Zebrudaya's “Special” English Syntax as a Departure from Standard British English: Entertainment and Communicative Intelligibility

This study examines Zebrudaya’s “Special” English syntax as a departure from Standard British English, focusing on patterns of variation, entertainment, and communicative intelligibility. It compares the syntactic structures of the two varieties and investigates how Zebrudaya’s usage achieves meaning within its sociocultural context. The study is anchored in the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH), Speech Act Context, and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG). CAH facilitates the identification of similarities and differences between Zebrudaya’s “Special” English and Standard British English, while Speech Act Context explains how meaning is derived from linguistic expressions in particular communicative situations. SFG, with its conception of language as a system of choices, provides a framework for interpreting how syntactic and lexicogrammatical choices create meaning. A qualitative research design was adopted, with 100 respondents selected through stratified random sampling. The findings reveal that although Zebrudaya’s “Special” English departs substantially from Standard British English norms, its distinctive structures do not necessarily constitute linguistic deficiency. Rather, they represent creative linguistic innovation shaped by the Nigerian sociocultural environment. The study therefore situates Zebrudaya’s “Special” English within the broader discourse of World Englishes and Nigerian English development. It concludes that the variety merits recognition as a meaningful and intelligible form of communication within the Nigerian speech community and, potentially, the wider African context. Its development also contributes to ongoing debates about language identity and Nigeria’s national language question. It further demonstrates how popular media can legitimise localised English forms while promoting cultural identity, accessibility, and interpersonal communication.