ABSTRACT
I was born in Nigeria into the familial and geographic inevitability of multilingualism. My mother was from the small Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, and my father was a Nigerian of Igbo ethnicity. In Nigeria, the more than 168 million residents from 250 ethnic groups speak 522 languages. English remained the country’s offi cial language even after the end of British colonial rule to provide some common ground for government and interethnic communication. However, while going about the business of everyday life in a land with vast differences in access to education and learning in English, far more gets done in the national and regional pidgins and the hybridized local varieties of communities in close contact than in any formal or standardized code (Faraclas, 2004; Igboanusi, 2008). As a child in my multinational home, I remember relatives and domestic staff communicating across language and cultural boundaries fl uidly in conversations throughout the home, speaking in northern and southern varieties of Igbo and British, Caribbean, Nigerian, and pidgin Englishes.
