguistic meaningfulness of text, which invokes any salient context and the social dimensions of language use, would be valuable for studying the LL.

In LL studies, scholars have linked these views of the sign with its meaning. In their semiotic perspective, Scollon and Scollon (2003) averred that any sign (said or written) would only be meaningful if one knew its producer and his/her social relation with the world:

The meaning of "What is that?" is anchored in a person (who is the speaker?), a social

relationship (who is the hearer?), a social situation (what are the speaker and the hearer

doing—looking or pointing at something?), and a physical world (what is a potential

"that" within the spaces of those people?). (pp. 2-3)

For Kallen (2009), signage (act of signing) is "a localized act of communication: a speech act which takes place where the sign takes place" (p. 108). He saw the sign as a convergence of the motivations and intentions of both the sign-producer and the (hypothesized and real) sign- consumer. Significantly too, Backhaus (2007) zeroed in on two types/meanings of sign: semiotic sign, "an object, quality, or event whose presence indicates the probable presence or occurrence of something else," and public sign, "a notice on public display that gives information or instruction in a written or symbolic form" (p. 4). Backhaus then interpreted semiotic sign as subsuming public sign: "[p]ublic signs are a specific type of semiotic sign in that they too stand for something other than themselves" (p. 5), and illustrated that the name of a company attached to a building indicated the presence of that company. And revisiting Peircean semiotics, he confirmed the value of the interpretive process in making meaning of the sign: "[u]nless interpreted by someone, human being or other, a public sign has no meaning" (p. 6). In their multimodal and all-inclusive view, Shohamy and Waksman (2009) operationalized the LL sign as public signs which could include "what is seen, what is heard, what is spoken, what is thought" (p. 313). They proceeded to specify the text types which would be considered the LLs containing signs, to include "virtual spra ed graffiti … mobile posters, screened advertisements, people as working commercials cartoons, ready-made objects, texts sustained on virtual interfaces and even transparent houses with their displayed habitants" (p. 315).

The "where" of a sign concerns its location and medium. Generally speaking, LL signs are publicly displayed in places and spaces. According to Scollon and Scollon (2003), "place" and "space" could be demarcated according to the levels of human influence: they defined the

former as "the human or lived experience or sense of presence in a space" (p. 214), and the latter, as "the objective, physical dimensions and characteristics of a portion of the earth or built environment; often defined by sociopolitical ideologies and powers" (p. 216). The first definition implies that a place could be physically or not physically occupied by humans. Since the major basis of LL research is "that visual language use in public spaces represents observable manifestations of circulating ideas about multilingualism" (Hult, 2009, p. 90), the second definition emphasizes the preeminence of space or the "spatial turn"—the understanding that space is both physically and socially constructed (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011; Lefebvre, 1991)— in LL studies. And Jaworski and Thurlow (2011) impliedly honed in on the human aspect of space, by submitting that LL scholarship was currently interested in "spatialization," "the different processes by which space comes to be represented, organized and experienced" (p. 7).

Thus, LL studies have focused on physical spaces (e.g. Landry & Bourhis, 1997) or virtual spaces (e.g. Ivkovic & Lotherington, 2009; Troyer, 2012) or the interaction of both (e.g. Jones,

2011).

Yet, a sign cannot be read independent of its emplacement. Unlike other forms of written language (diaries, letters, books etc) which can be read out of space, signs "require to be read at a certain point in space in order to make sense" (Backhaus, 2007, p. 9). This attunes very well with the crux of Scollon and Scollon's (2003) argument, that the meaning of a sign is chiefly achieved only through the sign's emplacement in the real world in a contiguous relationship with other objects in the world.

The primary form of the sign, advocated by Landry and Bourhis (1997), is the written mode. And most scholars have done LL research along this line, predicating this preference on the permanence of the written language (Backhaus, 2007). However, recently, the scope of LL

signs has been expanded, most widely by Shohamy and Waksman (2009) and Waksman and

Shohamy (2010), to include all manners of texts: written, oral, multimodal, within and outside buildings, in the physical space and the cyberspace. It is argued that since LL contextualizes language, it necessarily has a place for people, who, especially in the new mode of cyberspacing, cannot only construct (others) or be constructed (themselves) but can also "talk back," (or, respond) (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009). By implication, the advent of the Internet and the omnipresence of digital technologies make the concept of place/space (the backdrop of LL) somewhat fuzzy.

The linguistic content of a sign, or a sign's text, is the primary unit of analysis in LL studies. Broadly speaking, a sign could be monolingual (contain one language) or multilingual

(contain more than one language). However, in the nuanced delineation of mutually exclusive categories, most prominently projected by Backhaus (2007, pp. 90-107) and Reh (2004, pp. 5-

17), a sign could be classified according to the extent to which its text reflected a mutual translation or transliteration of the language or languages contained therein.

Sign-Producer. The sign-producer is the source of the sign, the person to whom the ownership of the sign can be attributed. Sign-producers could perform any or all of the tasks of drafting, designing, writing, and displaying signs. Put more succinctly, sign-producers are

"[those] who concretely participate in the shaping of LL by ordering from others or building by themselves LL elements according to preferential tendencies, deliberate choices or policies"

(Ben-Rafael et al., 2006, p. 9). Such participants have been identified independently as

"actors/agents/sign-writers" (Backhaus, 2007), "actors" (Ben-Rafael et al. , 2006), "authors"

(Malinowski, 2009), "sign-makers" (Scollon & Scollon, 2003), or combined, as "sign-owners and sign-makers" (Spolsky, 2009). They could be "legal" or "illegal" producers, that is,

producers whose signs fall within or outside the rules and regulations or conventions governing the use of public spaces, respectively. While most LL studies have investigated data from legally sanctioned sign-producers, a few studies have focused on the works of the producers of illegal signs, revealing the visibility and value of parasitic or transgressive signage (Kallen, 2011; Lynn

& Lea, 2005; Messin & La Valle, 2010; Pennycook, 2009; 2011).

Broadly-speaking, the sign-producer is the sign's author (Malinowski, 2009) who operates within the remit of "agency," the process(es) of a sign's production (Spolsky, 2009, p.

30). The approaches to identifying sign-production in LL research have been done, chiefly, from two perspectives, namely, (1) the visual and semiotic reading of code-dominance or code- preference (in bilingual and multilingual signs), and (2) the distinction between government and private signs.

Related to the first perspective, Scollon and Scollon (2003), following Kress and van

Leeuwen (1996), posited that the prominence of one code (or language) relative to another could be read from the systematic choices made by the sign-producer in positioning both codes, according to "order" and "font size." As regards order, "[t]he preferred code is on top, on the left, or in the center and the marginalized code is on the bottom, on the right, or on the margins"

(Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p.120). For size, the Scollons, as well as Backhaus (2007) and Cenoz and Gorter (2006), submitted that the preferred code covered the more/most space on the carrier.

And when order and size expressed different preferences, size would outweigh order (Backhaus,

2007, Scollon & Scollon, 2003). Yet, the Scollons notably conceded that a language-universal

"uniform" (what they called "normal" [p. 121]) system of writing patterns, to ground their theory of code-preference in LL design, was unverifiable. That Backhaus' (2007) findings about the ways in which sign-producers designed the LL signs in Tokyo did not agree with some of the

postulations of Scollon and Scollon (2003) probably confirmed that the latter's descriptions could be applicable (mainly or only) to Western contexts and cultures.

From another perspective, Spolsky and Cooper (1991) identified code preference as central to LL data categorization, a focalization they founded on three criteria, namely, (1) code preference according to the type and number of the sign's language(s), (2) code preference according to the function the sign is used to perform, and (3) code preference according to the sign's physical form or according to the material from which the sign was made. They also connected the permanence of signs to the skills required for, and the materials used in, the signs' production. The issue of materiality, as an index of a sign's meaning, was further extended by

Scollon & Scollon (2003), as they posited the significance of the sign's durability, temporality, and quality (p. 135-137).

The other distinction, concerning the sign's source, however is less controversial and is largely globally accepted. This notion, the demarcation of government from private signs, has been expressed in dichotomous terms—official/unofficial (Backhaus, 2007), top-down/bottom- up (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006; Shohamy et al., 2009), and public/private (Landry & Bourhis,

1997)—all of which identify signs as produced by government (and its agencies) or private individuals (and entities), respectively. However, a few scholars have problematized this simplistic conceptualization. For example, Spolsky (2009, p. 28) asserted: "both private and government signs can be government regulated, while government signs can be under more or less local control." Also, Coupland (2011) felt that all signs were "top-down," since they, with or without government prescriptions, were all meant to service consciously-designed ideological needs, meant to impact on others. For Huebner (2009) and Kallen (2009), the metaphorical distinction, top-down/bottom-up, could only be socially situated, since only the participants

would determine who occupied which position, top or bottom. According to Kallen (2009, p.

273) too, "any particular act of signage could be simultaneously top-down, bottom-up, horizontal, or otherwise oriented, depending on the speaker's intent, the reader's interpretation, and the place and function of the sign itself." He submitted that, for instance, a sign such as "NO

ENTRANCE," at a local shopkeeper's window, could denote "horizontal" agency (whereby the sign-producer addressed other private citizens) or local power relational practice (whereby the sign-producer spoke down to the customer, though in not in the same style as State-to-citizen).

Although most studies have been based on the contemplation of the "actual finished sign"

(Spolsky, 2009, p. 31) through the researcher's interpretations of the choices made by the sign- producer (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Landry & Bourhis, 1997), other studies have probed into the processes by which signs are produced (e.g. Dal Negro, 2009; Malinowski, 2009; Scollon &

Scollon, 2003; Spolsky, 2009; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991). Notably, Spolsky (2009) and Spolsky and Cooper (1991) tied sign-production to language choice, and predicated this interface on three relevant conditions: (1) "write a sign in a language you know," (2) "prefer to write a sign in a language which can be read by the people you expect to read it," (3) "prefer to write a sign in your own language or in a language with which you wish to be identified" (Spolsky, 2009, p.

33). Respectively, these conditions denote and connote that a sign can only be produced in a language that has a written form; that addresses a sign-consumer who is sufficiently literate in the sign's language; and that symbolically reflects the sign-producer's identity.

Sign-Consumer. The sign-consumer is the sign's addressee or reader, who could be known, predicted, or anticipated. Despite the various names given to this participant—"sign recipient" (Kallen, 2009), "presumed reader" (Spolsky & Cooper, 1991)—scholars agree that it is he/she who interprets, obeys, applies, and is affected by the sign.

One major consideration in LL research is the linguistic profile of the sign-consumer(s)— defined according to the languages at their disposal and their competences in the language(s) of the sign (Backhaus, 2007)—whose information can be relevant at the individual and societal levels (Spolsky & Cooper, 1991). The sign-consumer's knowledge of a language and the depth of that knowledge will determine how or how well he/she understands the sign. This is especially true of bilingual and multilingual signs, for which, according to Shohamy and Gorter (2009),

"the choice of languages is motivated by stereotypes of readers, of what policy makers think of them as they construct people as lingua personae" (p. 3, emphasis in the original). Spolsky's

(2009) and Spolsky and Cooper's (1991) second rule of language choice—producer's preference to write a sign in a language which can be read by people he/she expects to read it—becomes especially relevant here. More explicitly, Collins and Slembrouck (2007), in their investigation of the values of literacy and indexicality in the reading of multilingual shop signs, averred a variation in how signs were read according to "the purposes of reading, prior experiences with such signs, and knowledge of languages" (p. 335). They found readers' interpretations revelatory of the mutual relationships of the sign's producer and sign's consumer and the community where they interacted. This perspective (Collins & Slembrouck's) presents sign-consumption as an act in which the linguistic and the social are contextualized, and it ties in with the current trend in literacy studies in which meaning-making has been seen as an interpenetration of text and context (see also Blommaert, 2012).

Although LL signs are usually made for the predominant population where it is placed or made to confirm or project the predominant language of its targeted consumers (Backhaus,

2007), sometimes they could be used to orient to "outsiders" or minority populations, like tourists (e.g. Kallen, 2009), immigrants (e.g. Lou, 2009), or border populations (Martinez, 2004),

among others. Sometimes too, the sign-consumer's identity is determined by the sign's mode of discourse. For instance, a tourist sign could position the addressee as reader, hearer, or eavesdropper (Kallen, 2009).

Notably, Reh's (2004, pp. 3-15) framework for studying reader-orientation in sign- consumption in the LL identified three parameters: (1) sign's spatial mobility, (2) visibility of multilingualism, and (3) arrangement of multilingual information. Firstly, the level of physical fixedness of signs, distinguishing signs on stationary carriers (like buildings, signboards, trees, and walls) from signs on movable carriers (like books, newspapers, and T-shirts) would orient to a spatially mobile readership, in the former, but would rather "require a functioning dissemination system" (p. 4), in the latter. Secondly, the multilingual writing on the sign could either be overt or visible (when read on the same carrier and in the same spatial position) or covert (when a sign is available in one language at one place but in another at some other place).

Thirdly, she specified the arrangement of languages and information on a sign in four ways

(though all regarding multilingual signs): duplicating writing is the precise wording of a sign in two or more different languages; fragmentary writing occurs when a sign's text is rendered completely in one language but has some parts translated into at least one other language; overlapping writing applies when the two or more languages in which a sign is written contain the same message in some part but different messages in other parts; complementary writing is done with a sign which contains two or more languages providing different but complementary information.

Backhaus (2007, pp. 90-103), almost analogously, identified four types of what he called

"part writing," of which the first three referred to signs with multilingual texts while the fourth took care of monolingual signs: (1) homophonic (mutual translation or transliteration of

languages is completely available); (2) mixed (mutual translation or transliteration of languages is partially available); (3) polyphonic (mutual translation or transliteration of languages is not available; and (4) monophonic (has one language and so mutual translation or transliteration is not available).

To sum up, a major feature of the (written) LL is the all-inclusiveness of its consumer: unlike its producer, the sign's consumer is anyone and everyone, who is "allowed" (not prevented by any formal restriction) to access it. Predicating his argument on the edge the written sign has over the spoken sign, Backhaus (2007) submitted: "[b]eing dissolvable from the circumstances of its production, written language lends itself far more easily than spoken language to transmitting information to an unspecified group of people in public space" (p. 8). This means not only that the sign-consumer can access the LL text, but also that he/she can react in whatever way to the text, since the sign-producer, even if their identities are sometimes indicated in the sign are, more often than not, physically absent from the sign's location; the obvious exceptions are shop signs whose carriers are the shops themselves.

Functions

Landry and Bourhis (1997) identified two major functions of LL signs: information and symbolization. Performing the informational function, LL provides information about the linguistic situation—language characteristics and language boundaries—of a given language community. Thus, LL provides valuable information about the sociolinguistic composition of the language group(s) in a territory. Serving the symbolic purpose, LL conveys meta-linguistic information, revealing the status or/and salience of languages (in relation to one another) within a given territory, indicating the linguistic power of sociolinguistic communities, and the regulatory role of the State in determining how the languages in the LL are represented.

In the same vein, Scollon and Scollon (2003) explicated, from the semiotic perspective, the functionality of the LL, in the spirit, even if not in the letter, of Landry and Bourhis'. The former saw the sign-producer's choice of language as connotatively expressing either an

"indexical" or a "symbolic" meaning: the sign's language(s) "can either index the community within which it is being used or it can symbolize something about the product or business which has nothing to do with the place in which it is located" (p. 119). However, as Backhaus (2007, p.

58) had observed, all signs were indexical (of the circumstances of their emplacement) and symbolic language had a higher-level indexical signification as well: this explains for example, the sign-producer's use of a foreign language to mark signs for the non-foreign population, which has aided the spread of English world-wide.

Although some scholars have tried to identify more functions of the LL (Hicks, 2002;

Shohamy & Waksman, 2009), these could be accommodated within Landry and Bourhis', as sub- functions. In this wise, the arguments for the instrumentality of the LL for education and activism (Shohamy & Waksman, 2009) and for providing mythological or folkloric information

(Hicks, 2002) can be accommodated within the informational and symbolic functions of LL signs.

Other methodological issues

Some other methodological issues abound in LL research almost certainly due both to the multimodality of signs (consisting of text and images) and the significance of context (social, political, etc). Four of these issues have been identified in the literature, most notably by

Backhaus (2007), Gorter (2006b), and Spolsky (2009). These are concerned with methodological approach, sampling technique, unit of analysis, and categorization of signs.

There are three methodological approaches to doing LL research: (1) qualitative, (2) quantitative, and (3) a combination or blend of (1) and (2). Quantitative studies, including those undertaken by Barni and Bagna (2009) and Kotze (2010), focus on quantifying (counting, documenting, tabularizing), in some detail, the types and nature of multilingual signage. They are based on clearly-defined analytical categories, often interpreted with statistical tokens (such as ratios and percentages), and used to confirm a researcher's observations. Qualitative studies, such as those done by Coupland and Garrett (2010), Hanauer (2009), Kallen (2011), and Scollon and Scollon (2003), describe and analyze signs for content and how this contextualizes

(especially) multilingualism in a given geographical area. Many recent studies, including works done by Backhaus (2007), Ben Rafael et. al. (2006), and Huebner (2006), follow a combined approach, simultaneously employing quantitative and qualitative methods to reveal a holistic picture of the value and significance of the recorded and quantified public signs for multilingualism. Along this line, triangulation studies, especially in which researchers have investigated public signage via a combination of participant-observations, interviews, questionnaires, and documents are becoming increasingly popular (see Ben-Said, 2010; Garvin,

2011; Lou, 2009).

According to Backhaus (2007), sampling raises three main issues related to determining

(1) the survey area(s), (2) the survey items, and (3) the linguistic properties of the survey items

(p. 61). One major problem with the survey area is the comprehensiveness of data collection: considering two extremes, while this is easy to achieve in a small survey area like the microbiology laboratory wall (Hanauer, 2009), it becomes an issue of the researcher's subjectivity in larger survey areas such as a whole country (Bhatia, 2000).

Again, there has been no consensus as to determining the survey item or unit of analysis in LL studies. Although some scholars have included spoken language in their data (e.g. Barni &

Bagna, 2009), most LL studies have stuck with written data. Broadly speaking, two opinions about what constitutes a sign are popular: the sign is either a semantic unit (e.g. Griffin, 2004) or a physical entity (e.g. Backhaus, 2007). Accordingly, Backhaus (2007) defined his unit of analysis as "any piece of text within a spatially definable frame" (p. 66). Most LL scholars have subscribed to the physical definition of signs and have identified signs as temporary or permanent (e.g. Spolsky & Cooper, 1991; Scollon & Scollon, 2003) or as placed on stationary and movable carriers (Reh, 2004). Each of these choices has its implication. For instance, as Reh

(2004) noted, (1) texts on stationary carriers anticipated mobile readers and so the choice of the text's language might take into cognizance the expected readers or passers-by, and (2) because movable carriers anticipated static readers, the languages present and used in the area would most probably influence the language choice on those signs. Again, while many studies, especially the quantitative ones, have focused on commercial signs alone (e.g. Rosendal, 2009;

Tufi & Blackwood, 2010), most studies, either exclusively qualitative or combining both quantitative and qualitative approaches have included both commercial and non-commercial signs (e.g. Scollon & Scollon, 2003; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991). Regarding size, the unit of analysis can be identified as plaques in different languages (Spolsky & Cooper, 1991) or all the texts on a business establishment (Cenoz & Gorter, 2006). For Backhaus (2006, 2007), a sign could range from small handwritten posters to huge commercial billboards. So, for most LL scholars, the size of the sign is immaterial.

