Postcolonial Linguistic Identity and the Politics of Naming in Contemporary Nigerian Literature: A Critical Stylistic Analysis

This study presents a critical stylistic analysis of postcolonial linguistic identity construction and the politics of naming in selected contemporary Nigerian literary texts published between 2018 and 2024, developing an original analytical framework for the intersection of postcolonial theory and critical linguistics in African literary scholarship. Contemporary Nigerian literature is a site of active negotiation of language, identity, and colonial heritage, yet critical stylistic approaches that integrate formal linguistic analysis with postcolonial theory remain underutilised in Nigerian literary criticism. The research employs a critical stylistics methodology drawing on Jeffries' critical stylistics toolkit, Achebe's theory of African literary language, and postcolonial linguistics. A corpus of eight novels by Nigerian authors representing South East, South West, South South, and North Central voices was assembled and subjected to systematic analysis of naming patterns, language choice and code-mixing strategies, ideological positioning in speech representation, and the stylistic construction of postcolonial linguistic ambivalence. Findings document a consistent pattern across the corpus in which naming practices serve as a primary site of postcolonial identity contestation, with authors deploying the semantics of indigenous names as counter-hegemonic assertions of ontological belonging. The analysis also identifies a distinctive mode of Nigerian literary code-mixing that embeds indigenous language fragments within English prose as markers of cultural interiority inaccessible to outside readers. The study makes an original contribution to both critical stylistics and postcolonial linguistics in African literary studies. Keywords: postcolonial linguistics, naming, critical stylistics, Nigerian literature, literary code-mixing.