Language Contact and Lexical Enrichment in Agwagune

Abstract

This paper focuses on the Agwagune language, which belongs to the Niger-Congo phylum and is spoken in Biase local government area of Cross River State, Nigeria. The language has been classified as a minority language because of its paucity in development and demography. The paper examines the phenomenon of lexical enrichment in the language which has been brought about by contact with other languages and the need to develop new vocabulary to cope with new concepts. Such has been achieved through borrowing from other language sources, compounding, hybridization, collocation and so on. Language contact has also led to the phenomena of code-switching and code-mixing. Data for this work was obtained primarily through direct interactions with native speakers and from secondary sources. The language still needs to develop a corpus for the language of technology.

Keywords: Code-mixing, collocation, hybridization, metaphorical extensions, superstrate languages.