The LL could contain solely monolingual or multilingual signs. When the sign is monolingual, (the linguistic properties of) its texts are easily discernible. However, a

multilingual sign would have its languages or "scripts" (Huebner, 2006; Rosenbaum et al., 1977) either translated or transliterated (Backhaus, 2007; Reh, 2004): the two latter authors have significantly operationalized multilingual signs in line with reader-orientation (see above).

Theoretical Approaches to Linguistic Landscape Research

The multidisciplinarity and interdisciplinarity of (English Language-based) LL research has located it, eminently, in history, ethnography, geography, sociology, linguistics, and semiotics. These approaches are dicussed, below.

From the historical perspective, LL research has shown the diachronic processes and historical significances of the construction of public signs. Generally speaking, such LL studies focus on investigations of the changes in the linguistic outward appearance of a given place, whether as observed in "real time" (in at least two successive surveys done at different points in time) or "apparent time" (focused on one point in time) (Backhaus, 2005). Along these lines,

Coulmas' (2009), Pavlenko's (2010) and Spolsky and Cooper's (1991) studies are major reference points.

Coulmas (2009) traced the origin of the LL to all writing done in the public sphere since the earliest times. Hinging his discussion on six famous, ancient inscriptions—the Codex

Hammurabi from Babylon, the Rosetta Stone, the Behistun trilingual inscription, the Menetekel- parsin, the calligraphy of the Taj Mahal, the obelisks of Egypt—and answering questions about agency ("who"), location ("where"), and function ("what"), he concluded that LL necessarily focused on city life and drew particular attention to the issues of readership. While examining the languages used and the factors that determined language change in the Kyiv landscape (Ukraine) since the 9th century, Pavlenko (2010) reported the vitality and survival of Russian in its age-long battle for supremacy with Ukrainian and English. Despite the "new" (post-Soviet) Ukrainian

government's attempt to impose Ukrainian as the institutional language of communication

(which has made it the most visible language in the Kyiv LL) and its replacement of Russian with English (as the second language), Russian still creeps into the LL, largely because it remains the dominant language of everyday communication in Kyiv till date. Pavlenko concluded that the language change in the Kyiv LL directly reflected a political history of different regimes with different top-down language policies.

In Spolsky and Cooper's (1991) study of the development of East Jerusalem's LL, they contextualized three different street signs, written in Jerusalem' s three major languages—

English, Arabic, Hebrew—as indicative of different political regimes, and as reflective of the variations in the socio-political status of each language, in Jerusalem's history. They found that each of these languages either dominated the LL or came first in multilingual signs, to reflect the major languages of the political governors of Jerusalem: English, during the period of the British mandate (1922-1948); Arabic, under Jordanian rule (1948-1967); and Hebrew, under Israeli rule

(1967 and afterwards). Aspects of Leeman and Modan (2009; 2010) and Papen (2012) are also diachronic in perspective: the former traced the LL in Chinatown to the history of Chinese settlement in Washington DC while the latter linked the signage of Prezlauer Berg (a Berlin neighborhood) to the changes it has experienced since the German reunification of 1990.

Notably, the South African LL, which has yielded the highest number of African studies

(see above), has provided two relevant diachronic studies (du Plessis, 2010; Kotze and du

Plessis, 2010). And this is fairly predictable given the recency of the country's attainment of independence, in 1994. As such, one common strand that runs through such South African studies is the description of how the change in language regime—from the pre-1994 official

Afrikaans/English bilingualism to the post-1994 multilingualism—affected the linguistic marking of the public space (du Plessis, 2010).

In ethnographic studies, Landry and Bourhis' article (1997) is usually regarded as the definite origin of LL studies both because it offered the term, linguistic landscape, for the first time and for its focus on signage as an indicator of ethnolinguistic vitality: "the most basic informational function of the linguistic landscape is that it serves as a distinctive marker of the geographical territory inhabited by a given language community" (p. 25). They reported the perceptions of high school students to the language of the Quebec LL. Specifically, they located

LL in sociolinguistics, as an aspect of language planning, which served the two major functions of information (telling of the boundaries of a speech community) and symbolization (signifying the status of a language in a given territory). They claimed that a person would feel included in a community if his/her language was institutionalized for transactions in its major human domains, such as economics, mass media, education, and health. They demarcated government signs

(State-controlled) from private signs (less State-controlled within the realm of free speech) and submitted that in diglossias, the high-status language was more likely to be found on public signs than the low-status language.

One major theme in ethnographic studies is the suggestion that a language's prominence in a given LL might be due to other reasons, rather than the ethnolinguistic vitality of its speakers

(Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011), including ideological considerations (e.g. Coupland, 2011;

Pennycook, 2011), immigration (e.g. Lou, 2009; Barni & Bagna, 2010), and global consumerism

(e.g. Martinez, 2004). More explicitly, for example, in Garvin's (2010, 2011) "postmodern walking tour interview" studies of Memphis (Tennessee), she examined the self-reported emotions and visual perceptions of the LL. Employing a qualitative research perspective, she

revealed that the LL could never be a neutral site but was a context for the co-creation and negotiation of meaning by interviewer and participants, resulting in a complex of individual emotion responses. She thus concluded that Memphis was a place in transition.

At the geographical end, studies have generally linked LL research with cultural geography and urban studies. Notably, works related to this approach—for example, Lou's

(2009, 2010) and Leeman and Modan's (2009, 2010) —have established the connections between space (the objective natural or built environment) and place (the human intervention in the space). Specifically, in a study where they used the cultural geography theories of landscape to read commercial signage in Washington DC's Chinatown, Leeman and Modan (2009) submitted that the use of Chinese (language) exotified Chineseness and commodified Chinatown.

And investigating Chinese and English signage in 2 Starbucks coffee shops, one in Washington

DC's Chinatown and another in Shanghai, Leeman and Modan (2010) claimed that the use of

Chinese in the Washington shop made the setting a themed ethnoscape, deriving its meaning from its interpretation within a commodified context. Both studies converge in their authors' claim that the urban landscape could only be fully understood when complemented by an understanding of how the city is shaped, and that the meanings of signs were shaped as much by their linguistic and extralinguistic environments as by their backgrounded ideological and sociocultural contents.

The sociology of LL paraphrases "language facts that landmark the public space … as social facts, the variation of which should relate to social phenomena" (Ben-Rafael, 2009, p. 40).

Shohamy et al. (2010) identified, for sociological LL research, four major theoretical notions: power relations, good reason, subjective-perception, and collective identity (p. xix).

"Power relations" is gleaned from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu, who posited that

"social reality consists primarily of power relations [which] refer to the extent to which given actors are able to impose patterns of behavior on others—even against their will" (p. xvii).

Regarding LLs, Ben-Rafael et al. (2006) noted the social power of Hebrew in East Jerusalem,

Lanza and Woldermariam (2009) emphasized the social prominence of Tigrinya, Amharic, and

English in Ethiopia, and Backhaus (2006) observed the contest for power and solidarity between official and non-official signs in Tokyo. Two major flows of power relations have been identified, "top-down" and "bottom-up." While top-down defines government- or corporation- originated LL signs, bottom-up identifies LL signs made by private individuals. Accordingly, the interactions between top-down and bottom-up power relations in LL have been investigated in various contexts, notably by Backhaus (2007) and Lou (2009), both coming to the rough conclusion that actors signing the top-down flow are more powerful than those signing the bottom-up. Yet, the top-down/bottom-up hierarchical distinction has been challenged, especially by Kallen (2009 ; 2011), who held that LL signs could be read horizontally (e.g. a shop-keeper whose sign speaks with private citizens) and should be read within separate (though interrelated) interpretive frames, according to institutions, domains, and activities.

"Good reasons," linked to the works of Raymond Boudon, encompasses the instrumentality and rationality of LL actors in the context of general public interests, generally aimed at influencing audiences, according to the economic and social benefits accruable. In this direction, Cenoz and Gorter (2009) showed how, through a cost-benefit analysis of LL signs, the value of linguistic diversity in multicultural settings could be appreciated. Again, while Leeman and Modan (2010) argued that written LL signs commodified urban spaces, Malinowski (2010) argued for the amalgamation of the verbal and the visual (the processes of writing, reading, and

seeing) in LL, but argued against the imposition of particular patterns of seeing which digitized

LL seemed to be engendering.

The subjectivist perspective is very much in the tradition of Goffman (1963), and analyzes "social life from the viewpoint of how actors aim at desired goals by articulating their appearance and presenting to 'others' advantageous images of themselves" (Ben-Rafael, 2009, p.

45). Thus, LL actors are seen as always trying to seduce the "crowd," "the public of passers-by"

(Shohamy et. al., 2010, p. xviii), to react to or perceive their signs in particular ways. This response-focused, client- (consumer-) directed paradigm of LL studies has been researched by many scholars, including Aiestaran, Cenoz & Gorter (2010), Trumper-Hecht (2010), and especially Garvin (2010; 2011): while Aiestaran et al. discovered that speakers of threatened languages were usually more willing to use them to sign the LL than speakers of safe languages,

Trumper-Hecht's study revealed that the speakers of the minority languages displayed optimism while those of the majority languages felt threatened. For Garvin, the meanings of the LL were co-negotiated and co-constructed in the discursive interactions of actors, clients, and the LL. She submitted, significantly, that "the LL served as a catalyst or stimulus text mediating understandings of public space while eliciting emotional and psychological statements of belonging and identity in time and place" (Garvin, 2010, p. 268).

Moreover, LL sociological research has underlined the saliency of collective identities, given the tendency in many globalized societies, to illustrate forms of multiculturalism (Ben-

Rafael, 2009, p. 46), whereby actors identify with a particular collectivity. In Ben-Rafael and

Ben-Rafael's (2008) study on returning diasporas, they compared the LLs of a French Jewish community (in France) with an Israeli setting of French Jewish immigrants, and reported that returning did not obviate the diasporic condition. They also discovered the linguistic coding of

dual-homeness (expressed in French and Hebrew languages) in the LL of French Jews, in

Israel—not in France—and traced this to Israel's multicultural and globalized society. Also, as

Curtin (2009) traced the use of several non-Chinese languages to mark the Taipei LL to an interrogation of the Chinese group identity and the increasing internationalization of Taiwan,

Trumper-Hecht (2009) reported how Jews and Arabs contested the signage of the Nazareth LL, which they shared, by refusing to abide by the Isreali Supreme Court's ruling that Arabic be included in the city's LL.

Within the linguistic paradigm, the LL has been researched as it projects and connects language(s) in autonomous and applied realms. Huebner (2009) predicated his genre analysis of

LL signs on the 8 elements of Dell Hymes' ethnography of communication, "SPEAKING."

Accepting that the selection and classification of LL signs were problematic, he focused on the immediate context of signs, the interdependent roles of agents (producers) and audience

(consumers), and problematized, notably, the notion of agency as (merely and always) top/down versus bottom/up distinctive. He concluded that a holistic picture of the meanings of LL tokens would be found in more detailed and delicate considerations of "the linguistic forms that artifacts take, their relationships to the contexts in which they appear, and the motivations and reactions of those who are responsible for them or affected by them" (Huebner, 2009, p. 84). Similarly,

Kallen (2009), in his discourse-analytic study of the interaction of tourism, language policy, ethnolinguistic vitality in the Irish LL, saw the need to connect signage creators and signage recipients and critiqued the top/down and bottom/up classification of the act of signage as too simplistic. Additionally, he suggested the use of signage to perform speech acts related to 4 major foci: deixis, behavior, interaction, and cognition. He found the LL as positioning the tourist as performing, essentially, 3 encounter-constrained roles of addressee, audience, and

eavesdropper, and posited that the communicative functions of the LL for tourists should anticipate their needs for authentic leisure, traveling experiences, and security. In Pennycook's

(2009a) critical-discourse study, he furthered the semantic frontiers of LL research, with data from hip-hop graffiti. He advocated the reading of graffiti as revelatory and reflective of a subcultural community's marking of a particular identity and contextualization of the creation, expression, and (re)interpretation of meaning.

In their proposal of a sociolinguistic theoretical framework for LL research, Spolsky

(2009) and Spolsky and Cooper (1991) emphasized the motivations for, and the value of, language choice in public signage. They proposed a model predicated on three conditions: (1) the

"sign-writer's skill," (2) the "presumed reader," and (3) the "symbolic value." The first condition,

"write a sign in a language ou know … explains why signs are not written in languages without a writing system and accounts for the spelling errors common in languages written in foreign languages" (Spolsky, 2009, p. 33). The second condition, which is addressee-oriented, being focused on the communicative function of LL signage, demands that the sign-producer should prefer to write a sign in a language known to the people the sign is meant to address. This implies that language choice is a matter of the mutual intelligibility of the producer and consumer of the sign, meaning that the second condition can be fully met even if the first condition is not fully met. The third condition, "prefer to write a sign in your own language or in a language with which you wish to be identified … accounts for language choice on signs that assert ownership" (Spolsky, 2009, p. 33). This condition is thus founded on political considerations and would be used to interpret the order of languages on multilingual signs. While conceding that the fulfillment of the three conditions varied from one sign to another, Spolsky

(2009) regarded the first condition as necessary for all signs and the second and third as typical

and graded, "both may apply to a single sign, but the weighting will determine which has the main influence on the outcome" (pp. 33-34).

Moreover, there have been applied linguistic approaches to public signage, most visibly in the pedagogical direction. Predicating his study on genre analysis, Hanauer (2009) found the microbiology laboratory wall space a site for students not just to do literacy (learning microbiological enquiry) but also to co-produce LL. The wall space, therefore, functioned doubly for "facilitating a flow of knowledge throughout the laborator and … enhancing the procedural aspects of conducting scientific enquiry" (Shohamy & Gorter, 2009, p. 9). Elsewhere,

Sayer (2010) investigated the relevance of LL to English Language pedagogy in Mexico. He found the iconic and innovative uses of signs, where students were engaged as language investigators, anchored in six social meanings, and posited that English teachers could focus either on the social and cultural factors in signs or specific language forms (idiom, grammar, vocabulary).

Baumgardner (2012) suggested a template for teaching English language through a written English sign found in Taiwan and an English-flavored sign found in Mexico. He concluded that the LL could be used to illustrate the incidence of, and creativity in, World

Englishes. In a larger study, Liu (2011) investigated the LL of Taiwan and related it to the teaching of English (in Taiwan). She found four similarities and seven differences between the

LL of Taiwan and LL of other countries. Specific to pedagogy, she suggested three ways in which the use of LL resources could solve the difficulties normally encountered by Taiwanese students learning English: complementing classroom teaching with activities based on LL resources, providing an authentic context for studying English and bilingualism, providing a

basis for using a running translation model to study English and Chinese languages simultaneously.

Recently, the semiotic traditions have blossomed in LL research. Usually traced to

Scollon and Scollon (2003), the semiotically framed approach, dwelling on the materiality and contextualization of signs, identified three main principles of (geo)semiotics as indexicality

(signs mean what they point at), dialogicality (a sign is interpreted according to its relationship with its environment and other signs), and selection (people select signs and meanings based on salience). Chiefly, Scollon and Scollon (2003) interpreted the LL as a platform for doing discourse, where linguistic signs primarily revealed indexicality, in a way that connected the sign-producer, the sign-consumer, and the sign's contextual relevance:

The meaning of a sign is anchored in the material world whether the linguistic utterance

is spoken by one person to another or posted as a stop sign on a street corner. We need to

ask of the stop sign the same four questions we would ask of a person: Who has ' uttered'

this (that is, is it a legitimate stop sign of the municipal authority)? Who is the viewer (it

means one thing for a pedestrian and another for the driver of a car)? What is the social

situation (is the sign 'in place' or being installed or worked on)? Is that part of the material

world relevant to such a sign (for example, is it a corner of the intersection of roads)? (p.

Following Scollon and Scollon (2003), Jaworkski and Thurlow (2011) presented the

"discourse/s of place and the place/s of discourse" as a broadening of the concept of LL to include how "written discourse interacts with other discursive modalities, visual images, non- verbal communication, architecture and the built environment," and thus advocated a new concept, "semiotic landscape" (SL) or "any (public) space with visible inscriptions made through

deliberate human intervention and meaning making" (p. 2). Specifically, Jaworski and Thurlow's

(2010) conceptualized the LL (visible language/writing) as situated social practice, Sebba (2010) saw it as fixed and mobile discourses in socio-historical context, while Coupland (2010) viewed it as the linguistic and semiotic nature of human communication shaped by visible and invisible forces.

Given the multifaceted directions of the studies discussed thus far, the phenomenon LL has been considered as being in need of theoretical compactness (Spolsky, 2009). In this regard, a properly grounded sociolinguistic framework, which is worth a separate specification, is

Backhaus' (2007).

Backhaus' Sociolinguistic Framework

A major, clearly-demarcated sociolinguistic theoretical framework of LL research was utilized by Backhaus (2007), in his study of the signs of multilingualism in Tokyo. Drawing on a corpus of 2,444 signs gathered from 28 demarcated sites, he sought to answer three major questions, (1) Linguistic landscaping by whom? (2) Linguistic landscaping for whom? (3)

Linguistic landscaping quo vadis: while (1) referred to "the sign writers" and (2) referred to "the sign readers," (3) [originally a Latin expression, meaning "where are you going,"] was operationalized by Backhaus as "the dynamics of the linguistic situation as a whole" (Backhaus,

2007). Positing that "languages contained" and "combinations" were categories applicable to all the research questions, he assigned other analytical categories thus: (1) top-down versus bottom up, geographic distribution, code preference; (2) part writing, visibility; (3) idiosyncrasies, layering (p. 2).

Classifying as top-down signs, all official, municipal signs (as traceable to government or its agency), and all other signs (unofficial, commercial) as bottom-up, Backhaus found English

more frequently on bottom-up signs and Japanese as predominant on top-down signs. He noted the intriguing multilingual status of Tokyo, despite its 3.6% foreigners' population. To substantiate his reports on code preference and part writing, he identified three types of signs: monophonic (containing one language); polyphonic (containing several languages that are not translated); and homophonic (containing different languages which are either translated or transliterated). He also identified what he termed "mixed part writing" in which the content elements of a sign are available in two or more languages. He reported that only 6 of the 662 official signs were made in a language other than Japanese, confirming the predominance of

Japanese in official signs. However, less than 60% of non-official signs contained Japanese, which gave the general impression that non-official sign producers oriented to foreigners.

Backhaus observed idiosyncratic uses, mainly of English (where the signs looked English but made more sense when read as Japanese) and Japanese (where idiosyncrasies were found in the use of Braille and the transliteration of Japanese into Roman alphabets), but concluded that

English idiosyncrasies were on the decrease.

As regards layering, "the coexistence of older and newer versions of a given type of sign"

(Backhaus, 2007, p. 130), he found that English and Japanese were the languages layered and noted some bilingual signs which were profitable to those who knew the former and not the latter. In all, 80% of the signs in the survey areas were monolingual Japanese. He concluded that that despite its "growing linguistic diversification, Tokyo is not a multilingual city" (p. 145).

