The Impact of Migration on Language Development

A Paedo-linguistics Study of Child Language Acquisition among African Families in Diaspora

Abstract

African migration has become a notable development in the modern age. With the increasing movement of African families to various parts of the world in search of greener pasture, children are often raised in a multicultural context, leading to linguistic hybridity. Specifically, this research studied some online contents via selected social media: Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, with a view to examining the linguistic utterances of African children in the diaspora, aged 4-12years old. It focused on how migration shaped their language acquisition, its usage, and how their linguistic abilities are formed by their migration experience. Using Language Contact and Sociolinguistic Variation Theories by Fishman (1968) and Labov (1972), this research examined the proficiency and the linguistic patterns of ten selected second-generation children of African origin, in America and Europe. The study examined how they navigate linguistic spaces and negotiate their identities in the face of language contact. In addition to the social media data, some diaspora children were also studied through phone conversations, including audio and video calls, to enable more accurate and contextual analysis. It employed empirical case studies and a comprehensive review of existing literature to investigate the factors influencing language use among Nigerian children in diaspora. However, the study discovered that, language shift is a common phenomenon, as a lot of migrants abandon their native languages for dominant languages such as English or French. This act is driven by social and cultural factors, leading to the creation of new linguistic forms and identities in form of hybrid-accent. Consequently, this results in a blend of migrants’ native accents with those of their host communities.