📖 ABSTRACT/OVERVIEW
This study analyses lexical innovation in the lyrics of Nigerian hip-hop and Afrobeats artists from Lagos, South West Nigeria, examining the mechanisms of word formation, semantic extension, and cross-linguistic borrowing that characterise contemporary Nigerian popular music language. Nigerian popular music has become a globally circulating cultural product, and its linguistic content represents a significant site of innovation in Nigerian English and Pidgin, yet formal lexical analysis of Afrobeats lyrics remains underdeveloped. The study assembles a lyrical corpus of 100 songs released between 2020 and 2024 by ten Lagos-based Afrobeats artists. The corpus is analysed for neologism types, word formation processes including blending, clipping, affixation, and semantic relexification, as well as the ethnolinguistic source languages of borrowed lexical items. Findings document a highly productive system of lexical creation drawing primarily on Yoruba, Pidgin, and English, with several lyrics-specific coinages subsequently documented in non-music Nigerian digital discourse, suggesting the music industry as a driver of broader lexical diffusion. Semantic relexification of English words with Yoruba conceptual mappings is identified as the most linguistically distinctive innovation strategy. The study fills a research gap in the sociolinguistics of Nigerian popular culture and recommends the development of a Nigerian popular music linguistic corpus for ongoing lexical documentation. Keywords: lexical innovation, Afrobeats, Nigerian hip-hop, Lagos, sociolinguistics.
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