This framework will be chiefly relevant to my study. First, it is well thought-out and empirically rich. Also, although Tokyo is an Expanded Circle context, it shares many similarities with Ìbàdàn, an Outer Circle context, not the least of all an exponential growth in its linguistic diversification.

Summary

From this review, it is obvious that LL research can be accomplished using multiple theories in various disciplines. It would seem that the works discussed are fixed, clear-cut examples of specific theoretical standpoints. In reality, however, most of the studies on LL are interrelated and cross-cutting, straddling different theoretical perspectives all at once. As such,

LL research has been said to lack " a clear orthodoxy or theoretical core" (Sebba, 2010, p. 73).

And conceding this theoretical formlessness, Spolsky (2009, p. 29) notably recommended that

LL research should be fitted either into Semiotics (the general study of signs, that is including non-verbal signs) or into Literacy studies (and so would have to include other items like letters, tickets, receipts, books).

The direction of LL research currently is contextualist (e.g. Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011;

Leeman & Modan, 2009; 2010), with many a scholar interested in bringing on board whichever theory (or aspect of theory) would link LL to its central themes of language choice, language planning, multilingualism, and audience design, all manifestations of how and what linguistic signs mean in connecting language(s), people, and space/place.

Chapter 3

METHODOLOGY

This is a sociolinguistic study, done from a focally linguistic perspective. It approaches meaning-making from a (though not exclusively) sociolinguistic angle, by unveiling the significances of the semantics and pragmatics of signage as they reflect social and linguistic realties about a community's or people's language attitudes, policies, and ideologies. Specifically, the methodology for this study was informed by the theoretical framework identified with

Backhaus' (2007). As well, the analytical frameworks deployed by Coulmas (2009), Hanauer

(2009), Huebner (2006), Malinowski (2009), Reh (2004), Spolsky (2009), and Spolsky &

Cooper (1991) provided additional theoretical backbones for the study. Yet, given the multidisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity of LL studies, identified and discussed in Chapter 2, it seems rather natural that this study would feed from multiple theoretical frameworks as long as they belong in, or are adaptable to, sociolinguistics. In this wise, as the discussion will show, apart from the predictable grounding of this study in multilingualism and variationist sociolinguistics (given the study's focus on what termed [Backhaus, 2007, p. 1], "urban language contact in the written medium") there will be forays into semantics and pragmatics, discourse analysis, semiotics, and sociology. The intention is to bring on board whichever strand of knowledge would provide significant sociolinguistic information about the LL of Ìbàdàn.

Pointedly, this dissertation is predicated on the following major research parameters:

1. Agency (the sign producer)

2. Readership (the sign consumer)

3. Linguistic dynamics (language contact situation).

The study employs a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, as is the trend in recent LL research (e.g. Ben-Rafael et al., 2006; Cenoz & Gorter, 2006; Backhaus, 2007). At the quantitative end, the corpus and sampling procedure are clearly-defined and systematized, with figures provided as and when necessary. From the qualitative perspective, this study contains important observations on, and the conclusions that could be drawn from, the significance of the

Ìbàdàn LL concerning the status of the English Language in Nigeria. I now move on to the specifics of these methodological aspects.

Survey Area

The geographical setting of this dissertation is Ìbàdàn, located in the Western (more specifically, South-Western) part of Nigeria, is the capital city of State and the third largest metropolitan area, by population, in Nigeria, after Lagos and Kano, with a population of about

2.762 million people, as at 2013 (Index Mundi, 2013). As such, Ìbàdàn is an urban setting or metropolis, since, according to Shohamy et al. (2009), it "consists of quarters and also has a variety of suburbs and smaller satellite cities surrounding it" (p. xiii). There are eleven (11) local government areas (LGAs or counties) within the Ìbàdàn metropolis, of which five are considered

"urban" (Ìbàdàn North, Ìbàdàn North-East, Ìbàdàn North-West, Ìbàdàn South-East, Ìbàdàn

South-West) while six are termed "semi-urban" (Akinyele, Egbeda, Ido, Lagelu, Ona-Ara,

Oluyole). The high density areas (Dugbe, Mokola, Agbowo, to mention but a few), which have many signs which violate town planning specifications, contain more signs than the low density areas (Bodija, Ikolaba, Oluyole Estate e.t.c.), which are better planned. Yet, all the neighborhoods have data sufficient for a rich harvest of LL signs. Data were collected from all the 11 LGAs in Ìbàdàn city, with an average of thirty signs per LGA. I indicate below, in Table

3.1, the numerical distribution of the signs according to LGAs.

Table 3.1

Survey area and number of signs

Serial Name of local government Headquarters Number of signs number area

1. Ìbàdàn North Agodi 32

2. Ìbàdàn North-East Iwo Road 30

3. Ìbàdàn North-West Dugbe/Onireke 36

4. Ìbàdàn South-East Mapo 30

5. Ìbàdàn South-West Oluyole Estate 30

6. Akinyele Moniya 31

7. Egbeda Egbeda 29

8. Ido Ido 26

9. Lagelu Iyana Ofa 30

10. Oluyole Idi Ayunre 30

11. Ona Ara Akanran 28

12. Total 332

Specific Decisions

Although, the database of this study is comprised of all signs which are meant for public consumption wherever placed in the Ìbàdàn metropolis, given the ubiquity and variety of these signs, I had to make a number of decisions about where to look for data. These choices, I inferred, would make the data as representative of the total picture of the Ìbàdàn LL as possible.

Prolific LLs

I chose to gather data from all the notable landmarks and monuments in the Ìbàdàn metropolis, believing that they could be categorized as "prolific" LLs (Ben Rafael, et al. [2006]).

These are listed below, with the major additional reasons for their salience indicated, where necessary).

1. Adamasingba Stadium.

2. Bower Memorial Tower.

3. Broadcasting Corporation of State.

4. Cocoa House (Africa's first skyscraper).

5. Cultural Center.

6. Dugbe market (Ìbàdàn's commercial nerve-center).

7. Ìbàdàn airport.

8. International Institute of Tropical Agriculture.

9. State Secretariat Complex.

10. University College Hospital (Nigeria's first teaching hospital).

11. University of Ìbàdàn (Nigeria's first university), generally, and

its Zoological and Botanical gardens, specifically.

Local or (Inter)National Landmarks

Also, I had to make a decision, in many cases, concerning choosing between local and

(inter)national landmarks to avoid unnecessary duplication. The term "local landmark" refers to any landmark owned by the local or state government, while the "inter(national) landmark" means a landmark owned by the national government or an international agency. In this regard, I chose to gather data from the local landmarks which provided similar services as their

(inter)national counterparts, because I conjectured, from an indigenous-reader perspective, that the former would address the Ìbàdàn indigenes more and, so, would reveal sociolinguistic realities of a greater value. This decision informed my choice of the State-owned Adamasingba

Stadium, Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State, and the State Secretariat over the federal government-owned Obafemi Awolowo Stadium, Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria/Nigerian

Television Authority, respectively.

Sorting of Signs

Not all the data collected can be found in the analysis, because I have only picked about

30% of the total number. However; I have endeavored to represent as many varieties of the photographs found in the corpus as possible, avoiding any unnecessary duplication. The signs under investigation were all of the written medium, following Backhaus (2007), and I paid attention to only their linguistic features exclusively or as combined with text vector analyses

(Scollon & Scollon, 2003), whenever such (the latter) information revealed relevant indexical or symbolic sign-consumer-oriented meaning. For example, whereas Figure 3.2 is not considered a part of the data, because it contains a non-linguistic text, Figure 3.3 is, essentially because it contains linguistic information.

A sign is counted as one if it belongs to one carrier, that is, the object to which a sign is attached, which could be a door, a shop window, a building, and so on (Backhaus, 2007, p. 66).

Also, a sign is counted as belonging to one language either as occupying the whole carrier or as sharing the carrier with another language or other languages. Yet, there were some ambiguous or borderline cases in the data: while some were easily to classify in all respects, others were easier to classify in some respects than others.

For example, I had to decide between tagging a notice indexing the presence of a church in a particular location as either a sign emanating from an individual (its owner) or an association

(a group of pastors within the church or a religious body [the entire church as an entity]). I chose to categorize such signs as having been produced by religious bodies. As regards top-down and bottom-up distinctions, there was a case of both being attached to each other (in Figure 3.4), where the bottom-up sign was tied to and placed below the top-down sign.

Figure 3.2 Traffic sign (without linguistic content).

Apart from classifying the sign as parasitic, I counted the signs doubly, by placing this datum both in the top-down and bottom-up categories in my summative tables (see Figures 4.1 and 4.2).

Although non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which should be regarded as private concerns are active in the Nigerian LL, it was discovered that they always collaborated with government ministries and agencies in the production of signs. So, the categorization of the signs originating from the NGOs (e.g. the Nigerian Urban Reproductive Health Initiative [NURHI]), which initially provided a problem of classification, were eventually classified separately under the top-down category.

Yet, I could not assign some signs to any specific producer. For instance, although the symbol in the sign on the banner in Figure 3.5 is globally recognized as identifying HIV/AIDS, the sign's producer is not named in any way. Based on prior knowledge, that the producers of top-down signs would identify themselves one way or the other, I opted to classify this sign as bottom-up.

Figure 3.3 Traffic sign (with linguistic content).

Figure 3.4 Parasitic signs.

Figure 3.5 Health sign of unspecified producer.

Yet again, some signs posed some problems of sorting, because of their seeming double identities, that is, their fittingness in two different domains. This was especially evident in signs on mobile carriers. While non-commercial vehicles are not specially identified, commercial vehicles are. As is the practice in Nigeria, all commercial vehicles are painted in peculiar colors which demarcate one state from another. Within the states too, the commercial vehicles of the different towns and cities colors are further distinguished by particular color combinations. The specific colors, for commercial vehicles designated for the Ìbàdàn metropolis, are white with green stripes. So, I had to decide how to classify private signs on commercial carriers. To resolve this issue, a sign was categorized according to its function or the purpose for which it was intended by the sign-producer. So, Figure 3.6 (WARISI OMO OLOORE [Wareez, child of benefactor]) was classified as a non-commercial, adulatory sign, despite being placed on a commercial vehicle.

Figure 3.6 Non-commercial sign on commercial carrier

Data Collection Procedure

The data consist of photographs which I took by means of a pocket-sized digital camera.

Given the place and value of digital photography in LL research (see Gorter, 2006a), I found the camera expedient for documenting the signs. Equipped with the camera, I visited all the LGAs and took the photographs of all kinds of signs found in the Ìbàdàn public space, with an eye for multilingualism, thematic variety, and uniqueness. Given the omnipresence and ubiquity of the

English Language in Ìbàdàn LL—being an Outer Circle English environment—the documentation of all public signs in the city would be unwieldy and possibly impracticable. As such, I applied a stratified random sampling procedure (specifically, "quota/judgment sampling"

[Milroy & Gordon, 2003]); being an Ìbàdàn indigene and familiar with the demographics of the city, I used my background knowledge to select the data which would be seen as sufficiently representative of all the varieties of signs in the Ìbàdàn LL. There are therefore enough examples of each identifiable LL sign in my data. I sometimes made use of a research assistant, who

simply had to help me hold some of the falling signs properly, in the process of taking some of the photographs. The data were collected between June 6 and August 10, 2012.

A major consideration was the population density and accessibility of the streets of neighborhoods of Ìbàdàn. Regarding this, I chose to collect the data of the less densely-populated areas at any time and day, while I opted for office hours and Sundays to gather data from the busy areas. In fact, many of the photographs of shop signs were taken mostly on Sundays, when most businesses were closed. The photographs of the signs were stored in my computer's photo gallery section, from where I could retrieve any photo I found relevant for my analysis. And to ease this retrieval, I coded each photograph, according to a coding scheme I invented.

Unit of Analysis

This dissertation is focused on written signs, following Backhaus' (2007) physical, rather than semantic, operationalization of "sign" (see Chapter 2) as "any piece of written text within a spatially definable frame" (p. 66). A sign, then, contains an autonomous, independently-framed piece of information, either occurring alone or in contiguity with other similar or dissimilar signs. As such, Figure 3.7 contains two signs, mainly behavior regulatory, even though they are emplaced on the same carrier (the back of a truck): while one sign, the top-placed and more prominent, is used to specify what the truck is allowed to convey, the lower, marginalized sign is an invitation to evaluate the truck driver's competence at the wheels and how his/her driving could be regulated through some form of telecommunicative intervention.

Again, the signs being studied, must be in publicly displayed or in the public space.

"Publicness" refers to public accessibility, that is, anywhere a specified public or passers-by can have legal access. So, I gathered my data from all public spaces, both outside, in the open (e.g. streets) and inside, within walled spaces (e.g. hospital). The data contain all legible and visible

Figure 3.7 Two different warning signs on same carrier. forms of language representation occupying identifiable spatial limits and made accessible to the public.

"Space," here, is sociolinguistically anchored, encapsulating all of Lefevbre's (1991) three-dimensional conceptualization: "[spatial practice] the actual distribution of languages on signs that can be observed and documented by camera, [conceived space] the LL as it is represented by views and ideologies held by different policy makers whose policies mold the LL,

[lived space] the 'experiential' dimension of LL as it is presented by 'inhabitants'" (Trumper-

Hecht, 2009, p. 237).

Notably, I have documented both fixed and mobile signs, following Reh (2004). As such, my data contains both written signs emplaced on stationary carriers (like walls, trees, boards, wood) which are immovable at least for some time as well as signs on means of transport (like cars, buses, motorcycles, and tricycles). Given the significance the mobility value of a sign has

for meaning variation (Reh, 2004), I felt these two broad kinds of fixed signs could yield interesting results.

Analytical Framework

This dissertation contains the exposition of a sociolinguistic study, gleaned from a linguistic perspective. Specifically, this study is done from the theoretical standpoint of sociolinguistic meaning within LL research (Backhaus, 2007; Huebner, 2009; Spolsky, 2009), an unpacking of the values and significances of both "linguistic landscape" ("the planning and implementation of actions pertaining to language on signs" [Backhaus, 2007, 10]) and "linguistic landscaping" (the revelations and results of actions related to the linguistic landscape [Backhaus,

2007; Itagi & Singh, 2002; Singh, 2002]). These dwell within but exceed the affordances of variationism, multilingualism, and language contact.

Specifically, this study is predicated on the following major theoretical parameters

(popularized by Backhaus, 2007 but inflected and enlarged by a few other sociolinguists, already identified above): (i) Sign-production or agency; (ii) Sign-consumption or readership; (iii) linguistic context or dynamics of language contact.

Sign-Production

The LL literature is largely consistent in the categorization of the origin of signs into two mutually-exclusive types, top-down and bottom-up. By this, it is meant that LL data are categorized as originating either from "national and public bureaucracies" (top-down) or from

"individual social actors" (bottom-up) (Ben-Rafael et al., 2006). In my data, the top-down signs are those displayed by public institutions: educational, governmental, medical, and tourist. Also included in this category are political announcements and public announcements (of civic importance). Signs of the bottom-up type are those which have originated from commercial

concerns (private and corporate), private announcers, associations (religious, social, cultural), and transgressors (graffiti). In my analysis, I have stuck with a government/private demarcation to name the top-down/bottom-up signs, respectively. Because the motivations for and ideologies behind the choices used to articulate the top-down and bottom-up signs often differed significantly—the former's more dependent on policy (Kotze, 2010), the latter more democratic and diversified—I have decided, in this dissertation, to dwell more on the latter.

Another aspect of agency is code preference. This focuses on the choices made by the sign-producers to determine the language(s) (or code[s]) they should use to mark the LL and the arrangement of the languages. As my data show, there were monolingual and multilingual

(bilingual and multilingual) signs in the Ìbàdàn LL, with English and Yorùbá the only languages used to mark monolingual signs. Also, I have applied the relevant aspects of the literature on the semiotic and linguistic manifestations of code-preference (see Chapter 2) for interpreting the data. To recapitulate, briefly, Scollon and Scollon (2003) projected sign-production as an instantiation of choice-making which is used to project a code (or language) as either preferred or marginalized, as related to the position of a sign on a frame: while the former would be situated in the left, top or center, the latter would be on the right, bottom, or margins. For Cenoz and Gorter (2006), the preferred code would occupy more space than the marginalized code. As well, Spolsky and Cooper's (1991) three-tier conceptualization of code-preference—as consisting in the type and number of languages used to mark a sign, a sign's function, and its material form— has been found useful. This combination of the linguistic and the semiotic is especially necessary in a research focused on observational, photographic, but not interview data, like mine.

In sum, since the significance of a sign's use and function is a recurring decimal in content of any

data analysis, only code preference as language prominence and as materiality of sign will be used to interpret the signs.

Sign-Consumption

This concerns how the LL signs were designed to orient to their readers or addressees.

The first part of this section was devoted to unveiling the significance of the spatial mobility (the level of fixedness or otherwise) of the LL carriers. Following Reh (2004), stationary carriers are demarcated from mobile carriers, the former oriented towards mobile readers, the latter, presuming static readers but an operational information circulation system. Additionally, the fixedness condition is significant on two major grounds: when a stationary carrier bears a sign whose information is meaningful and relevant only in the carrier's spatial location (like the neighborhood regulatory sign in Figure 3.8), the mobility of the reader might be inconsequential; if a stationary carrier bears a non-spatially dependent information (like advertisements), the sign communicates either if the reader is mobile or if the sign is repeated in several locations.

The next section, which I tagged "multilingualism as visibility," combined the concepts of Reh's (2004) "the visibility of multilingualism" and Backhaus' (2007) "visibility" with my personal inflection. Here, the focus was on the extent to which the visibility of multilingual signs

(operationalized to encompass all signs containing more than one language) was made obvious to the sign-consumer. Specifically, a distinction was made between overt multilingualism (when a sign had its two or more languages on the same carrier) and covert multilingualism (when two different carriers in two different locations had two signs in two different languages, of which one was a translation of the language of the other).

Yet, I introduce an additional interpretation of covert multilingualism. In this conceptualization, I note that the use of a non-indigenous language to mark the signs in an area

where the level of education is perceived to be below average (because of the inhabitants' low income level), indirectly indicates the sign-producer's assumption of the multilingual, multiliterate identity of the presumed sign-consumer. Thus, the observed prevalence of English in a geographical location where the L1 is the Yorùbá Language, was interpreted as another form of covert multilingualism.

Figure 3.8 Neighborhood regulatory sign.

Dovetailing from multilingualism as visibility is multilingualism as structure. This, viewed as a convergence of Backhaus' (2007) "part writing" and Reh's (2004) arrangement of multilingual information, identified the number of languages in a sign and the extent to which a sign contained translated or transliterated texts. Basically, a monolingual sign contained no translated nor transliterated texts and were thus "monophonic" (Backhaus, 2007). However, multilingual signs contained mutual translations or transliterations of their texts completely or partially or not at all. In my data, the multilingual signs showed various combinations of English and Nigerian languages. For example, while the number of languages in a sign like Figure 3.9 is

clear-cut (i.e. two languages), the situation with Figure 3.10 is rather problematic. So, I chose to regard examples like Figure 3.10 as containing not two languages but one: even though the

Yorùbá terms "Ìbàdàn" and "Oja'ba" are respectively pre-modifying and post-modifying

"mosque," since they are toponyms, they are regarded as neutral (because they do not qualify as language data in this dissertation). A clear-cut toponym was however demarcated from a bilingual sign bordering toponymy, a situation in which a place is named neither after a person nor as identifying a specific geographical generally-recognizable spatial referent (e.g. the name of a street, neighborhood, or city) but as attached to a slogan or some other privately-devised referent. As such, the sign in Figure 3.11 is regarded as bilingual—containing Yorùbá and

English texts—because the Yorùbá nominal phrase, Ogo Oluwa (God's glory) is rather a religious exhortation and not a constitutionally-recognized proper noun.

