Conceptualising Yoruba as a Heritage Language in Post-Colonial Educational Discourse: A Critical Theoretical Analysis

The conceptualisation of indigenous African languages as heritage languages within post-colonial educational discourse carries significant ideological implications for how these languages are valued, taught, and transmitted across generations. This dissertation critically analyses the theoretical construction of Yoruba as a heritage language in Nigerian and transnational educational discourse, interrogating the adequacy, limitations, and political consequences of heritage language frameworks developed primarily for European immigrant minority language contexts. Using critical discourse analysis and post-colonial theory as methodological and theoretical anchors, the study examines educational policy documents, academic publications, teacher education materials, and community organisation statements from Nigeria, the United Kingdom, and the United States published between 2015 and 2024. The study challenges the uncritical application of heritage language theory to Yoruba by demonstrating that Yoruba's social and political position, as a majority regional language in Nigeria but a minority community language in diaspora, requires theoretical reformulation. The dissertation develops an original theoretical framework, the Yoruba Sociolinguistic Positioning Model, which accounts for the multiple and contextually shifting sociolinguistic statuses of Yoruba across national and transnational contexts. Existing heritage language scholarship has engaged with Yoruba descriptively but has not subjected the heritage language category itself to rigorous post-colonial critique in a Yoruba-specific context. This dissertation makes an original theoretical contribution to both heritage language theory and post-colonial linguistics. Keywords: heritage language, Yoruba, post-colonial education, critical theory, sociolinguistic positioning.