Volume 2, Issue 1

Shop signs, billboards and posters make language visible in the city. This study photographs and analyses 1,200 signs in three districts of Enugu to map the use of English, Igbo, Nigerian Pidgin and other languages. English dominates official and commercial signs, but Igbo and Pidgin appear in playful and intimate registers, particularly in names and slogans. The article argues that the linguistic landscape shows a division of labour between languages rather than simple English dominance.

Hashtags compress political claims into a few words. Analysing 50,000 posts from three Nigerian protest movements, this study describes the grammar of protest hashtags: their imperatives, their pronouns and their code-mixing. It shows how hashtags build collective identity and argues that their brevity is a resource for mobilisation rather than a limit on argument.

Nigeria’s constitution allows legislators to speak Hausa, Igbo or Yoruba, but English remains the language of the National Assembly. This paper reads parliamentary records alongside theories of linguistic justice to ask what a genuinely multilingual legislature would require. It proposes a model of interpreted debate that treats language rights as part of political representation.

A review of a lucid study of African writers who publish in two languages, with chapters on self-translation and on the economics of publishing in African languages.