Since this dissertation is not based on any form of interview data, the sign-consumption, operationalized in this dissertation, was presumed or hypothesized, based on my identity as an

Ìbàdàn indigene, a Yorùbá L1 speaker, and an educated Nigerian (which would imply an English

L2 speaker competence).

Figure 3.9 Bilingual sign

Figure 3.10 Toponymic sign.

Figure 3.11 Bilingual, not toponymic, sign

Linguistic Dynamics

This contains discussions about the significant indices of the linguistic contacts between

English and the Nigerian languages in the data. This was shown by the instances of orthographic and lexical deviations from "Standard English" (Inner Circle English). As noted by Backhaus

(2007), idiosyncrasy was preferable to "error" or "mistake," given the difficulty of evaluating language data as "right" or "wrong."

Also discussed in this section is the concept of "layering." Layering, the coexistence of at least two versions of the same sign in such a way that one is obviously older than the other

(Backhaus, 2007, p. 130; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p. 137), has been a useful parameter for identifying the changes in a city's LL. A study of these changes is useful especially for "apparent time" studies, in which the focus is on studying the coexistence of such signs in just a specific point in time. As confirmed by the discoveries of Spolsky and Cooper (1991), such an approach is especially helpful in diachronic linguistics to draw conclusions about a city's LL, at a given point in time. As such, Backhaus' (2007) treatment of layering, specifically his "number of languages" and "proportion of languages and script," is applied to the analysis of my data. In addition, I find useful Kallen's idea of "parasitism." According to Kallen (2010), the LL could sometimes be discursive or chaotic, such that there could be "parasitic" signs, that is, signs which are placed on other signs or signs which "involve little conscious planning and considerable spatial independence" (p. 42), as evidenced by Figure 3.4, above.

Constraints

I encountered some challenges in the process of gathering the data for this research. A major challenge was convincing some shop owners to let me take photographs of their signs: given the security situation in Nigeria2, many of these people were very reluctant to cooperate with me except after much pleading and convincing. The situation was especially risky in Sabo,

2 Since 2003, many parts of Nigeria (or specifically the Northern Nigerian States) have experienced series of armed attacks from an Islamic terrorist group (Boko Haram, meaning, “Western education is illegal”), resulting in the death of about 3000 people (Nigerians and non- Nigerians), as of July, 2013.

a predominantly Hausa neighborhood (located in Ìbàdàn North LGA), whose predominant religion was Islam, the faith the Boko Haram terrorists (see footnote) claimed to be defending and propagating. Since I could hardly the Hausa Language (the L1 of this immigrant population) and many of these immigrants could neither understand much English nor Yorùbá (my L1), I had to plead with a Hausaman (one of the Foreign Currency traders) to help me convince the predominant immigrant population of the area that I was only a researcher, and that I meant no harm. Moreover, many of the sign-producers (specifically, sign-owners) in the other parts of the metropolis were apprehensive and less-accommodating because of the recent drive by the

State government to enforce the extant laws guiding the placement of (especially commercial) signs. So, I made great work of convincing some of the shop owners to allow me take photographs of the signs on their shops: many of them insisted on seeing my identity card before obliging me.

Also, there is a loud absence of data from financial institutions in the study, despite the ubiquity of these institutions in the Ìbàdàn landscape. Try as much as I did to sample a few of the information in their public spaces, I didn't succeed. The managers claimed (though they did not show documents) that their institutions' policies forbade the taking of photographs anywhere within their (the institutions') premises. This situation was replicated at the National Museum

(Ìbàdàn North-West LGA) and the Trans Amusement Park (Ìbàdàn North LGA), where the managers claimed that any visitor could only see but would not be allowed to take photographs of any text within the museum's premises. In the alternative, I was requested to provide a letter of authorization from my university: unfortunately I had none. Although these constraints reduced

the number of signs which I would have liked to present as data, they did little to query the data's representational adequacy.

There were also some technical problems with the photographs. Some of the photographs were either unclear or incomplete: I could only photograph some signs from across the road, which were fairly far distances; I could not get the right elevation to photograph some signs, especially billboard signs; because of the width of the lens of my camera, I could not capture at once, some of the signs; the automatic camera flash, which I had to use to take some photographs in the dark spaces, brought white spots onto them. As such, there were occasional overlaps in the photographs, because I had to take some of them (the photographs) either from different angles or retake them for closer shots. All the imperfect photographs were eventually eliminated from the data.

Summary

In all, I identified 332 signs of various sizes. The LL of Ìbàdàn is depicted by the languages on shop signs, street names, billboards, walls, notice boards, traffic signs, and inscriptions, inside and outside public spaces. As the data show, top-down (government) signs are less prominent than bottom-up (private) signs: the latter are more in number, have a higher rate of multilingualism, and display more indices and varieties of language contact. Both types of signs will be analyzed along the lines of the three research questions in Chapter 1.

Chapter 4

DATA ANALYSIS AND FINDINGS

Having operationalized the methodological path this study is to follow, this chapter is focused on situating the data within the framework. Specifically, the chapter is used to analyze the corpus of signs and explicate the study's findings. The analysis moves from the general to the specific, as an attempt is made to identify how the data can be used to reflect or respond to both the study's analytical framework and its research questions (outlined in Chapter 1).

General Picture

As noted earlier, this study is focused on a sample of 332 signs. The signs minimally contain languages (exclusively), and maximally, languages combined with pictures. Altogether, six languages are identified in the data: English, Hausa, Igbo, Latin, NigP, Yorùbá . And the signs are either monolingual or multilingual, in the second variant, showing various patterns of co-occurring languages. Since the data are photographic, the signs contain, sometimes a juxtaposition or interaction of both linguistic and non-linguistic content useful for LL analysis and revealing valuable sociolinguistic information, to a greater or lesser degree. As applied to the analytical procedure, the data reveal a variety of realities concerning the situation of sign- production, sign-consumption, and linguistic dynamics. The data show an uneven distribution of top-down and bottom-up signage. They contain 131 top-down and 201 bottom-up instances. This translates into 39.5% of top-down signs and 60.5% of bottom-up signs, as graphically represented in Figure 4.1. Among the former, non-commercial and official signs (signs originating from the tripodal local, state, and federal governments) dominate (see Table 4.2) while for the latter, there are both commercial and non-commercial signs, with the former

showing the greater variety (see Table 4.3). Altogether, there are more top-down signs in the high density than the low density LLs.

Although the bottom-up signs are more in number and can be separated from top-down signs, the former exist only within the former, in the larger picture. Even if there are not many explicitly worded legal restrictions on the Nigerian physical environment, generally speaking, a particular extant regulation stipulates that approval must be sought by all—private individuals, corporate individuals, groups, governments, and non-governmental organizations—for the right to erect signs in lived neighborhoods. In fact, the most recent State law governing the emplacement of public signs in LGAs in State, the Ministry of Physical Planning and

Development Law (2012), clearly states (in Section 16, Subsection 3):

(3)No outdoor advertisement, billboards, or signposts may be erected by any

person, group of persons, organisation, government or its agencies without

prior approval of the Control Department, except as specified in the Building

Plan Regulations made pursuant to the Law (p. 6).

As such, as I have indicated in Figure 4.2, the large number of the bottom-up signs can be

(easily) explained: when compared with the top-down signs; they have far more producers who also have more messages to pass across; they are less rule-governed or their producers violate the existing rules (often minimally, sometimes flagrantly, so much so that some signs carry semiotic indicators of government's clamp down); and they reveal the more varied picture of the sociolinguistic realities of signage in Ìbàdàn. As a result, wherever they co-occur for analysis in this dissertation, the bottom-up signs will be subjected to a more detailed treatment than the top- down signs, in this dissertation.

Table 4.1

Distribution of signs

Type of Sign Number Percentage

Top-down 131 39.5

Bottom-up 201 60.5

Total 332 100

Top-down Bottom-up

Figure 4.1 Pie chart showing sign types according to production

Top-Down: 39.5%

Bottom-up: 59.5%

Figure 4.2 Another interpretation of sign-production

Meaning-Making in sign-production

Top-Down

As shown in Table 4.2, the governments (local, state, and federal), their agencies and the

NGOs, with which they collaborate, are the sources of top-down sign-production. In the data, government signs account for 161 (or 80.1%) of the number, and thus constitute the majority, of the totality of top-down signs.

All the top-down signs are used to perform informational (indexical) and symbolic functions. When performing the informational function, these signs are used to specify a building or institution as belonging to government or as being under government management (like the case of house numbering in [Text i]) or as enjoying a government service (like, in [Text ii] which is shown by the text of a Water Corporation of State [WCOS] sign placed on the outer wall of a house).

Table 4.2

Top-down Signs

Category Type of Sign Sub-Type Domain

Top- Non- 1.Government Local Admonition, Direction, Education,

Down Commercial State Event, Tourism, Place Identity, Place

Federal Name, Politics, Regulation,

Sanitation, Tourism

Agency Health, Place Name, Object Name

2. Public Institution Commemoration, Event, Health,

Place Name, Regulation, Tourism

3. Non-Governmental Health

Organization (collaboration)

Commercial Government State Transport, Recreation

(i) N6B/857

(ii) WCOS11016150050.

A few signs are used to make political announcements (like the name and slogan of a party, in

Text iii) or to regulate behavior, subtly (e.g. Text iv) or forcefully (e.g. Figure 4.3).

(iii) PEOPLES DEMOCRATIC PARTY

POWER TO THE PEOPLE

(iv) CAUTION

CROSSBAR & BUMPS AHEAD

DRIVE SLOWLY

Also, while some of the signs are used for symbolization purposes (like Figure 4.4 which symbolizes, perfectly for the Ìbàdàn context, the multilingual nature of Nigeria, as identified with the sign containing four languages), others are used to perform both informational and symbolic functions. For example, the top-down, commemorative engraved sign, in Figure 4.5, is used doubly to identify the location (as a media facility, the Broadcasting Corporation of State) and to symbolize the commissioning of a new block of offices, at the said location.

Figure 4.3 Top-down warning sign.

Although it would probably have added some greater value to the sign's meaning component if the sign-producers self-identify in the government-related signs, it is observed that most of these signs lack any form of such identification. Such signs as Figure 4.6 and 4.7, on which the sign-producers' (the University of Ìbàdàn [UI], for the former, a collaboration of the

National Youth Service Corp [NYSC] and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission

[EFCC], for the latter) are clearly indicated are thus more of the exception rather than the norm.

While the producers of many of the signs could not be ascertained, because they are not stated

(like Figures 4.4, and 4.5), the specific locations where the signs have been placed (the entrance of a building, a hospital wall, and the wall of a media outfit, respectively) make it easy to pragmatically retrieve their (the producers') identities. And concerning Figure 4.3, the location of the sign (on a tree within UI) coupled with the identification of the sign-producer by the word

"MANAGEMENT" commonsensically and pragmatically aids the recognition of UI as the sign's producer. As such, their producers are only assumed by the indexicality or context-dependency

(Backhaus, 2007; Scollon & Scollon, 2003) of their emplacement.

Figure 4.4 : Top-down hospital sign.

Figure 4.5 Top-down sign, dual purpose.

Figure 4.6 Top-down admonitory sign (single producer).

Figure 4.7 Top-down admonitory sign (dual producer).

Bottom-Up

As Table 4.3 indicates, bottom-up signs are also of two types, commercial and non- commercial, although, unlike the top-down signs, they belong to many more domains and also display different information about agency. The commercial sign is placed by a sign-producer

with the primary intention of seeking some form of economic advantage or the availability of a product or service which can only be got (by the sign-consumer who is willing to part with some means of exchange) while the non-commercial sign is meant to serve any other purpose but economic. The commercial signs contain five major sub-types, demarcated according to their carriers and frames, into shops, institutions that belong within the hospitality industry (e.g. hotels, bars), billboards, posters, and stickers. The data reveal signs which indicate the name of the business as well as its type and location, specify the product/service available (or which would be available in the future) or indicate a combination of any set of these functions.

Minimally, a sign contains a specification of a business content (product/service) and the name

(personal or business) of the sign-producer (more specifically, the owner of the business). As

Figure 4.8 indicates, the sign-producer specifies the business content (kerosine) and the business- owner (MR & MRS AFOLABI). Yet, one major recurrent feature of most of the bottom-up commercial signs is the documentation of the sign-producer's (business owner's) contact mobile phone number. As the data show, many of the signs contain such numbers (1) as combined with the business-content (Figure 4.9), (2) as co-occurring with the business-name and the business- content (Figure 4.10), and (3) as co-existing with business-name, business-content, and business- slogan (Figure 4.11): apart of the common denominator of phone numbers, (1) shows

"BATTERY CHARGER" as business content (as well as a directional text to specify where the business-owner can be found); (2) displays the business name of "LIDEW SUPERMART" and the kind of products sold therein; and (3) reveals the business name ("ESTEEM BARBERS"), the business content (of services [beauty styles] and sales [beauty products]), and slogan ("We

Add More To Your Beauty").

Table 4.3

Bottom Up Signs

Category Type of Sign Sub Type or Source Domain

Bottom- 1.Commercial Shops Product, Place Name, Service

Up Taverns/Bars/Guest Name, Information, Product,

Houses/Hotels/Restaurants/Night Service,

Clubs

Billboards Product, Service, Name

Posters Event, Information

Stickers Product

2.Non- Private Individuals Admonition, Death, Event,

Commercial Felicitation, Interpellation,

Politics, Place Name,

Regulation, Slogan,

Corporate Bodies Admonition, Job Vacancy,

Place Name, Politics,

Regulation, Volunteerism

Religious groups Place Name, Event,

Exhortation

Grafitti Admonition, Politics

Often, these commercial signs are placed either on the business content (Figure 4.8), on or close to the business content (Figure 4.9) or at some remote distance from the business content

(Figure 4.10). Other forms of commercial signs, in which phone numbers are obviously absent

(denoting signs which specify the sub-domains of food, hospitality, and stationery, respectively) include Texts (v), (vi), and (vii).

Figure 4.8 Bottom-up commercial sign showing owner and content of business.

Figure 4.9 Commercial sign showing contact numbers and business content.

Figure 4.10 Commercial sign showing contact numbers, business name and content.

Figure 4.11 Commercial sign containing contact numbers and business name, content, slogan.

(v) Ezinwanne Canteen

Food is ready

(vi) KOKODOME

RESTAURANT & NITE CLUB

(vii) Dupe Olu Printers

General Printers

Binders

(Comb Binding Inclusive)

Stationery Suppliers

Estimating Consultants

Again, some of the signs are located in places which cannot be identified as the physical addresses of the products or services being advertized. Such signs, including these two placed on electric poles, contain minimal information about such products and services and then, phone numbers (Text viii) or the sign-producer's name, the service rendered, and a phone number (Text ix):

(viii) WATERCARE BOREHOLE DRILLING

08137644430

07038375836

(ix) Joseph

Welder

08059825562

Finally, there are signs which show all the varieties indicated above. For example in

Figure 4.12, the sign producer, one after the other, indicates the business name, its slogan, a

mission statement related to the product, the products available, the business' official addresses and phone numbers.

Figure 4.12 All-inclusive commercial sign.

The ubiquity of mobile telephone numbers indexes two meanings, the accessibility of the business owner and his/her business and the business owner's socio-economic status: the more the phone numbers listed, the stronger the indexical value. The mobile phone is a fairly recent staple in the Nigerian society, becoming popular only in the early 2000s. As such, apart from the symbolization of accessibility of the sign-producer, it also indexes his/her above-average socio- economic class.

Also some of these signs include the Personal Identification Numbers (PINS) of the

Blackberry (BB) phones of their sign producers', apart from the phone numbers (see Figures 4.10 and 4.11). The BB phone is a more recent feature of the Nigerian telecommunication context

(traced to around 2008) often used to identify the socio-economic elite. Because this type of phone is expensive to acquire, and because the BB pin occurs only alongside the phone numbers in the data, a sign which contains a BB pin indexes a sign-producer of a higher socio-economic class than a sign that does not. Additionally though, given the fact that it is possible to send a text

message even without having credit on one's phone's BB phone, a sign-producer's indication of a

BB PIN also reveals his/her unlimited accessibility and an orientation towards a telecommunicatively savvy and sign-consumer. Moreover, the indication of a sign-producer's BB pin on a sign suggests newness of either business content or sign.

The non- commercial signs in the data are placed by individuals, associations, and religious bodies, announcing the availability of products or services but primarily for informational purposes. The private signs come in the form of special announcements, like warning (Text x), behavior regulation (Figure 4.13) and admonition (Text xi, in which five ordinarily distinct words are joined to form a single word).

(x) BEWARE

OF WILD

DOGS

(xi) JOWOMASETOSIBIMO

(Gloss: PLEASE/DON'T/URINATE/HERE/ANYMORE)

An interesting sign-producer is the landlord's association, a group whose presence is felt in the

Ìbàdàn LL in different ways. The signs emanating from this association are used to perform functions ranging from instruction (like the uniquely, highly placed traffic sign on a horizontal bar, across a road, in Figure 4.14) to warning (Text xii) to (rude) behavior regulation (Text xiii).

(xii) NO OKADA RIDER

IS ALLOWED TO PLY

THIS ROAD

AFTER 10:00 P. M

ORDER BY

OKE ALARO/KUOLA

LANDLORDS ASSOCIATION.

Figure 4.13 Non-commercial bottom-up sign

(xiii) ENI BA DA ILE SI

IBIYI YOO SOFO

TOMOTOMO

(Gloss: Whoever empties trash here will waste including [his/her]

children)

Figure 4.14 Landlords' traffic sign

Moreover, some of the signs performed dual functions, like the case of Figure 4.15, where two different texts, placed on the same carrier, serve the purposes of instruction ("Post no bill") and admonition (JOWOMASETOSIBI), respectively.

Figure 4.15 Dual functioning bottom-up sign.

Graffiti, used for the purposes of political campaign and instruction, also abound in the data, and could have been placed either by persons or associations. For example, the sign in

Figure 4.16, placed on a wall of an uncompleted building, is expected to have been produced, logically speaking, by the owner of the property. The environmental sanitation sign, Figure 4.17,

(meaning "Urinate here and run mad"), could be traced to either an individual (a landlord on whose house's fence the sign is placed) or a landlords' association (in whose territory the sign is found). Undoubtedly though, Figure 4.18 (an instance of a sign found on a tarred road, in a students' neighborhood, alluding to a forthcoming students' election), an example of graffiti being used for political campaign, could only have been produced by a student.

