Constructing a Corpus of Nigerian French: Methodology, Documentation, and Linguistic Analysis

Nigerian French, the variety or varieties of French used in Nigeria across educational, diplomatic, commercial, and border community contexts, has not been formally described as a linguistic object or subjected to corpus-based analysis, leaving a significant gap in the documentation of French in West African Anglophone contexts. This study constructs and analyses a pioneering corpus of Nigerian French, designated the Nigerian French Corpus, drawing on spoken and written data from six functional registers across Nigeria. Corpus construction methodology involved multi-year data collection from university classroom interaction, diplomatic communication, border community speech, radio broadcasting, newspaper and social media text, and creative writing in French by Nigerian authors. Data collection protocols were designed to ensure ethical informed consent, metadata richness, and representational balance. The resulting corpus comprises approximately 2.4 million words of transcribed spoken data and 1.8 million words of written data, annotated using Universal Dependencies and CLAN software. Corpus-based linguistic analysis examined lexical frequency, grammatical feature distributions, and phonological variable patterns using AntConc and Praat. Results document seventeen lexical features, eight grammatical features, and four phonological variables that characterise Nigerian French as a distinctive national variety of French with systematic rather than random deviations from metropolitan French norms. Comparisons with Cameroonian and Ivorian French corpora reveal shared West African French features alongside Nigeria-specific patterns. The study constitutes a foundational empirical contribution to the description of French varieties in Anglophone Africa. Keywords: corpus linguistics, Nigerian French, language documentation, variety description, West African French