ABSTRACT

This chapter proposes that the languages used in a film text, and the decision to translate or not translate parts of the dialogue, are means by which texts 'define' a public. It considers a selection of films belonging to the 'New Nollywood' trend in Nigerian film-making. Onye Ozi and Abeni will serve as examples of monolingualism, while Phone Swap and Confusion Na Wa will serve as examples of multilingualism in popular Nigerian film-making. The ways in which language addressivity is handled in film texts initially made available to multilingual publics within the space of the nation-state will likely provide insight into the relationship between multilingualism and the circulation of imaginative narratives on a more geographically dispersed scale. The widespread exclusion of English-language films from subtitling or dubbing would seem to indicate designation of English as a shared idiom for speakers of many other languages.