The three examples of graffiti and the purposes to which they are put fall within their conceptualization in the literature, as purposeful even if transgressive art (e.g. Pennycook, 2009), and not linguistic vandalism. Notably, Figure 4.16 is ideologically loaded, inscribing on the

Ìbàdàn LL a reminder of Nigeria's history of military rule (which only came to an end in 1999) and instilling fear in any sign-consumer who would contemplate engaging in any kind of non- conforming behavior on the property. As previous personal experience has shown, such a sign is usually intended for claiming that the property's owner belongs to one of Nigeria's military forces: however, most often, this is not the case, nor is the property located in any kind of military environment. Moreover, Figure 4.17 has a pragmatic meaning of chastisement, it is not a directive, as the text's form indicates: such signs indicate the sign-producer's decision to resort to impoliteness or verbal aggression after and when admonitions (like the one found in 4.15) have failed to make the presumed addressee to conform to the environmental sanitation standards of a given community. And Figure 4.18 is from a predictable sign-producer, the student. Given the tendency of youths (including students) to be adventurous, rebellious, and independent, this sign

obviously underlines why its sign-producer would prefer placing this sign on an "illegal" carrier

(a road) rather than any of the "legal" options which are surely available.

Figure 4.16 Graffiti as warning.

Figure 4.17 Graffiti as chastisement.

Figure 4.18 Graffiti as political campaign.

Despite the relative freedom of spatial expression or emplacement afforded by bottom-up signage, there are certain conventions and a particular law (see the extract from the State Law, above) regulating such freedom. This explains why a sign's emplacement may be considered illegal, not because it is transgressive (like graffiti) but because it defies certain specified or conventional regulations. An indication of this illegality is represented either semiotically or both semiotically and linguistically on such signs in the data. This explains the red check mark in

Figure 4.19 and the combination of the red check mark and the specific instruction (REGISTER

OR REMOVE WITHIN 21 DAYS) on the education sign in Figure 4.20.

Code Preference

As related to code preference, the data reveal different forms and indices of the dominance of one code over another in the arrangement of the languages on the signs. As such, this analysis follows a two-tiered pattern which interprets code-preference as a revelation of the

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those choices which relate a sign's prominence to the type, number, and hierarchy of languages and its material form.

Figure 4.19 Illegal sign, semiotically marked.

Figure 4.20 Illegal sign, semiotically and linguistically marked.

Code preference as language prominence. In total, there are six languages in the data.

Of this, English is the most prominent and Latin, the least. Most of the signs are monolingual, that is, done using English exclusively. In such signs, the sign-producer's choice of English

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signals any of, a preference for a national official language (since the English Language is

Nigeria's lingua franca), a desire to access a limitless number of addressees in Ìbàdàn's multilingual setting, or an intention to display a certain level of literacy (either restricted or not restricted to English Language).

When the sign is multilingual, its first and most prominent language is either English or

Yorùbá. The pattern found in the data shows that very often (though not exclusively) English is the dominant code in signs containing English and another other language(s) while Yorùbá is the most prominent code in signs containing Yorùbá and any other language(s), but excluding

English. Prominence is also shown by font/letter size, space, and order.

Two instances, Figures 4.21 and 4.22 are used to illustrate the prominence of English: the former is top-down while the latter is bottom-up. In Figure 4.21 (here repeated for a different analytical focus), the four constitutionally-endorsed Nigerian major languages appear on a hospital sign in a public institution, as different versions of the same sign. The sign shows

English on top, of Yorùbá , Igbo and Hausa languages (all indigenous languages), as the first language and as the language of the sign's title, "NOTICE." Given the fact that this sign is located in a federal health facility (the University College Hospital, Ìbàdàn), which is expected to attract clients from all parts of the country, the prominence of English can be explained away as illustrative of the pride of place and official function accorded English as Nigeria's lingua franca.

However, English is found in a similar situation on Figure 4.22, which is located in a totally different environment whose predictability is less explicable. Figure 4.22 is an English-Yorùbá bottom-up neighborhood sign, located in Odo Ona Elewe (Ìbàdàn North East LGA), an indigenous area, whose prominent or first version is expressed in English, and not Yorùbá, the language of the Ìbàdàn indigenous population. Both Figures 4.21 and 4.22 are therefore similar

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(in that they show the visual hierarchy of languages) except that the latter has its title expressed in both Yorùbá and English.

Figure 4.21 Top-down quadrilingual sign.

Figure 4.22: Bottom-up bilingual sign.

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Yet, there are peculiar cases of code-dominance in the data, where Yorùbá dominates

English exceptionally (Figure 4.23) and where the preferred code is a rarely spoken language

(Figure 4.24). Illustrating the former situation, Figure 4.23 indicates a situation of Yorùbá-

English code-mixing. The sign (translated as "IMPORTANT WARNING WE DO NOT WANT

ANYONE TO PASS THROUGH THIS NEIGHBORHOOD FROM TIME 12AM TILL

5:30PM) contains only two English expressions, the temporal markers, 12AM and 5:30PM.

Because the preference of Yorùbá to English is so overwhelming that the sign could as well have been monolingual, a possible interpretation of the use of English to indicate only the temporal markers—despite the fact that Yorùbá has equivalent lexical forms—would be the sign- producer's consideration of the neighborhood's or the city's literacy conditions: that is, it is most likely that by choosing to write the temporal markers in English (and numerals) rather than

Yorùbá , the sign-producer reveals the low literacy level of the community as regards understanding the Yorùbá numbering system. This interpretation would need further investigation, though. Latin, a language hardly spoken, (except by the members of the legal profession) in the Ìbàdàn LL, is the preferred code in Figure 4.24, and it dominates English

(represented singly by the proper noun, India). Because of its location, at the Botanical Gardens, and because of the peculiarity of tourist signs to, among other functions, provide sign-consumers with new experiences (see Kallen, 2011), the preference of Latin on Figure 4.24 (in a larger society where the language is hardly used) is to provide the sign-consumer an authentic, linguistic, tourist experience.

Code preference as materiality of sign. As mentioned above, the material form of a sign is relevant to its meaning. Spolsky and Cooper (1991, p. 81), in their notable specification of the value of code preference as related to the permanence of signs and the skills required for

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making them, linked the processes of inscription—engraved, illuminated, painted, printed, typed, written—with particular carriers or frames—bronze, glass, metal, paper, plastic, poster, stone, tile, wooden board.

Figure 4.23 Yorùbá-dominant bilingual sign

Figure 4.24 Latin-dominant bilingual sign

When compared with this list, while the data reveal all the processes of inscription, they contain no occurrences of signs on bronze and stone. However, additionally, the data include signs

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written on roads (e.g. Figure 4.18) and walls (like Figure 4.16 and 4.17). Specifically, the data contain signs whose permanence and durability can be placed between the two extremes of temporary and permanent. At the former extreme is Figure 4.25, whose sign is used to publicize soccer games in a viewing center, that is, a big room or hall used for showing international sports, especially soccer, via satellite television for token fees. It contains two, (black and brown wooden) carriers, whose texts (identifying the games, their scheduled times, and the dueling teams) are written in chalk. The signs are placed by the road side, in the open, but are usually removed and placed behind closed doors, in the event of bad weather, rain, and at night. This non-permanence is to prevent the chalked text from rubbing off. Also, the materiality of chalk- on-board for such signs is functional: since the information being provided is temporary (usually such signs last about three days)—because it is no longer relevant after the game has been played—it will need to be obliterated and replaced, to advertize as many games as possible. The choice of this kind of material, instead of a more permanent and certainly more expensive material which would demand a less cumbersome process of text replacement, also symbolizes a sign-producer of a low economic status.

At the other end—choice of signs on permanent materials—is the example of Figure

4.26. This is a top-down sign, used to commemorate the commissioning of the studio complex of a government media house (the Broadcasting Corporation of State, BCOS). To index the event as permanent and as intended for being engraved in the hearts of anybody and everybody who passes by the sign, the sign-producer has opted for stone as the sign's material and engraving as its medium of inscription. These two choices have been identified as indicative of the permanence of a sign's materiality (Scollon & Scollon, 2003, 135-137).

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Meaning-Making for Sign-Consumption

This section discusses the processes of and the artifacts/equipment used for triggering the real and presumed reader in the acts of making meaning in the Ìbàdàn LL. These include, mainly, the issues of carrier mobility and the visibility and structure of the languages found therein.

In the first instance, the linguistic profile of the sign-consumers in Ìbàdàn, at the individual and societal levels, are not significantly different. In all, like observed in the first chapter of this dissertation, more than 500 indigenous languages are spoken in Nigeria.

Figure 4.25 Sports sign.

Though there are no records to enable a verifiable statement, owing to the historical, political, and administrative statuses of Ìbàdàn as the capital of the (former) Western region, it is predictable that all the languages spoken in Nigeria would be available in Ìbàdàn. Signs produced in English, Yorùbá, Hausa, Igbo, NigP and Latin are found in the survey area. While all the other languages are found on signs in different locations, the Latin language is found only at the Botanical Gardens (of the University of Ìbàdàn), on the wooden carriers which denoted the botanical names (and historical origins) of trees (see Figure 4.27).

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Figure 4.26 Commemorative sign.

Figure 4.27 Botanical name as Latin sign.

Yet, English and Yorùbá stand out as the two major languages found on the monolingual signs in the data. The prevalence of English and Yorùbá on the Ìbàdàn LL reflect the functional identity of both languages, the former as Nigeria's official lingua franca, the latter as the lingua franca of the Yorùbás, the indigenous population of the metropolis. Both signs thus orient to the indigenous and non-indigenous populations, variously. Given that 300 of the 332 signs in the

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data contain (some form of) English, it is incontrovertible that the Ìbàdàn LL is used to address a multilingual readership. Since Backhaus (2007, p. 58) rightly noted that the presence of a foreign language in a LL does not necessarily presuppose an orientation towards a foreign readership, and because the Botanical Gardens are a tourist center, the use of Latin to mark the trees would be for technical and aesthetic reasons alone: even if the trees had English or Yorùbá names, the

Latin names would come across to tourists as the most precise and probably the most exotic.

Mobility of Carrier

This concerns the spatial mobility of the carrier of the LL signs. As noted by Reh (2004), this feature, which explains how the fixedness (or otherwise) of sign carriers orient to different potential readers, specifies the significance of space-dependency in LL signage. In the Ìbàdàn

LL, the carriers have signs done in paint, posters, and stickers. The signs on stationary carriers are more pervasive than those on mobile carriers.

The mobile carriers are of two types, the different mechanical means of popular human transportation (lorries, buses, cars, tricycles, and motorcycles) and roadside wooden boards usually placed and removed by the sign-producers, at the close of work or late in the evening: the former category contains signs made with stickers, banners, or imprints, the latter are made with paint or hand-written. Signs on these types of carriers have no permanence of emplacement, such that both mobile and immobile readers could access them. Generally, the signs found on the mobile carriers can be sub-divided into various themes ranging from advertisement to advice to adulation to slogan, as in

Advertisement: Gas

Yes

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Advice: Se botimon (Gloss: Do as you can)

Adulation (Self-directed): Warisi, omo oloore (Gloss: Wareez, son of [a]

benefactor).

Adulation (Other-directed): Up Drogba (Note: Drogba is a famous non-Nigerian,

international soccer player).

Slogan: P.D.P. POWER

P.D.P. NO SHAKING

P.D.P. WE DEY KAMPE (Gloss: We are solid).

Specifically, the few instances of top-down mobile carriers are the State government-owned tricycles (see Figure 4.28) and buses, used for public transportation, labeled, Keke (bicycle)

Ajumose and Ajumose Shuttle, respectively. As an aside, Ajumose (joint action) is the State government's slogan, a coinage related to the content of the State governor's last name, Ajimobi

("born into a large family").

Figure 4.28 Top-down sign on mobile carrier

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On the other hand, Figure 4.29 illustrates how bottom-up signs, placed on a trailer-truck, function as description (LONG VEHICLE), advice (STOP, DO NOT PASS ON INSIDE), and adulation (OPEYEMI OLUWA or "God is worthy of my thanks," and OLA OLUWA or "God's wealth").

The stationary carriers have signs on building fronts, wooden, textile, and paper materials

(placed on or away from the buildings, walls, notice boards) as well announcements or notices on electricity poles, fences, trees, walls, e.t.c.). Of the lot, paper carriers, whose signs are either hand-written or computer-written, are usually the least durable (especially when placed outside the building) and used to convey the most temporally-limited information. For example, the lettering of the job advertisement (Figure 4.30) looks faded, obviously as a result of effect of weather conditions on the carrier, because it is done on paper and placed on the fence of the company which needs to hire more staff.

Figure 4.29 Signs on a mobile carrier

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Apart from the state-owned vehicles used as mobile carriers (mentioned above), the carriers of all the other top-down signs are fixed, usually bearing information addressing readers about the location of particular institutions and the availability of products and services, outlined earlier in Tables 4.1 and 4.2. However, the data show instances of fixed carriers metamorphosing into "mobile" carriers (since they are capable of being dispersed by human beings and natural elements [e.g. wind and flood]), as result of carelessness or a lack of proper maintenance on the part of those who are supposed to protect the carriers and signs. An example of this duality of identity is the case of the fallen airport sign in Figure 4.31.

Figure 4.30 Job advertisement on mobile carrier.

Monolingualism/Multilingualism as Visibility

The data contain signs whose languages are made more or less visible to the reader, demarcating overt (visible at first sight) from covert (not visible at first sight) visibility. These include monolingual or multilingual signs. In the data, there is an instance of two spatially removed but closely proximal carriers of two English monolingual signs of Odua Investment

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Company Limited, in which each carrier has a piece of information which contributes to the coherent interpretation of the other; as shown by Figures 4.32a and 4.32b, the two signs would be meaningful only if read as two parts of the same information only minimally differentiated by the antonymous semantic denotation of entering and exiting a business concern (Odua

Investment Company Limited), respectively.

Figure 4.31 Airport sign on stationary but mobile carrier

As such, this instantiation would be read as being intended by the sign-producers for triggering sign-consumers' prior encounters with such signs.

Also, there is a singular instance of covert multilingualism, exemplified by Figures 4.33a and 4.33b. Here, multilingualism (more specifically, bilingualism) is made covertly visible by the proximal emplacement of two signs (each sign was placed opposite the other, across the road) with identical information, meant for regulating the reader's behavior about waste disposal: while Figure 4.33a is a Yorùbá sign, Figure 4.33b is an English sign, and each sign is textually represented by a word-for-word translation of the content of the other.

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Figure 4.32a Covert monolingualism, first pair-part.

Figure 4.32b Covert monolingualism, second pair-part.

Figure 4.33a Yorùbá sign, covert multilingualism, first pair-part.

For overt multilingualism, two forms are identified in the data. In the first instance, as shown in Figure 4.34, there is the case of "make-believe translations" or the provision of a sign

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in two languages to give the impression that a bilingual reader is being targeted (Backhaus, 2007, p. 116).

Figure 4.33b English sign, covert multilingualism, second pair-part.

In this example, the sign's symmetric design, which reveals the positioning of an English text above a (seeming) Yorùbá text on the same frame and carrier, suggests that the two texts are translations or transliterations of each other. However, a closer look at the information therein reveals otherwise.

From the outset, the titles have different messages: IKEDE PATAKI means "Important

Information" (given Yorùbá 's structure of post-nominal adjectivalization) and not PUBLIC

NOTICE (which should have read IKEDE GBOGBOGBO). Then, the first text (1.) of the

English version is rendered wholly in English, except for the colloquialism, OKADA (an alternative term for motorcycle). However, its assumed translation contains both Yorùbá and

English expressions: while "MOTORCYCLE" (spelt correctly here but not in the earlier version) is preferred to its Yorùbá translation, ALUKUKU, the Yorùbá version still contains the time

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frame "7AM-7PM," although this has the same meaning as the Yorùbá , LEHIN AGOGO MEJE

ALE SI AGOGO MEJE ARO.

Figure 4.34 Overt multilingualism, "make-believe translation."

Similarly, apart from the English word "motor" which creeps into the Yorùbá version in the second text (numbered 2.), the remaining parts of the information in the Yorùbá texts unveil a duplication of English expressions in Yorùbá : as evidenced by the temporal nominal forms

(AGOGO MEWA ABO ALE or 10.30PM) and the acronym (NB, a Latin expression appropriated by English, meaning, "note carefully"). Given the situation of the sign in Figure

4.34, where the supposedly pure Yorùbá version also contains some information in English, the sign producer has oriented to two kinds of readers; (1) the English- Yorùbá bilingual and (2)the monolingual Yorùbá reader who may feel more comfortable with, or understand better, some expressions when they are rendered in English.

To illustrate the other form of overt multilingualism, let us analyze two health signs, giving the same information but each containing neither translated nor transliterated texts in

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English and another indigenous language. First, these signs (Figures 4.35 and 4.36) are emplaced clearly with the intention of activating the dominant populations of the specific locations of two different ethnolinguistic communities, the Yorùbás in the former, and the Hausas in the latter.

Figure 4.35 Health sign: overt multilingualism (Dugbe)

Figure 4.36 Health sign: overt multilingualism (Sabo)

They contain similar pictures (of a couple each) who, albeit, are dressed in two ethnically- different traditional attires—Yorùbá and Hausa, respectively—engaged in some form of

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conversation. This is coupled with the fact that both signs are placed in two different parts of the

Ìbàdàn metropolis: while Figure 4.35 (containing Yorùbá and English texts) is found somewhere in Dugbe, a habitation predominantly populated by the indigenous Yorùbá people, Figure 4.36

(revealing Hausa and English texts) is placed at Sabo, a geographical space with a predominant

Hausa population. Second, the texts, comprised of directive speech acts, are used to ask the reader to take an action—"go for family planning" (as each of the Yorùbá or Hausa texts means)—although their English content ("Get it together") suggest the sign-producer's meaning of a joint action, by a man and woman. Given the maturity levels, the smiling faces and heterosexual identity of each couple, it would be pragmatically presumed that the reader would understand that only a married couple could engage in this joint action, termed, "get it together."

Moreover, the fact that the men are the ones talking and the women, those listening, activates a familiar indexicality of the traditional Nigerian gender relations, which specify that men should speak and women should listen, cooperatively.

Monolingualism/Multilingualism as Structure

This section is devoted to readership orientation, as it relates to the structural forms of the monolingual or multilingual content of the texts on signs. As indicated in the outline of this dissertation's methodology (above), LL signs are produced in such ways that the translations and transliterations of multilingual information are provided to a greater or less extent. In Backhaus'

(2007) conceptualization of this aspect of the use of signs to orientate to the sign-consumer, what he called, "part-writing," he noted four types—monophonic, homophonic, mixed, and polyphonic. These terms would be used for the analysis to follow. A summative presentation of the quantitative distribution of the types found in the data (see Table 4.4) reveals an

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overwhelming preponderance of homophonic signs (89.16%) and a minimal presence of polyphonic signs (1.20%).

Table 4.4

Distribution of monolingualism/multilingualism as structure

Type Monophonic Homophonic Mixed Polyphonic Total

Instances 300 22 10 4 332

Percentage 89.16 6.63 3.01 1.20 100

Monophonic signs. A monophonic sign contains only one language. In the data, there are monophonic signs in English (in an overwhelming majority), NigP, and Yorùbá. The monolingual identity of the monophonic sign is determined by the text of the sign (and not any other instance of language visible in the sign, like the name of the product). As such, the words

"phensic tablets" on Figure 4.37 is regarded as identifying the product, and the datum (na carry go! E dey commot headache and pain for body) represents a monophonic sign in NigP (meaning,

"It's go ahead! It removes headache and pain from the body").

