Language Ecology and the Positioning of German in Nigeria’s Post-Colonial Linguistic Landscape: A Critical Ecolinguistic Analysis

This study applies critical ecolinguistics as a theoretical and analytical framework to examine the positioning of the German language within Nigeria's complex post-colonial linguistic landscape. Drawing on Stibbe's ecolinguistic analytical toolkit and extended by discourse ecological theory, the study investigates how German is represented, valued, contested, and institutionally positioned across a range of textual and discursive domains, including national educational policy, university catalogues, professional recruitment advertisements, bilateral diplomatic communications, and popular media. The study constructs a multi-genre corpus of 500 texts produced between 2018 and 2024, drawn from governmental, institutional, corporate, and media sources across all six geopolitical zones of Nigeria. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis is combined with ethnographic data gathered through interviews with 40 language policy stakeholders, educators, and German programme alumni. Findings reveal that German occupies a liminal ecological niche, valued instrumentally as a language of economic opportunity and academic mobility but consistently marginalised within official language policy discourse. The study identifies five dominant discourse formations that shape German's ecological status and develops a model of foreign language ecologies in post-colonial multilingual states with theoretical transferability beyond the Nigerian context. Original contributions include the ecolinguistic model, the multi-genre corpus, and a set of policy recommendations for sustainable foreign language ecology management. Keywords: language ecology, ecolinguistics, German in Nigeria, post-colonial linguistics, linguistic landscape.