This book is intended as a textbook for advanced undergraduate or graduate students in the field of bilingualism and language choice. It reports on a sociolinguistic study of the language choice patterns of the minority Ikwerre ethnic group of Port Harcourt City, Nigeria. Further, it aims primarily to present a systematic and coherent account of the extent and patterning of Ikwerre-NPE bilingualism within the Ikwerre community, focusing on: the means by which people in this community deploy two different codes in their day-to-day communicative interactions and the social and attitudinal...

Since the inception of modern contact linguistics through the works of Weinreich (1953) and Haugen (1953), numerous investigators have studied the manifestations of language contact across different disciplines, naturally adopting varied perspectives and approaches relevant to their particular field of inquiry. In spite of the many approaches and interests, quite simply, when speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for their languages to influence each other. The influence could be as common as the exchange of words or what is termed vocabulary borrowing in the...