The data's monophonic or monolingual signs are of two broad categories, (1) signs containing minimal texts, such as single words or a couple of words and (2) signs containing lengthy information, that is, having more texts than specified in (1). On the whole, most of the monophonic texts contain English expressions. Those signs which contain minimal texts include

English signs in such domains as directional (in, out), traffic (bend, road diversion), place name

("state box," "national museum," "Tantalizers," "Skye Bank"), regulatory (no smoking, stop), and slogan ("Up Drogba"). On the other hand, most of the English monophonic signs are multi-

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worded and complex, containing all sorts of information like the commercial, bottom-up sign in

Figure 4.38.

Figure 4.37 Monophonic sign in NigP.

Figure 4.38 Multi-worded English bottom-up commercial sign.

All the few monophonic Yorùbá signs are of the bottom-up category. These signs are, like the English types, either minimally-worded or multi-worded/complex. Examples of the former are found in the catch-phrases and slogans contained in the stickers emplaced on cars and

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buses (ore ofe, alubarika, sebo timon) while the multi-worded signs, like Figure 4.22, are mainly behavior regulatory.

The English monophonic texts are used to target both the indigenous and non-indigenous sign-consumers living in and passing through the Ìbàdàn metropolis, since English is Nigeria's official language and lingua franca. However, the Yorùbá monophonic signs are oriented towards the predominant indigenous population, especially the non-elite or illiterates. Because such signs are few and far-between and of an infinitesimal fraction when compared with the

English monophonic signs, the percentage of the total population targeted by the Yorùbá monophonic signs are extremely low.

Homophonic signs. Homophonic signs contain at least two exact texts whose languages are either translated or transliterated completely. They signal what Reh (2004) interprets as

"technical" and "affective" values of communication: the former either foregrounds the insufficiency of individual multilingualism (that designing a given multilingual sign in one language or less languages would leave out some members of the targeted sign-consuming population) or the intention of a sign-producer to reach a particular group of sign-consumers (e.g. tourists, students); the latter makes relevant the use of languages for denoting the equality of a community's different linguistic and cultural groups (pp. 8-9). In the data, the two specific types of homophonic signs found are bilingual and quadrilingual.

For example, Figure 4.38 is a Yorùbá-English bilingual health sign placed within the walls of the University College Hospital (UCH). The sign's texts, which specify the dangers which five elements pose to the human eye, are complete translations of each other, first in

English and then in Yorùbá, right from the sign's title to its parting message: the only texts left untranslated specify the sign's producer (that is, Nigerian Ophthalmic Nurses Association

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(NONA), UCH chapter, State). This sign orients to both the technical and affective aspects of sociolinguistic meaning: because of, and despite, its location in a federal (national) facility, the language pairing is used to acknowledge the society's (Ìbàdàn's) most pervasive or visible form of multilingualism (that is, Yorùbá -English). Pragmatically too, it indexes a presupposition of, and a warning speech act targeted at, the sign-consumer's practice of self-medication, especially as concerning interventions in optical issues.

Figure 4.39 Homophonic, bilingual sign.

From another perspective, Figure 4.40 is a homophonic, quadrilingual sign whose texts, although also framed vertically, contain the complete information in each language before the next.

Emplaced at the cashier's, in the same context as Figure 4.21 (that is, UCH), Figure 4.40 is used to display the same information in four different languages—English, Yorùbá , Igbo, and Hausa, respectively—under the title, "NOTICE." The linguistic structuring of the sign, affectively, indicates the sign-producer's acceptance of the society's (both Ìbàdàn's and Nigeria's) multilingualism and technically, the equality of these four languages in the context of the sign's

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meaningfulness. Semantically and pragmatically, the sign is used to connect the sign-consumer in two major ways.

Figure 4.40 Homophonic, quadrilingual sign.

First, it is used to signal the four most-widely used and officially recognized languages in

Nigeria. As well, it is a directive meant for the hospital's patients and customers but can also function as a warning speech act to the consumer not to pay their fees to the wrong person (the reason for being told to deal with the "fee collector only") or to a fee collector who might deny the receipt of those fees (the reason for being instructed to "collect official receipt"). Second, the sign has been used to symbolize both the hierarchical significance of Nigerian languages and the code preference made by the sign's producer. Despite the fact that Ìbàdàn is a Yorùbá -speaking

L1 environment, the English Language is the first language on the sign (as indexed by the language of the sign's title and its first complete information), while the Yorùbá Language only comes second. Owing to the practicality of Nigeria's linguistic profile, which identifies English as the country's language of official interactions and multilingual settings (the kind of setting of a big hospital like the UCH), English is predictably the first language on the sign. Then, since the

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hospital is situated in a Yorùbá L1 environment, Yorùbá is expected to be the next most popular language. The motivation for the indexical ordering of Igbo and Hausa may not be easily discernible, however. From another perspective, this sign is symbolic of the business interests of its producer, that its money should not go into wrong hands. Given the fact that this sign is engraved on stone walls (foregrounding the importance of permanence) and can only be found by the cashiers, and not in any other section of the hospital, it makes sense to believe that one of the intentions of this signage is economical subjectivism rather than good reasoning (Goffman,

1983; Ben-Rafael, 2009; Shohamy et al., 2009).

Mixed signs. A mixed sign contains multilingual texts whose translations or transliterations are incomplete. Following Reh (2004, p. 10-14), a distinction can be made between "fragmentary multilingualism" (situation in which a sign's information is fully provided in one language alone but partially provided in another or others) and "overlapping multilingualism" (describing a sign whose texts are in at least two languages, one with a content repeated in another, the other, not repeated). Although Backhaus (2007) converged both types under "partial translation or transliteration," his exemplification (pp. 93-97) of this orientation to sign-consumption—specifically about the significance of pragmatic information—has shown the value of Reh's distinction. Two instances, in my data (Figures 4.39 and 4.40) will be used to illustrate this reality.

Figure 4.41 is an English-Yorùbá top-down sign emplaced at one of the locations of the cashiers at the Broadcasting Corporation of Oyo State (BCOS). The sign's translation is mixed and overlapping, because while the initial part of the text, CASH OFFICE, is used to name the location/room, the remaining part of the text's information is used to indicate the point of payment.

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Figure 4.41 Mixed sign, semantically marked.

While the red paint color symbolizes a desire to attract the attention of the sign-consumer whenever he or she is within sight, the importance of this location as a point of payment is signaled by the repetition, and by implication, foregrounding, of the spatial deixis, nibi or here.

Being a top-down sign, granted the official status of English, and given the code-preference exhibited by the producers of such signs in the data analyzed previously, the choice of the

English text as the one not needing translation is predictably illustrative of the preeminence of

English in the Nigerian LL. So, the marking of sociolinguistic meaning in Figure 4.41 is semantic.

On the other hand, Figure 4.42 (used for a different purpose above but repeated here) is a

Yorùbá-NigP bottom-up commercial sign. It is used to reveal a fragmentary multilingualism, since the text's full information (glossed as "Good honey is available for sale here") is provided in Yorùbá. Moreover, the use of the red color to highlight a specific part of the information, that part which indicates that a product is available for sale in a particular spatial location (nibiyi or here), specifies commodification and location as the most important parts of the information in the sign. The minimal information in the NigP part (glossed as, "There is honey") could be interpreted to mean the inferior importance of NigP in the LL and the sign-producer's

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identification of a "less important" group of non- Yorùbá-speaking sign consumer. Figure 4.42 is thus seen as being pragmatically marked.

In sum, the mixed sign contains texts whose accessibility is oriented towards a multilingual sign-consumer, who must know all the languages in which the texts are rendered.

Figure 4.42 Mixed sign, pragmatically marked.

While the linguistic competence of such an addressee can be more minimal for him/her to decipher in a mixed sign, such competence has to be less minimal for understanding a polyphonic sign, examples of which are analyzed below.

Polyphonic signs. The polyphonic sign contains texts in two or more languages whose information are completely demarcated from the other: "[i]n other words, one version does not give away any information contained in the respective co-appearing version" (Backhaus, 2007, p.

97). Two instances of such signs, which Reh (2004) tags "complementary multilingual writing" are discussed below.

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Figure 4.43 is a Latin-English sign (emplaced on a tree at the Botanical Gardens of the

University of Ìbàdàn) in which Latin is used to name the object (the type of tree) (Terminalia

Superba Combretaceae) while English identifies the tree's geographical origin (Africa). The sign is used to perform both informational and symbolic functions: the sign provides the object's onomastic and historical identities; the sign's Latin text—since it is not translated or transliterated in any form in a LL or country where Latin is not a major language—is used to denote the stylistic framing of code preference in a peculiar tourist LL. And adjusting to this indexical value of the botanical name, the sign-consumer has to rely on the purpose of reading

(that is, tourism) and prior experience with such a sign (Collins & Slembrouck, 2007) to interpret this sign.

Figure 4.43 Polyphonic tourist sign.

From a different perspective, Figure 4.44 is an English-Yorùbá polyphonic sign emplaced on a garbage container. The sign's vertical structural framing shows a movement from English to

Yorùbá and back to English: the first part of the information, given in English, is a direct speech act, requesting environmental well-being from the sign-consumer, "KEEP STATE

CLEAN"; the second part is a Yorùbá text—AJUMOSE GBOGBO WA NI O (meaning, "It is our

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joint action, really")—functioning as a recurrent interpellation of the present (that is, year 2012) state government's efforts at ensuring a better life for its citizens; and in the third part, the identity of the sign-producer, one of the Ìbàdàn LGA's, is revealed, in English. Thus, this sign provides information, albeit skeletal and implied, about the function of the container as well as its source. In addition, it symbolizes a government's offer of good governance to its people, in this instance, in the domain of environmental sanitation: this symbolic meaningfulness, then, falls within the remit of Goffman's (1963) "positive self-presentation."

Figure 4.44 Polyphonic sanitation sign.

Because no complete information is provided in either of the two sets of languages found in the polyphonic signs discussed above, the sign-consumer needs a proficiency in the texts' languages to respond to them. While such type of linguistic proficiency might be a tall order in the case of Figure 4.43 (because of the near-extinction of Latin in the linguistic repertoire of

Nigerians, except lawyers'), it is commonplace in the case of Figure 4.44 (given the ubiquitous presence of English and Yorùbá in the Ìbàdàn LL). The negligible occurrence of polyphonic signs in the data (1.20%) marks its unpopularity and low level of functional distribution in the

Ìbàdàn LL.

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Meaning-making as Linguistic Dynamism

Introduction

The LL is a site for the contacts of languages (or codes) and scripts and an investigation of this contact situation is comprised of the "how" of meaning-making in the LL. In the literature, the general tendency has been to investigate the diachronic development of a given LL as it unveils how the mixed codes and mixed scripts reveal meanings about the relationships between sign- producers and sign-consumers (e.g. Backhaus, 2007; Reh, 2004; Spolsky & Cooper, 1991).

However, there is no evidence of the effect of Ìbàdàn's historical development on the meanings projected by its LL. In this section, therefore, the values and significances of the contact of languages, and how those languages interfere with one another—in relation to the making of meaning in the Ìbàdàn LL—are analyzed and interpreted.

Idiosyncrasies

One major manifestation of language contact is the occurrence of linguistic idiosyncrasies. Predictably, these idiosyncrasies abound in the use of the dominant "foreign" language, English, in the Ìbàdàn LL signs. Yet, these peculiarities are not restricted to English; even Yorùbá, the L1 of Ìbàdàn's indigenous population, is idiosyncratically used. In the data, orthographical and lexical idiosyncrasies are found in the English and Yorùbá texts, though more in the former than in the latter. The idiosyncratic orthographic occurrences will be treated first.

In the types of idiosyncratic orthographical English found, spelling forms predominate.

Examples include deviant spellings of English words like "MOTOCYCLE" (for "motorcycle"),

"ALLIMENT" (for "alignment), and "KANOPY' (for "canopy"). These spelling forms reveal the sign-producers' transfer of the linguistic realities of Yorùbá to English. The deviations in the first two examples are traceable to three interwoven factors: the syllabic structure of Yorùbá (which

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follows a consonant-vowel [cv] pattern); the non-existence of the schwa in Yorùbá; and the lack of consonant clustering in Yorùbá (the nearest form, of consonant clustering, gb is treated as a single sound). As a result, because "motorcycle" is pronounced motosaiku (mo/to/sai/ku) in

Yorùbá, it is possible and convenient for the Yorùbá sign-producer to replace the ("or," the lexical realization of the schwa sound /ə/) with ("o," the lexical and phonetic form of the rounded, frontal vowel sound /o/) and to substitute "os" for "orc." Similarly, the word "alliment" reflects a contraction of "alignment" to reveal an assimilation of "gn", this time, to indicate the

Yorùbá [cv] structure. In the case of "Kanopy," the initial alphabet "k" is substituted for the

English "c", because Yorùbá has only the former and its phonetic realization can only be paralleled by the latter (among all the English alphabets).

In the Yorùbá texts, there are instances of orthographic markedness and under- specification. For example, the Yorùbá monophonic sign JOWOMASETOSIBIYI is grammatically irregular since it ordinarily should be a collocation of five independent words

JOWO MASE TO SIBI YI (Please don't urinate over here). Again, Yorùbá's writing system has some peculiar features which any instance of the language should reflect: an absence of such features, in places where they should occur, means linguistic under-specification. As relevant to this analysis, the use of tone marks and diacritics is an important aspect of the Yorùbá Language.

As a result, standard and conventional Yorùbá orthography is hinged on, among other considerations, the tone marking of vowels and the syllabic nasal (n)—following a three-tier tone system classified into high (´), low (`), and mid (unmarked)—and the use of lower diacritics to distinguish three sets of alphabets, e/ẹ, o/ọ, and s/ṣ (Bamgbose, 1967). However, because they lack some or all of these salient features, most of the Yorùbá signs contain Yorùbá words which may be read awkwardly or mistaken as belonging to any other language. While the text in the

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Yorùbá-English family-planning sign, Figure 4.45 (meaning, "Go for childbirth control") is tone- marked, and so, standard, most of the Yorùbá texts in the Ìbàdàn LL are without this graphologically and semantically salient marks.

Examples of such deviant expressions include texts showing minimal deviation (as in texts whose words are not tone-marked, e.g. Ọmọ Ẹlẹran 2, DA ILẸ SIBI KIO ṢOFO ỌMỌ ATI

DUKIA) or major deviation (lacking both tone marks and specified diacritics, like SEBO

TIMON, WARISI OMO OLOORE, JOWOMASETOSIBIYI and the lengthy Yorùbá sign in Figure

4.34).

Figure 4.45 Sign, showing standard Yorùbá orthography

Another index of orthographical peculiarity is the use of lower and upper case letters.

While this is minimally represented by the Yorùbá text, Tọ Sibi KO YAWERE, in which the motivation for the switch from upper to lower cases is not too clear, it is also evident in Figure 4.

46 which is used to advertise the sale of cars and buses. Unlike in the earlier example, however, the use of uppercases for "tokunbo cars" and "bus" could be intentional: it could be the sign-

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producer's way of directing the attention of the sign-consumer to the object(s) of sale, a common orthographic practice in the commercial domain (Backhaus, 2007, 118).

Cases of idiosyncrasies of a morphosyntactic kind also abound, specifically in the

English texts. One major manifestation is the absence of inflections. The cases of missing inflections include "REFEREES OFFICE" and "CHILDRENS CLINIC," in which the possessive markers should be used to inflect the first nouns, respectively. Also, there are instances of missing words.

Figure 4.46 Sale sign, showing lettering in upper and lower cases.

For example, the omission of a determiner—the definite article—"the" in the space between "Be" and "alert," from the environmental sanitation sign, "Be on alert and listening to the media for updated emergency information and instruction," apart from the wrong use of the present continuous verb, "listening", instead of the more intelligible base verb, "listen."

Similarly, as found on a sign at a government-owned gas station, the preposition "off" is used

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instead of the phrasal verb, "put off," to express a major directive in Nigeria's gas stations, "PLS

[please] OFF YOUR TELEPHONE SET."

There are also examples of the use of wrong words. For instance, while the word

"Nigeria" should have been "Nigerian" in the text NIGERIA ADULT #50 (# is the sign for naira,

Nigeria's unit of currency) at the entrance of Bower's Tower (a tourist site), African should have been used to replace African in the restaurant sign extract, "WE DEAL WITH ALL AFRICA

FOODS." Again, the word is "bounds" in the English idiom (italicized) in the text of the sign

"THIS ROAD IS OUT OF BOUND" and the verb "save" should have been substituted with its noun variant, "safe" in the text of the aviation sign, "We wish you save passages through our airport." Similarly, the lexical form "goatry," in Figure 4.46, is substituted for "goatery" ("a place where goats are kept"), probably based on the sign-producer's knowledge of analogous English words, like "rabbitry" and "poultry."

Another type of lexical idiosyncrasy can be termed, "peculiar collocation." This is exemplified with two texts. In the English-Yorùbá sign in Figure 4.22, two temporal markers are repeated in Yorùbá and English, in the Yorùbá version of the sign: AGOGO MEWA ABO ALE

(10.30 PM) and AGOGO MOKANLA ABO ALE (11.30 PM). Given the fact that the English temporal markers in these texts have been indicated in the English version, a repetition (of the same concept) in the Yorùbá section of the sign is rather peculiar. Using the same sign for illustration, the collocation "enter into" in the text, "MOTORS ARE NOT ALLOWED TO

ENTER INTO THE COMMUNITY..." is peculiar, since the preposition, "into," is already implied in, and a part of the meaning of, "enter." Particularly popular is the expression "food canteen," used to identify a place where food is available, as in the sign extract, "OLA MUMMY

FOOD CANTEEN." Since the meaning of the noun "canteen," already subsumes the availability

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of food, the collocation of "food" and "canteen" is therefore idiosyncratic. From another perspective, "sheep" and "goatry" (which should be "goatery"), in Figure 4.47, is peculiar.

Although both words are nouns referring to two animals, one names an animal ("sheep") while the other is meant to name a place (where goats are kept), and so both cannot be used to qualify a word or expression, whatever "F.U.G." means.

Figure 4.47 Sign showing lexical idiosyncrasy.

However, the lexical forms are not all idiosyncratic: some are expected consequences of language contact. By far the most visible exemplification of the lexical patterning of the Ìbàdàn

LL are three instantiations of morphological processes, loans and neologisms. In all the examples of loan words, English is the donor language, and Yorùbá, the recipient language. The data consist of such Yorùbá words as "suga" (sugar), "kapisu" (capsule) (found in Figure 4.39) which are loaned from English. The neologisms are in two broad forms, colloquialisms and semantic shifts. The colloquial expressions are: "k" used to stand for "thousand" as in "2k," "4k," "60k" (in a sign containing the specification of gate fees for a comedy show); "yahoo yahoo," coined from a reduplication of Yahoo (the name of an American internet corporation) but meaning, "internet

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fraud," found on a bottom-up sign titled, "STOP YAHOO YAHOO"; okada, referring to

"motorcycle," coined from "Okada Air," a defunct Nigerian airline, are found on many signs, including Figure 4.34 ; tokunbo, meaning "imported used vehicles," originating from a Yorùbá name for "a child born outside the shores of Nigeria (especially the US or Europe) and then brought home," as found on Figure 4.46 ; and 419, meaning "fraud" or "fraudster", coined from

Section 419, the part of the Nigerian Constitution focused on advanced fee fraud (as on the sign,

"THIS LAND IS NOT FOR SALE, BEWARE OF 419").

