The King’s Association is delighted to announce the next lecture in the Enlightening Minds speaker series. We will welcome King's College London academic, Dr Kingsley Ugwuanyi, for his talk on 'Who Decides What Counts as English? From Nigerian Streets to the Oxford English'. 

The Enlightening Minds lecture series aims to nurture and ignite intellectual curiosity across the entire King’s community - including students, parents, governors, alumni, teachers, and partner schools. These lectures feature knowledgeable members of the broader King’s community, sharing insights related to their field of research or expertise in a topical subject. 

English is the most geographically widespread language in the world, used by different people in different places for different purposes and in different forms - a phenomenon scholars of English refer to as the existence of many “Englishes”. But are these Englishes all equally regarded as “proper” English? We know, for example, that some varieties are treated as “standard” while others are marginalised as dialectal, regional or non-standard. How, then, do particular words and forms of English come to be recognised as legitimate, and who has the authority to make those decisions? In particular, how do words from everyday speech across the English-speaking world (in Nigeria, India, Jamaica or Australia) come to be included in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)?

In this lecture, Dr Kingsley Ugwuanyi draws on his work with the Oxford English Dictionary (involving the inclusion of many Nigerian English words in the OED) and on his extensive research on varieties of English worldwide to examine how linguistic standards emerge historically and how they become associated with prestige and institutional authority. Moving from everyday language use in Nigeria to the processes through which dictionaries like the OED record usage, the lecture considers what this reveals about the relationship between power, linguistic hierarchy and language ownership in a global English-speaking world.

Dr Kingsley Ugwuanyi is a Senior Lecturer at KCL. Before joining King’s, he was a Research Fellow at SOAS University of London. He has served as a consultant to the Oxford English Dictionary, where he contributed to the inclusion of numerous words of African origin in the dictionary. His research focuses on World Englishes, linguistic identity and questions of language standardisation and ownership. His work also examines how English functions in multilingual societies, with particular emphasis on Nigerian English and other African Englishes, and on processes and politics of codification and recognition.

The Enlightening Minds lecture series is free to attend and open to all. We would be grateful if you would consider making a voluntary gift towards our bursaries fund to provide young people with the opportunity to access a King’s education irrespective of their family’s financial situation. You can do this by clicking here and adding a contribution at the next step. Thank you.