ABSTRACT

Drawing from health-crisis communication literature and anchoring the study on what we have coined as Dressler-Schmidt’s endangered language model, we aim to explore the extent to which COVID-19 pandemic has become a language endangerment window for users of English as a second language (ESL) in Nigeria. To achieve this, data was collected from respondents via online questionnaires and follow-up interviews. The analysis of the data was done using frequency count and percentage while that of the interview responses was done thematically. Overall, the analysis reveals that Nigerian languages are facing a serious linguistic dislocation amid the COVID-19-crisis communication. The paper concludes that the wheel of language endangerment may keep rolling in the multilingual Nigerian society and can get accelerated by any health-crisis communication. We, therefore, propose a COVID-19-crisis communication model to slow down the language endangerment flame in the country.

摘要

我们借鉴健康危机传播文献，并以我们所创造的 Dressler-Schmidt 濒危语言模型为基础进行研究，旨在探讨 COVID-19 大流行在多大程度上已成为英语作为第二语言用户的语言濒危窗口（ESL）在尼日利亚。为了实现这一目标，我们通过在线调查问卷和后续访谈从受访者那里收集数据。数据分析是使用频率计数和百分比来完成的，而访谈回答则是按主题进行的。总体而言，分析表明尼日利亚语言在 COVID-19 危机传播中面临着严重的语言错位。该论文的结论是，语言危及的车轮可能会在多语言尼日利亚社会中继续滚动，并且可能因任何健康危机沟通而加速。我们，