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Why the Conference?

In the course of the last decades, the interventions for sustaining the growth of Naijá have been more individuated than coordinated through a synergy among users and practitioners in the different domains mentioned above. The institution of the Naijá Language Project (now defunct) in a 2009 Conference has until now been the major collaboration that brought its users and practitioners under an umbrella to forge the development of Naijá. Thus the overall aim of the Naijá na Hẹlẹlẹ Conference is to harness the growth of Naijá so far and chart its further advancement under an umbrella body with members drawn from various communities in Nigeria, West, Central, Eastern and Southern Africa, the Diaspora and the rest of the world.

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  • Interactive Forum
  • Parallel Sessions
  • Lead & Keynote Lectures
  • Performance

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  • Collaboration
  • Networking

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  • Naijá Festival

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    Professor Francis Egbokhare

    I hereby extend a warm invitation to attend the Conference themed ‘Naijá na Hẹlẹlẹ (meaning Naijá is incredible) - Nigerian Pidgin in the Local, Global and In-between Contexts. The Conference is an initiative that is meant to facilitate a forum for discursive interactions/engagements among researchers, language technologists, teachers, journalists, artistes and artists, skitmakers, poets, playwrights, policy makers and many others from October 2-5, 2024 (Independence Week).

    Our Speakers

    Keynote:

    From Marginalisation to Mainstream: Evaluating the Evolution of NP and Prospects for future growth and advancement.

    - by Prof. Christine Ofulue

    Maria Mazzoli

    Maria Mazzoli is a (socio)linguist, assistant professor at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), and a visiting scholar at the University of Alberta (Canada). Her research focus is on sociolinguistics, language contact and Algonquian morphology. She is particularly interested in applied (socio)linguistics research that engages with societal issues relevant to communities.

    Emmett Strickland

    Emmett Strickland is a third-year PhD student at Paris Nanterre University, where he employs a corpus-driven approach to study the relationship between prosody and syntax in Naijá. His main contributions to Nigerian Pidgin linguistics include developing the NaijaSynCor-Prosody treebank, which provides a single interface to study prosodic and syntactic phenomena, and overseeing the creation of NaijaTTS, the first speech synthesis platform developed for the language. He has worked closely with the language since 2019, when he joined the French National Research Agency project, NaijaSynCor.

    Christine I. Ofulue

    Christine I. Ofulue is a Professor of Linguistics and Distance Learning at the National Open University of Nigeria. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Indiana University and a Postgraduate Diploma in Open and Distance Learning from Indira Gandhi Open University. A U.S. Fulbright Visiting Scholar, she has led numerous initiatives on research and quality assurance in eLearning in Africa and has spoken at international conferences, including as a keynote speaker at the 2023 SPCL Summer conference. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, contact languages, and multilingualism, with particular interest in Nigerian Pidgin, Gullah, and African American Vernacular English. She has contributed to the NaijaSynCor project and is involved in a study on multilingualism in education.

    Joana Duarte

    Joana Duarte, PhD, is a professor of educational sciences at the Department for Teacher Education of the Faculty of Behavioural and Social Sciences of the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her main research areas are multilingualism in education, teachers’ professional development, equity in education, global citizenship, and (foreign and second) language education.

    Schedule

    Our Kolabo People

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