LANGUAGE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: RISING ISSUES IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF NIGERIAN ACADEMIC ENGLISH CORPUS (NAEC)

Abstract

Over the years, linguists like Fries (1952) and Quirk et al (1985) have
employed the use of language corpus in the study of natural language
use. Language corpus like The British Academic Written English
(BAWE) corpus, Lancaster Corpus of Mandarin Chinese (LCMC),
American English corpus, have set the pace for language study. They
have contributed immensely to the development of sustainable
language development. In order for languages spoken in Africa to
benefit from this global trend, it needs to explore the technological
advancement being applied to language study in other languages. In
this work, we created a Nigerian Academic English Corpus (NAEC).
It is a collection of texts published by academics in Nigeria. Since
works with large body of texts are written by scholars in the
humanities, the corpus contains more texts from scholars in this field.
Acceptable works selected are in English language, but may contain
language use examples from local languages. This work charts the
experience in data collection, highlights problems encountered
during data collection and the approach towards finding a solution.
A preliminary research was done using our data to show the endless
possibilities a quantitative analysis of data has. We chose two words
from the NAEC and calculated the MI score and the Log-Dice of their
collocates. It also reveals the temporary academic finding so far with
view of facilitating and encouraging future development of other
corpus text in African languages.