Other examples include specific instances of semantic reinvestment, in which the meanings of words are either generalized or narrowed. These are examples of generalization:

"wear," (also "wears" elsewhere in the data), used as a noun, meaning "clothing and accessories"

(see Figure 4.48) is ordinarily a specification of a kind of clothing (e.g. rainwear); "battery charger," meaning someone who charges a battery (rather than the dictionary meaning of "an appliance for charging"), a coinage "based on analogy with the verb + 'er' suffix occupational lexemes such as ... 'pepper grinder'" (Alabi, 2000, p. 111). Finally, there is a case of narrowing, in "vulcaniser," a sign specifying the occupation of the sign-producer. According to the Oxford

English Dictionary (1989) is broadly "a skilled workman especially one who is concerned with the making or use of machinery" (p. 1680). However, as also noted by Alabi (2000), in her discussion of occupational lexis in Nigerian English, a vulcanizer in Nigeria, has a meaning narrowed to "one whose job has to do with patching inner tyre tubes, inflating tyres, changing vehicle wheel rims etc" (p. 110).

Also, the meanings of words are re-assigned in some of the signs contained in the data.

For example, Figure 4.49 contains a popular Nigerian occupational tag, "fashion designers," which is uniquely conceptualized in NE.

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Figure 4.48 Commercial sign containing neologism

Figure 4.49 Commercial sign, showing semantic re-assignment.

In the Longmans Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDCE, 1978), the tag, "fashion designer" specifies "someone whose job is to plan (DESIGN) new styles in (women's) clothes" (p. 398).

However, from personal experience, the business owner (and the apprentices) which such signs are used to identify, more often than not, can only sew but are incapable of designing clothing.

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As such, the text might have been used here to mean "seamstresses" (because BLESSING [here implied as the name of the owner of the business] is a predominantly female Nigerian name), since the word, "seamstress" means "a woman whose job is sewing" (LDCE, 1978, p. 1002).

Most often, Nigerians use such idiosyncratic lexis to appeal to modernity and ego-boosting, as attested to Alabi (2000, p. 110). Thus, the semantic re-assignment of "fashion designers" would be seen as being used to perform the symbolic function of Goffman's (1983) "positive self- presentation."

From the foregoing, the data contain signs which reflect orthographic and lexical idiosyncratic creations in English and Yorùbá, the most visible languages in the Ìbàdàn LL.

While the incidence of these creations might be due to the sign-producer's carelessness or intentions, competence or creativity, the specific English examples found in the data reflect the contact of English with Yorùbá, specifically, and Nigerian sociolinguistic practices, generally.

Layering

Layering, in this study, has two senses: conventional layering or the emplacement of at least two signs of which one is more recent or more temporary than the other (Backhaus, 2007, pp. 130; Scollon & Scollon, 2003, p. 137); parasitic layering or the co-occurrence of two non- identical signs in a discursive or chaotic manner (Kallen, 2011, p. 42).

There are several examples of layering in the data. Two examples are used to illustrate the conventional sense of the term: while Figure 4.50 shows a simple illustration, Figure 4.51 indicates a complex structure. As shown in Figure 4.50 , found on the wall of a gas station, NO

SMOKING, the behavior regulatory text (the relevant part of the sign) is layered. This English monophonic sign indicates an older version placed above a newer version, an explanation justifiable by the brighter color of the red in the lower sign.

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Figure 4.50 Gas station sign showing layering.

In the complex semiotics of Figure 4.51, a bilingual restaurant sign, "OLA MUMMY

FOOD CANTEEN," is represented by two vertically-framed signs. While the upper sign looks newer, is better planned, and is emplaced by Coca Cola (notice the product sign at the bottom right corner), the lower sign seems older, less planned, and lacks a source. Again, though the newer version identifies the name, owner, and location of the restaurant and pragmatically indicates the symbiosis of food and drink in both pictorial semiotics (of three people eating food and drinking Coca Cola) and lexical collocation ("better together"), it leaves out the specification of the types of food available (in the restaurant). While each of the versions is English-Yorùbá bilingual, the newer version contains fewer English words than the older. An idiosyncratic text is however observed in the name of the owner of the restaurant: this is given as ALHAJA BOLA

YUSUFF in one version but as ALHAJA BOLA ODOLAYE, in the second, even though the name identifies the same person. Given the sociolinguistic realities of personal names in Nigeria, the sobriquet, "Alhaja" identifies a woman, while the disparity in the second names would most probably be indicative of a change in the bearer's marital status.

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The layering pattern of Figure 4.51 however indexes two notable changes: a change in the restaurant owner's socio-economic status and a change in the society's economic styles.

Regarding the latter, the newness of the sign's first version is an information about her improved socio-economic identity which is indicated by her decision to effect the emplacement of a new sign even if the old one is still relevant for marking the LL. Moreover, the fact that Coca Cola, a global beverage brand, would accept to produce a sign with its logo identifying this restaurant is a confirmation of the restaurant's, and by extension, the restaurant owner's, improved commercial status. Secondly, the collaboration indicated in the newer sign (showing a partnership between the business-owner and Coca Cola) reveals a change in the society's signage patterning: since the older sign does not indicate any coaction, and since such partnerships in sign-production are recent developments in the signage of the Ìbàdàn LL.

For parasitic layering or parasitism, Kallen's (2011) matrix of a systematization of the spatial independence and conscious planning of signs, as either discursive and chaotic, and my additional operationalization of this matrix (see above), will be used to do the analysis to follow.

Three clearly-demarcated instances are used to discuss the patterns found in the data: Figures

4.52, 4.53, and 4.54. In Figure 4.52 (Figure 3.4, repeated for ease of, and a focally different, analysis), we find a chaotic relationship of two co-occurring signs of which the lower is parasitic on the upper: the former is less consciously planned than the latter; the latter is used to identify the location of a law-enforcement outfit, while the former is an advertisement of an educational institution; the latter symbolizes force while the former indexes freewill and democracy; the latter is framed on a permanent carrier (made of steel, securely fixed in the ground) while the former is framed on a temporary carrier (made of textile, detachable from its prop); the source of the latter is top-down while that of the former is bottom-up.

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Figure 4.51 Layering in a restaurant sign.

However, the pattern of parasitism in Figure 4.53 is discursive. Here, the simple sign, "FOR

SALE" is parasitic on the rental sign, titled, "TONY RENTALS." Both signs are different in certain respects: the former sign is used to advertize a product (the items used available for rentals) while the latter sign indicates the availability of a service; given the freshness of their paints, the former sign is newer than the latter. However, both signs are discursively related in many more aspects: both signs are commercial, bottom-up, consciously planned, expressed in the same language (English), and framed on the same material (wood) on the same carrier (steel gate).

Finally, Figure 4.54 is an instance of peculiar parasitism. In this case, a program, the passing out (graduation) parade of a batch (Batch A) of corps members (graduates of Nigeria's polytechnic and universities) in the year 2012, is indicated on a manual scoreboard (at the

Adamasingba Stadium). As such, the program advertisement is the "parasite" while the text "vs," meaning "versus," used to connect the opposing teams in a soccer game, is the peculiar "host."

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Figure 4.52 Chaotic parasitism.

Figure 4.53 Discursive parasitism.

This parasitic patterning is also largely chaotic, although both are top-down signs and expressed in English: the host belongs to the recreational domain while the parasite belongs to the domain of public institution; the parasite is less consciously planned and more temporary than the host; despite the fact that the host contains just a text (an abbreviation of "versus") while the parasite contains eight texts, the former indicates a complete information while the latter's information is incomplete (observe the space between B and H in the sign, the gap is filled by this researcher's

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knowledge of previous similar signs, a knowledge which the sign-producer would use the sign to trigger in every consumer of this sign).

Figure 4.54 Peculiar parasitism.

In sum, the two broad types of layering discussed in this section suggest that the Ìbàdàn

LL contains some signs which are used to reveal the values of the coexistence of older and newer as well as permanent and temporary signs, sometimes on different carriers, but often on the same carriers. Although they depict or predict no changes in the historical or linguistic identity of the

Ìbàdàn LL, they reflect layering as both conventional and non-conventional signage.

Summary

To sum up, meaning-making as a collaborative enterprise connecting sign-producers and sign-consumers in the Ìbàdàn LL dwells on allusion (indirect reference). The allusions, which are almost predominantly evident in the bottom-up signs, have been used to activate four major types of knowledge: linguistic, cultural, economic, and religious. These knowledge-types, some shared and some presumed, are most evident in the naming patterns on the signs.

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At the linguistic end, the findings reveal a semantic connection between the names of sign-producers and the services they offer, such that the signs are transparent carriers of meaning: this is the case with such bilingual signs as OMOGBEDU ("son-of-a [type-of-very- loud] drum") PRODUCTION (used to name a publicity company) and AGBELERE ("farming means profit") Cooperative Investment Credit Society (which identifies a farmers' credit and thrift society), which are used to activate the shared linguistic-cum-cultural knowledge of the meaningfulness of Yorùbá names. From another perspective, many signs contain computer- mediated abbreviated linguistic forms, usually identified with text-messaging. As such, "4"

(for),"@" (at), and "e"(electronic)—in extracts like "ELYON 4ME LTD," "KELVIN 4 REAL,"

"BUY YOUR ICE-BLOCK @11 ORELOPE STREET", and "Professional e-Currency Exchange

Services"—are sign-producers' linguistic allusions to technologically-savvy sign-consumers.

Finally, as related to linguistic allusiveness, many signs reveal the anglicization of Yorùbá names in the identification of sign-producers. These include "ADEFEM" (a clipped form of Adefemi),

"KAYUS" (combination of clipping and suffixation [of] "us" from Kayode), "MR AJAYSCO"

(an English address term placed before a clipped form of Ajayi inflected with a suffix "sco"), and

"YOBAT" (most likely and most often, a compound or blend of two names beginning with or containing the letters "YO" and "BAT," in that order), all among the many categories identified by Ajileye (2012) as indexical of the patterning of Yoruba-English bilingual names of persons and businesses.

The case of intermittent power supply, a major issue in Nigeria's industrial growth, is an economic knowledge alluded to and triggered by some of the signs. The availability of uninterrupted power supply, which should be a given, is regarded as special in the Nigerian commercial context. As such, the constancy of power supply is a knowledge which the sign-

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producer has to provide specifically for goods and services whose quality depend on the availability of this federal-government-monopolized source of energy. This fact is realized in signs which are used to advertize the availability of a particular product, "Ice Block", and a particular service, "constant power supply": the product is advertized in signs like "ICE BLOCK

SOLD HERE" and "BUY YOUR ICE BLOCK HERE" while both the product and the service are offered in Figure 4.55. In this mobile sign, all the relevant information for publicizing (the content of a sign) are provided: the availability of two products ("ice block" and "drums"), their location, contact's phone number, and the economically-salient caveat, "no power failure." The use of the upper case in specifying the major product (ice block) and the alluded knowledge (no power failure) foregrounds the emphasis placed on both pieces of information by the sign- producer.

Another knowledge token usually alluded to, but often unnoticed because of its ubiquity, is religious knowledge. With more than 90% of the population attending religious programs and praying regularly, Nigerians are the most religious people in the world (BBC, 2004; Chiluwa,

2008). This fact is revealed in and illustrated by the names of Ìbàdàn shops and business outlets whose examples include: "MERCY OF GOD VENTURES"; "BLESSED COMPUTERS";

"DROPS OF MERCY DOCTORS' POLYCLINIC"; "BALM OF GILEAD PET PARADISE";

"IRANLOWO OLUWA (meaning, "GOD'S SUPPORT") SHEEP AND GOATRY FUG";

"IRETI-OLU (meaning "GOD'S SUPPORT") GROUP OF SCHOOLS"; "OGO-OLUWA

(meaning, "GOD'S GLORY") BLOCK INDUSTRY."

In rounding off this chapter, it is necessary to observe that the communication between the sign-producer and the sign-consumer is flawed or not straightforward in some of the signs: some signs barely communicate (e.g. Figure 4.56), others practically fail to communicate (e.g.

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Figure 4.57) any interpretable meanings, and there is an instance of false or unverifiable information (Figure 4.58).

Figure 4.55 Allusive mobile sign

The bottom-up sign in Figure 4.58 contains an identification of the name, telephone numbers, email and web addresses of the sign-producer, without any clear indication of the product or service available. Although the title, "Feats Support Services," suggests that the sign claims the availability of particular services, the fact that the title is abbreviated in the acronym,

"FSS", (on the left side of the sign) and the established pattern of acronyming would necessitate a different reading: since acronyms are used to identify the names of organizations or frequently referenced terms, and since FSS is not a frequently referenced term, the title would most certainly be the identity of the sign-producer. As such, the sign-producer does not make known to the sign-consumer, clearly enough, the available services. This poor reading orientation is worse in the billboard in Figure 4.59. Here, the sign contains a quote from the Bible (the book of

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Isaiah, chapter 43 verse 19), the bust of a woman, and nothing besides. Neither the sign-producer nor the sign's purpose has been indicated in any form whatsoever, making the sign meaningless

(as a LL index of producer-consumer communication).

The example of Figure 4.58 is a financial bottom-up sign which contains some false information. The sign contains information about the sign-producer's name and (probably self- scored) ranking, the service being offered, the company's slogan, physical location and mobile contacts. The falsehood, here, is in the sign's virtual address, www.standardexchange.com: this web address is non-existence on the Internet, the closest being www.standardexchangeuk.com (a

British financial service provider, which does not claim to have a Nigerian affiliate either). This deliberate falsehood would then be read as a dubious attempt by the sign-producer to orient to the sign-consumer's socio-economic knowledge, that only reputable companies are found on the world wide web, given the global use of the Web as a marketing medium for enacting relationship building in producer-consumer interactions (Geissler, 2001).

Figure 4.56 Barely communicative sign

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Figure 4.57 "Non-communicative" sign.

Figure 4.58 Financial sign displaying false information.

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CHAPTER 5

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS

Summary of Dissertation

The purpose of the study is to characterize the LL of Ìbàdàn metropolis as revealed in the signs found in its 11 LGAs. This survey area displays no marked predominant presence of any group of Nigerians (even the Hausa neighborhood of Sabo still has many non-Hausas, who were born or bred in the neighborhood or who have inter-married with the Hausas). As the introductory chapter shows, English has become a global language and thus, an important language for marking the LL. The connection of English to LL research has been shown to be founded, chiefly, on the language's "world-wide" acceptance as the index of globalization, commodification, and international communication (Bolton, 2012). Again, Ìbàdàn (as an example of a typical Nigerian context) shows a positive attitude to the English Language, both as regards the status of the language as the official, de jure means of communication as well as concerning its practical de facto status as the language of literacy, media communication, and modernity. Yet, the value of NigP, as the most-widely spoken, but still officially underwhelming, language in Nigeria (Faraclas, 2004) is also noted.

There is no agreement yet on the definitions of many of the LL terms. Although the elucidations of the terms, "linguistic landscape" and "sign" are largely uniform, there are fairly divided opinions on operationalizing LL's components (sign, agent and reader) and functions.

Most significant is the disagreement about delineating the unit of analysis (what constitutes a sign) and the survey area in LL research. Given the multidimensional nature of LL investigations, a review of extant theoretical approaches registers the use of the LL to, especially, capture ethnographic issues of language change and reflect local and localized sociolinguistic

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realties. It ultimately shows the movement towards contextualism (Leeman & Modan, 2009,

2010) and semiotics (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011).

The methodology shows a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, as the methodology contains both clearly identified-categories and some quantification as well as descriptive statements and subjective conclusions. Although leaning heavily on Backhaus (2007) theoretical framework, the study includes insights from other LL researchers, notably Reh (2004) and Scollon & Scollon (2003). The survey area is Ìbàdàn, one of the most populous metropolises in Nigeria (and Africa), containing people from all the nation's linguistic and ethnic units.

Although the study covered all the LGAs in the metropolis, specific places of historical and social importance were purposely sampled. The camera is the equipment. Also, the signs, identified and analyzed, are sorted by a rule thumb, based on the literature and the researcher's identity as an indigene and L1 speaker of Yorùbá. The unit of analysis is the written text (as an independent entity or as combined with the semiotic text). Practically, the framework for the analysis identifies meaning-making as founded in the processes of sign-production, sign- consumption, and the communication between the signs' languages and the sociolinguistic world of their emplacement.

The analysis reveals both top-down (official) and bottom-up (private sign) signs, showing the active participation of governments, associations, and corporate and private individuals in investing the Ìbàdàn LL with meaning. In the top-down signs, government-related agents (local,

State, and federal governments, government agencies and departments, non-governmental agencies collaborating with government) are the major sign-producers. From both sources, the most visible language and the preferred code on the LL signs is English, with Yorùbá coming a distant second. The other languages found on the signs are Hausa, Igbo, Latin, and NigP. The

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structural form of the languages shows a preponderance of homophonic sign and a most dismal representation of polyphonic signs. The linguistic dynamics reveal a rich harvest of both lexical and orthographic idiosyncrasies and instances of both conventional layering (Scollon & Scollon,

2003) and parasitism (Kallen, 2011).

Thus, by investigating the sociolinguistic realities of meaning-making in the Ìbàdàn LL, this study shows how the languages spoken in this Nigerian context are made visible, by virtue of signage. This visibility has been shown to underscore and unearth issues related to language attitude, language ideology and multilingualism, all favoring the English Language.

Discussion of Findings

On the whole, the Ìbàdàn LL revealed very interesting sociolinguistic patterns of language variation and language contact, most often, but not entirely, confirming many of the assumptions and findings of other studies. The multilingual signs found in the Ìbàdàn LL reveal various combinations of the six major Nigerian languages, here listed in their order of salience and prevalence: English, Yorùbá, Hausa, Igbo, Latin, and Nigerian Pidgin. Of these, signs written in English (alone or as combined with another language) number 300, accounting for about 92.4%, of the data. The making of meaning investigated in this dissertation is interpreted within sociolinguistics. Thus, whatever is sociolinguistically meaningful in the patterns found in the data has been identified and analyzed.

Meaning-making in sign production has been interpreted along the two major paths identified in the literature: top-down (emanating from official agents) and bottom-up (emanating from private agents). In the data, top-down signs are found to be almost entirely in the non- commercial domain: used for naming place and objects, regulating behavior, commemorating events, specifying location, and tourism. This reflects a tendency towards a major

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conceptualization of government, as instituted for collective well-being, following Aristotle, rather than for commercial purposes. This, interpreted within the structuration principles of the social sciences, means the top-down signs are used for an expression of both "good reasons"

(Coleman & Fararo, 1992; Shohamy et al., 2010) and administrative collective-identity (Ben-

Rafael, 2009; Shohamy et al., 2010). On the other hand, although the bottom-up signs show almost a balance between commercial and commercial signage, the commercial domain displays the greater variety. So apart from using the LL in the same ways as the top-down producers, bottom-up producers use the signs to reveal the contents (products, services, or both), places, and ideologies of their commercial entities: this other function thus locates the variety of the bottom- up signs within the "positive self-presentation" principle (Goffman, 1963, Ben-Rafael, 2009).

