SOCIOLINGUISTIC DIMENSIONS OF URBANIZATION IN SELECTED NIGERIAN MULTILINGUAL SOCIETIES

Abstract

The major preoccupation in this paper is to examine the sociolinguistic dimensions of urbanization in selected Nigerian multilingual societies. The motivation for this work stems from the following sociolinguistic realities: for every user of a language migrating into another speech community, his or her language stands at the threshold of dual threat; first, back way at home, the number of speakers of the language has undoubtedly dropped by that digit individual; secondly, the same individual will be faced with the hard choice of learning or using a new language in order to define his relevance in the new linguistic environment; or live with his ethno-linguistic chauvinism for his first language and consequently cripple his socio-economic potential. The data were sourced as sociolinguistic inventory and analysed to reveal their relative effects on the languages in contacts. Our findings are that while the majority languages (or the regionally major languages or the languages of wider communication) continue to gain more speakers, the languages of immigrant speakers to the urban centres are steadily losing members of their speech community. This is because the migrating speakers do not readily find (a) speakers of their languages in the new urban environments, (b) the linguistic fields, and (c) speech events where they can interact regularly. Their functionality in their first languages, therefore, does suffer attrition.