Towards a Unified Theory of Nigerian English: Integrating Endonormative, Post-colonial, and World Englishes Frameworks

Nigerian English has been theorized through multiple competing frameworks over the past four decades, including Kachru's Outer Circle model, post-colonial English paradigms, endonormative stabilization theory, and translanguaging-informed World Englishes approaches, none of which has provided a comprehensive account of Nigerian English's systemic properties, its social distribution, its normative dynamics, and its ongoing change. This dissertation develops a unified theoretical framework for Nigerian English that integrates the productive insights of these existing approaches while addressing their individual limitations and generating novel theoretical contributions. The framework is constructed through a three-stage process: a critical synthesis of existing Nigerian English theoretical literature identifying the explanatory gaps each framework leaves; an empirical programme addressing three key theoretically under-specified dimensions of Nigerian English including its normative hierarchy, its regional variation structure, and its diachronic change trajectory; and a theoretical integration stage constructing a multi-level framework that accommodates these empirical findings. The empirical programme draws on a large-scale corpus of spoken and written Nigerian English across registers and social groups, acoustic phonetic analysis, and sociolinguistic survey data from all six geopolitical zones. The resulting Stratified Dynamic Model of Nigerian English proposes four analytically distinct strata: an international interface stratum, an educated national stratum, regional-ethnic vernacular strata, and a contact varieties stratum, with specified mechanisms of inter-stratal influence and normative negotiation operating across strata. The framework is designed to be generative of testable hypotheses for future empirical research and applicable to comparable complex English varieties globally. Keywords: Nigerian English, theoretical framework, World Englishes, endonormative stabilization, variety theory.