Phonetics and Phonology of Nigerian English

In this paper, the features of the pronunciation of English in Nigeria as observed in the productions of selected Nigerians have been isolated. This goes to confirm that Nigerian English has features that can identify it from other varieties of world Englishes. It has been shown that there are particular segmental phenomena and practices that are peculiar to Nigerian pronunciation.These include: fewer vowels and consonants resulting from the approximations of some English segments to close equivalents of Nigerian languages’ sounds. Some vowel and consonant processes have also been identified some of which include:final consonants nonrelease, simplification of consonant clusters and monophthongisation of diphthongs and triphthongs. With the supra segmental phenomena, a tendency to have a proliferation of stressed syllables resulting from non-reduction of vowels was identified. This feature of Nigerian performance is shown to cut across varieties and linguistic groups and to be significantly different from the performance of a native speaker. With regard to intonation, the characteristic feature of Nigerian pronunciation identified include a preference for unidirectional intonation tunes rather than bidirectional ones with the level tones being rarely ever used. Nigerian English rhythm cannot be neatly categorized as either ‘stress-timed’ or ‘syllable-timed’; rather, there is a tendency in one direction or the other since Nigerian English as RP has peaks of prominence in connected speech but the weak syllables of RP speech are stronger in Nigerian English thus there is a tendency towards stress timing. The tonal structure of Nigerian English has been described as being similar to those of tone languages. Standard Nigerian English is shown to have more level tones and very few contour tones. There is a tendency to produce stressed syllables with a high tone and unstressed ones with a low tone There is also a right-spreading tone rule on multi-syllabic words especially when the multi-syllabic words are in company. In each case, the feature identified tends to reduce with greater proficiency which leads to closeness to the native speaker’s variety.

Keywords: Segmental Features Stress Tone Rhythm Intonation Ninglish

Author

• Inyang Udofot,
  Department of English,
  Akwa Ibom State University