This paper examines an understudied language maintenance strategy, which the Abureni people, a minority group in South-southern Nigeria, employ to maintain their language. The strategy, named Cultural Policing by the researcher, is a native speaker-to-native speaker approach, which entails the informal application of non-violent policing tactics such as observation, suspicion, questioning, and investigation, to identify shifting speakers, and persuade them to re-embrace Abureni. Hinged on the Ethnolinguistic Vitality Theory, the study employed semi-structured and in-depth interviews to elicit data from purposively selected members of the Abureni Cultural Policing team as well as shifting speakers. The data were then subjected to content and descriptive analyses. Findings reveal that the team leveraged elite agency, educational, religious, and digital resources, to attract shifting members back to the patronage of Abureni. The paper concludes that since Cultural Policing has been effective in reversing Abureni language shift, its efficacy could be tested in other minority language shift situations globally.

Dr Esther Senayon is a Senior Lecturer with the Department of Languages and Literature, Lead City University, Ibadan, Nigeria. Her research interests include Language Maintenance, Language Documentation, Language Policy and Planning, and, more recently, Medical Linguistics. She has published in reputable journals such as International Journal of the Sociology of Language; International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism; Journal of West African Languages and Journal of Contemporary African Studies, amongst others. In 2023, she was a DAAD fellow at the Institute of African Studies and Egyptology, University of Cologne. Currently, she is a Visiting Researcher, under the TWAS-DFG Cooperation Visits, at the same Institute.

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