Epidemics and Language Rejuvenation: The Emergence and Use of New English Forms in the Covid-19 Pandemic Nigeria

Abstract The novel coronavirus (SAR-COV-2) and its attendant respiratory disease, COVID-19, said to have originated in Wuhan, China December, 2019 has become a global concern with far-reaching impact on all facets of human life. Its the English language can be seen emergence new forms expressions, extension meaning existing words resuscitation hitherto not commonly used expressions. A number these innovations usages affect generally, yet use is context-bound revealing cultural realities users their environment so that at times exhaustively catalogues things, events processes (Carrol, 1966:102). This study adopts Functionalist Approach investigate linguistic COVID-19 discourse Nigerian variety using data from Nairaland , an online forum. It establishes pandemic informed Englishes by way morphemic coinages, phrasal restructuring, syntactic composition, semantic broadening, lexical acronymic coinages.