TRANSLITERATION IN ROYAL SELECTION AND AFAMEFUNA (MOVIES)

ABSTRACT This work studies transliteration in Royal Selection and Afamefuna Movies by Kene Egbue and Mike Godson. Existing studies on transliteration in Nollywood focus on its general role in multilingual communication, however, there is a gap in the examination of how transliteration specifically affects the portrayal of cultural nuances, language authenticity, and viewer engagement in these films. To this effect, this work examines and accounts for the causes of transliteration in Nigerian English, it examines how Nigerian movie industry use transliteration to express those aspect of their indigenous expressions which do not have corresponding equivalent in the English language. It examines the communicative functions of transliteration in Nigerian English. The study examines transliteration in Nigerian English not as a deviation but as a variant of the Standard British English usages. The work adopts a qualitative research methodology, utilising a random sampling approach for the data collection. The primary data were collected from the two Nigerian movies Royal Selection and Afamefuna while other secondary data were sourced from relevant publications such as journals, textbooks and the internet. The work adopts M.A.K Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar which asserts the functions of a language over its grammaticality as its theoretical framework. Based on the analysis of the data collected, this work found out that the use of transliteration to incorporate indigenous syntactic structures and lexical items into Nigerian English, results in expressions that diverge from Standard British English. The study concluded that transliteration is a vital aspect of the English language spoken in the Nigerian environment, which has given prominence to the Nigerian English variety and contributed to its legitimacy as a subset of world Englishes. The researcher recommended that transliteration is a common feature in Nigerian English and encouraged further research into other Nigerian Online movies.