Nigerian English

[1] Based on British and American English, the dialect contains various loanwords and collocations from the native languages of Nigeria, due to the need to express concepts specific to the cultures of ethnic groups in the nation (e.g. senior wife).

Nigerian Pidgin English is very commonly spoken in the South-South region of Nigeria, such as in Rivers, Delta, or Bayelsa States.

It is more concentrated than the pidgin spoken in the city of Lagos, which is occasionally seen as merely an urban-Yoruba-mediated version of Nigerian English.

[4] The literal meaning of "sorry" usually indicates some sort of responsibility on the part of the person saying it, but for all varieties of Nigerian English, it is used to express sympathy in a unique way, or to show empathy to whoever has experienced misfortune.

There are three basic subsets of innovations that have occurred as a result of the nativization of English in Nigeria:[8] "loanwords, coinages, and semantic shifts".

[10] Compared to loanwords, coinages typically have a short lifespan and are adopted for unique cultural purposes of the present, and as such, die out quickly after their acquisition.

A common example of semantic shift is in the reappropriation of the meaning of English words for Nigerian purposes and uses.

[15][16][17] It is based on work of speech synthesis created by a team at Google led by Nigerian linguist Kola Tubosun.

[22][23] In April 2024, Nigerian English gained attention for its stood out lexicon compared to other Englishes such as the frequent use of delve after a study by the Swinburne University of Technology analysing PubMed articles containing this word from 1990 to 2024 was highlighted by Paul Graham on Twitter who argued it as a marking indicator of text generation by ChatGPT.

This was met with strong objection by Nigerians in his circle, further reports proposed this finding resulted from a large language model dataset outsourced to workers based in the country who write in this dialect.