Also, English has been found to be the preferred code in the Ìbàdàn LL, as is the case in most other English-as-L2 contexts (Akindele, 2010; Kotze, 2010; Reh, 2004). This finding becomes particularly interesting since Yorùbá is the favored language of the indigenous Yorùbá people who dominate this context. Even most of the signs that are Yorùbá monolingual and homophonic still contain some English, no matter how minimal. This manifestation attunes with what some other researchers (including Jaworski & Thurlow, 2011) have noted, that the language that is most preferred in a LL may not be the most widely used. The semiotic coding of the signs shows a top-for-preferred and bottom-for-marginalized framing pattern. Moreover the color red is used for indicating the text being emphasized on signs. As such, Nigerian sign- producers do not, on the whole, align with Scollon & Scollon's (2003) position on how semiotic resources are used to indicate code-preference. From a different perspective, though all the materials used for sign-production, identified by Scollon & Scollon (2003), are found in the data, some of the signs are represented in walls and roads (though the latter signs are graffiti). This

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means, probably, that any material form found framing and carrying signs in a given LL outside the comprehensive list provided by the Scollons would be "illegal."

Although both stationary and mobile carriers bear the signs in the data, signs of the former type far outweigh those of the latter. This is a reflection of the superior durability of stationary carriers and an orientation towards physically mobile sign-consumers. The overwhelmingly high percentage of stationary carriers in the top-down signs signals the intention of the top-down sign producers to project the durability, even if the space dependence, of their signs. Even the top-down LL signs on the few government-owned mobile carriers would still be considered more durable than the bottom-up equivalents because the purpose of the latter— political propaganda—would necessitate a continuous maintenance of the color and brightness of the signs. However, as the prior experiences of the sign-consumers (Collins & Slembrouk, 2007) would have afforded them, such carriers and the signs on them would only be durable and permanent as long as the governor (state administrator) remained in power: a new governor would come with a new idea and a new slogan which would either necessitate the ordering of new vehicles carrying new slogans or the cancellation of the idea of mass transportation entirely.

Again, since the few state-government mobile carriers are means of public transport providing cheaper alternatives for its citizens, these carriers were meant to orient towards both mobile and fixed readers so that they might appreciate the efforts of government at making life better for its citizenry. This thus indicates the government's intention to connect the linguistic with the social, in a way that links three of the theoretical perspectives of the sociological significance of the LL: rational considerations, orientation to positive self-presentation, and evocation of regional administrative collective-identity (Ben-Rafael 2009; Shohamy et al., 2010).

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The visibility of signs has indicated that it can index both monolingualism and multilingualism, either covertly or overtly in different ways. Notably, in the case of covert multilingualism (or "make-believe" bilingualism) when a Yorùbá sign contains much English, the intention of sign-producers—probably subconscious—to make English very visible in the

Ìbàdàn LL comes to the fore. Against the backdrop of the fact that the indigenous languages do not creep into English texts in similar fashion, the Ìbàdàn LL sign-producers are considered to favor English at the expense of the local languages. The covert manifestation of multilingualism is less controversial and more obvious. The specific instance of the location of the two linguistically demarcated forms of health signs, (Figures 4.33 and 4.34) to align with the environments in which two different linguistic groups predominantly dwell, is meaningfully valuable. These signs are used to orient to two types of bilingual readers anchored in markedly distinct deictic spaces in two ways: given the fact that both signs contain English texts but only vary according to the indigenous languages, the preeminence of English is foregrounded; again, granted that English monolingual signs are mutually intelligible in the Ìbàdàn LL—as inconvertibly evidenced by the high prevalence of such signs in the data—the specification of the environment of their emplacement confirms Reh's (2004) submission, that "the majority of readers worldwide prefers reading texts in their most fluent—typically first language—even if they have knowledge of a second" (p. 6).

The analysis shows the presence of all the four types of Backhaus' (2007) "part-writing"

(which I have interpreted as structural monolingualism/multilingualism) in the data, though with differing incidences: monophonic signs are of the highest incidence while polyphonic signs are of the lowest. The polyphonic signs, containing Latin and English, are found only in the

Botanical Gardens, a tourist center. Because the literature indicates that tourists would normally

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want to have a new, authentic experience (e.g. Kallen, 2011), this peculiar instance of multilingualism projects an ideological meaning. Moreover, these polyphonic signs are unmistakable indices of an aspect of Scollon and Scollon's (2003) "place semiotics," which underscores how code-preference anchors the semiotics of place in the use of language in " index the community within which it is being used" (p. 119). Yet, the results shown by the patterns of the data's monophonic signs tell a lot about the sociolinguistic importance of English in the

Ìbàdàn LL. Although there are instances of a few monophonic signs in the bottom-up category, there is no instance of a top-down monophonic Yorùbá sign in the data. This means that the

Nigerian governments, their agencies, as well as the NGOs have adopted English as the language they would prefer to use to mark the Nigerian public space, if and when only one language has to be chosen. This would identify anyone who would not be able to understand an English monophonic sign as a linguistic "Other" (outsider). Given the low level of education of Nigerians

(generally speaking), this would mean a disregard of the linguistic profile of the average sign- consumer. Again, the domains where the Yorùbá monophonic signs are emplaced project some connotative meaning: the restriction of the Yorùbá monophonic signs to stickers on public buses and taxis (usually driven by Nigerians of low economic and social statuses) and behavior regulatory domains could mean the targeting of the non-elites and illiterates who would be treated as the "other" in the social classification of urban settings.

An analysis of the linguistic dynamics of the signs shows a blend of orthographical and lexical idiosyncrasies. Concerning the Yorùbá Language, some of the texts on the signs lack the tone-marks and special diacritics characteristically used to demarcate meaning in the language, despite the fact that many of the sign-producers are usually Yorùbá indigenes. This could signal the sign-producer's lack of literacy or poor competence in the Yorùbá Language or his/her

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assumption that the sign-consumer should be able to employ contextual meaning to disambiguate such non-Standard Yorùbá texts. For the English expressions, the idiosyncratic forms are clear cut reflections of "languages in contact" (Weinreich, 1953). The analysis shows the ways in which Nigerian sign-producers transfer the linguistic and social facts about (especially) Yorùbá language and people to English. This has resulted in many occurrences of orthographical and lexico-semantic peculiarities many of which have been established in the literature on Nigerian

English (e.g. Adegbija, 1989; Alabi, 2000).

Languages and texts have been layered in the data in some interesting ways., necessitating new ways of viewing "layering." As such, the analysis shows conventional (the original form of ) layering and unconventional layering (what Kallen, [2011] calls parasitism: two different carriers bear two different messages; one carrier has two different messages, whose content may be similar (discursive) or different (chaotic). Although the Ìbàdàn LL does not reveal the linguistic representation of any political history (as found in Spolsky & Cooper's

(1991) Jerusalem), it contains older and newer versions of some signs, often revealing improvements in the sign-producers' socio-economic statuses. In sum, although the instances of

"layering" discussed in this study, show less significances of languages or scripts contained or the consciousness of linguistic idiosyncrasies found in Backhaus' study (Backhaus, 2007) or advocated by Kallen (2011), they nonetheless indicate that the concept need be further delineated.

It would be necessary to end this discussion by reacting to the research questions in

Chapter 1. As regards Question 1, the findings have shown that there is the necessary link between sign-production and sign-consumption as related to meaning-making in the Ìbàdàn LL.

The sign-producers dwell on the cognitive common ground (of languages, competences, and

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interpretive affordances) they share (or could share) with their addressees, given the fact that these consumers are often presumed and only sometimes known. Specifically, top-down and bottom-up indicate different realities, as per functions, languages contained, and code preferences. Top-down signs are used mainly for orienting to sign consumers (1) as people needing specific information about places, events, and extant ideologies (indexical) and (2) as people who must acquire competence in English (symbolic). On the other hand, bottom-up signs are used both for informing sign-consumers (1) about particular activities, places, and expected behavior (like top-down signs) and about the availability of a product or service (indexical) and

(2) about their (sign-producers') positions on the socio-economic scale (symbolic). English is the preferred language in both top-down and bottom-up signs, occurring on 300 out of the 332 signs studied. Although the top-down signs contain a total of six languages, they confirm the official- language status of English in Nigeria, such that they show no single monolingual or monophonic

Yorùbá sign, despite the predominant Yorùbá-speaking context of Ìbàdàn. Conversely, all bottom-up signs contain either Yorùbá or English or NigP texts, or their combinations and they show the dominance of English in multilingual signs.

In response to the second research question, this study has revealed the status of English as the default language of the Ìbàdàn LL. English is so common in the LL that the Yorùbá signs come across as deviations from the norm. This explains why some of the Yorùbá signs also contain some English. Given this researcher's personal observation of the prevalent use of

English among Nigerians so much so that some families now use the language for both official and non-official communicative functions, coupled with the Nigerian government's drive to popularize English as much as possible, the discovery of the prominence of English signs in the

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traditional indigenous metropolis of Ìbàdàn is somehow predictable. However, the overbearing presence of English, eventually revealed by the findings of this study, has come as a surprise.

About the third research question, the Ìbàdàn LL has revealed that English is present in the Nigerian context both in "Standard" (conforming to most universally accepted rules) and localized forms. Although most of the instances manifest what can pass for Standard English, many instances of NE also abound. Given the fact that language contact necessarily enables the mutual interpenetration of the source and target languages (Weinreich, 1953), the manifestations of NE on the Ìbàdàn LL are indicators of an authentic variety of English, a variety that contains relevant information about Nigerian culture. Thus, this LL's reflection of Nigerians' acculturation of English to reflect local norms, knowledges, and meanings via a global language reflects and attunes with the postulations on cultural globalization and glocalization (Robertson, 1995;

Bolton, 2012). Beyond the linguistic fact of one language (Yorùbá) borrowing from another

(English), the NE expressions have also suggested Nigerian sign-producers aspirations to elitism, modernity, and globalization by deciding to code signs in English regardless of their levels of proficiency in the language. These motivations, though not new within the territory of WE (here, meaning English as a global language), however opens new vistas for investigating how much of

English a user of the language can have before he/she can be said to be its owner.

Concluding Statements

Research on English-language based LL has been undertaken from different theoretical and methodological standpoints across the world. The thematic foci have also been varied, ranging from language planning or language policy to language choice to bilingualism or multilingualism to spatialization, all intended for expressing, revealing, and interpreting the function and meaning of public signage. Although much of the research addressing the issue of

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bilingualism/multilingualism has dwelt on power relations, whereby a speech community's first language is either enforced or conventionalized as the dominant language and, therefore, the most used or most visible in its linguistic landscape, this may not always be so. As this study has prove, a people's second language (L2) could be the dominant language in their public signage, even if that language is one which the people use, essentially, for official functions: this is the situation of English in the Ìbàdàn LL. Thus, while English is overwhelmingly dominant, Yorùbá is under-represented in the Ìbàdàn LL.

Significantly, Nigerian government's attitude to indigenous languages (in this case,

Yorùbá) is unhealthy. The almost absolute presence of English in the top-down signs implies that the government expects everybody to know English (or know somebody who knows) if they are to understand these signs. In actual practice, this may not be so. This singular act weakens the intimacy bond between the governors and the governed, which communication in a language indigenous to the people being addressed would have engendered (Bamgbose, 1996). Although the bottom-up signs (many of which contain Yorùbá) are in the majority, the powerful status of the top-down signs (since they are from government, which controls most of the political and economic resources in Nigeria) stifles this numerical advantage, and enhances the status of

English.

This ubiquitous presence and commanding prominence of English in a se cond-language context endorses a popular view that a broad, pluricentric use-based approach rather than a narrow features-based approach to WE will best capture the realities of English, especially its situation in non-native contexts (Saraceni, 2010; Seidlhofer, 2009). This also reiterates Saraceni's demand of a relocation of English beyond "BANA" (Britain, Australasia and North America) to the expression of other local cultures, so that English "ceases to be somebod else’s language, or

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the language of the Other, and can trul and comfortabl become one of the Self’s languages (p.

143). As such, as the LL of this Outer Circle country has shown, the boundaries between Inner

Circle and Outer Circle English are not as clear-cut as thought.

Implications of Study

The findings of this study have valuable implications for the spread and maintenance of

Yorùbá, hinting at the endangerment of the Yorùbá Language. Because there are few Yorùbá signs in the studied landscape, despite the fact of Ìbàdàn's political status as the capital city of

Nigeria's South-West region and cultural identity as the city-center for all Yorùbás, it would seem that Yorùbá is fast becoming an endangered Nigerian indigenous language. And the fact that what could have been Yorùbá's place in the LL has been yielded to English (Nigeria's omnipresent official language) confirms a major submission of many scholars of Nigeria's linguistic profile, that Nigerian indigenous languages are under the constant threat of the English

Language (Adegbija, 2004; Fakoya, 2008). This illustrates Bamgbose's (2011) submission of how Africans appeal to linguistic globalization negatively affect the visibility of their indigenous languages.

From another perspective, the poor presence or visibility of Yorùbá (the L1 of the indigenous and dominant population in Ìbàdàn) in the Ìbàdàn LL implies the need for viewing the vitality of languages on given LLs differently. Because these people are emotionally tied to the Yorùbá Language and use them for their daily social transactions, one would have expected the language to be predominant in the LL. But as illustrative of Barni and Bagna's (2010) observation, linguistic, extra-linguistic, and contextual factors could contribute to "the relationship between the visibility of languages within a territory and their potential (and actual) vitality" (p. 16). Given the fact that Nigerians generally have and express negative attitudes

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towards their indigenous languages, especially when placed side by side English (Ajileye, 2012), the overwhelming predominance of English on the Ìbàdàn LL has implications for the place of language attitudes in LL research.

This study also highlights the significance of language ideology in LL signage.

According to Woolard (1998, p. 3), language ideologies are "[r]epresentations, whether explicit or implicit, that construe the intersection of language and human beings in a social world." This coalescence of the linguistic and the social has been identified also as the belief-systems through which language users rationalize and justify perceived language use (Silverstein, 1979). The overbearing presence of English in the Ibadan LL is thus more ideologically salient than ethnolinguistically relevant. Because English is the most prominent and visible language on the

Ìbàdàn LL even though it is, by far, not the most-widely used language of its speakers, a major finding of this dissertation aligns with some other LL studies (e.g. Coupland, 2011; Sebba, 2011) that the degree of prominence of a language in a given context may depend on other factors rather than the ethnolinguistic vitality of its speakers (Barni & Bagna, 2010; Jaworski &

Thurlow, 2011,).

Limitations of Study

As mentioned above (see Chapters 1 and 3), this study's database is merely illustrative and not comprehensive, containing only snapshots of the complete picture of the Ìbàdàn LL.

Although serious attempts were made to make the data as representative as possible, some of the challenges (outlined in Chapter 3), especially the security issues and new government clamp- down on illegal signs, constrain the size of the sample and query a generalization of the study's findings. Also, the LLs have been seen as being in a constant flux of change: what obtains at a moment in time may change sooner than later. Given the new state drive towards urban renewal

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and its tendencies towards new legislations, the Ìbàdàn metropolis may soon reveal different realities relevant for LL research. Moreover, since this study contains no interview data, it has been based, in many situations, on the researcher's intuitions and interpretations. Although subjective research is not strange in sociolinguistic studies, the popularity of contextualist and triangulation studies in LL research (Ben-Said, 2010, Collins & Slembrouk, 2007; Leeman &

Modan, 2009; 2010) has shown that some gaps are not filled by this study.

Recommendations

This study has made evident the need for a review of the position and influence of

Nigeria's indigenous languages vis-a-vis the English Language. At the level of status planning, there could be a review of Nigeria's laws, regarding the use of indigenous languages for literacy purposes. Although the Nigerian Constitution allows for the use of each region's major languages for teaching in the earlier years of primary (elementary) school education and for legislative discussions, the reality is that this has done little to encourage the use of these languages, especially for prestigious functions. An enhancement of (at least) these languages (that is, Hausa,

Igbo, Yorùbá) would be better achieved, it is believed, if they are used side-by-side English for teaching all students all subjects, all through their years of public primary school education.

Although the Nigerian Six-Year Primary Project has provided enough justification for the use of the indigenous language as medium of instruction in the 6 years of primary school (Bamgbose,

2011), the fact that the project never survived calls to question the viability of teaching primary children all subjects in their L1s without some handicaps.

Even if it would be undemocratic for the government to try to effect this type of curriculum change in private schools, most of the Nigerian children still attend the public schools, which are, by the way, more predominant by a high ratio. Similarly, a choice of specific

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days of the week for the conduct of legislative business (in the state's Houses of Assembly) in any of these major languages (native to the location of the legislature) will do a lot to improve

Nigerians' knowledge and use of the languages.

Again, there is the need for the federal government to enhance the status of NigP. Given the fact that this "language" is widely spoken in Nigeria, especially in the cities (Faraclas, 2004), its formalization, codification, and inclusion in the country's language curriculum is long overdue. As a matter of fact, in most markets located in Nigerian cities, the seller-buyer commercial interaction is initially initiated in NigP once one part of the dyad suspects the likelihood of the other to be a "linguistic outsider" (one who cannot speak his/her language). The official recognition of NigP will thus save the language from the disdain and rejection it is still experiencing in many official quarters.

Specific to this study, there is a great need for more LL studies, focusing on the Nigerian context. For a country where about 500 languages are spoken, the dearth of LL studies (for instance, this researcher found no major work so specifically conceptualized) is greatly conspicuous. Since this research was done in an urban area, further research could focus on a rural area or a combination of a rural and urban context. It is probable that any of these options would reveal a clearer picture of the ethnolinguistic vitality of Yorùbá. Because this study has underscored the under-representation of Yorùbá in the Ìbàdàn LL, it can be replicated in some other predominantly Yorùbá-speaking context, so that comparisons can be made (between this study and that). Again, an enhancement of the analytic method employed here with interview data could be attempted, so that, for instance, the motivations for the choices made by sign- producers and the understandings made by sign-consumers can be confirmed.

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Moreover, attempts could be made at conducting similar research in major cities where the three major Nigerian indigenous languages—Igbo, Hausa, Yorùbá —are spoken. Given what this researcher knows about the levels of affinity and loyalty of their speakers to their languages, the hunch is that, when compared with Yorùbá, more of Hausa and less of Igbo will be found in the public signs on the Nigerian LL. This hypothesis could yield very interesting results.

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VITA

Akinbiyi Adetunji holds the MPhil degree in English Language from the University of

Ìbàdàn, Nigeria. He has published in peer-reviewed journals, most notably, Pragmatics,

Discourse & Society, California Linguistic Notes, Internet Journal of Language, Society and

Culture, and MARANG. He has published in volumes (publishers: Cambridge Scholars

Publishing, Lincom Europa, and Centre for Black Arts and Culture) and has co-edited two international volumes, Perspectives on Media Discourse (2007) and Studies in Slang and

Slogans (2010). He taught Bachelors and Diploma students (in Nigeria) between 1993 and 2010.

He has also worked as an Adjunct Instructor at the English Language Institute of Texas A & M

University-Commerce. His areas of research interest are sociolinguistics, pragmatics, stylistics, and discourse analysis.

Email: [email protected]