Nigerian English in and out of Nigeria through Nollywood industry

This paper aims at focusing on the main linguistic features of the Nigerian video-film industry, known as Nollywood. It can be considered a recent phenomenon, barely one-and-a-half-decade old. Despite its early age, this industry has made an astronomical stride and has secured global attention for itself, having been declared in 2009 as the world’s second largest producer of film by the United Nations – being behind Bollywood and ahead Hollywood film industry. The original geopolitical structure and linguistic diversity characterising the Federal Republic of Nigeria is reflected by its film production. In fact, one of the key elements of the Nigerian film production’s success is multilingualism.In this paper, after having briefly reminded the distinguishing features of Nigerian linguistic situation, we will analyse Nollywood industry from a variety of points of view – its origins, its inbound and outbound spread, its financial turnover, as well as the major themes it deals with and its connection with Nigerian literary world. Finally, we will focus on language issues in Nollywood films – i.e., which have been the chief languages of film production, and, consequently, which is the role of English and the other local languages in Nollywood industry. In fact, although Nigeria’s official language is English, a growing number of films have been shot in native languages, in particular Yoruba and Hausa. In the end, we will reflect on the potential positive – or negative – fallouts deriving from the use of subtitles in films in a local language and we will outline the further steps of our research study in progress, which aims at outlining a Nigerian English-Italian glossary of the most distinctive terms used in Nollywood.[...