Nigerian Accents of English in the Context of World Englishes

Abstract

Despite the simmering rage over the reality of any variety of Nigerian English in some circles, the major varieties arebeing presented as the core regional dialects of a World English in this article. This paper is a thesis statement whichis purposed to project a convincing defense of Nigerian English varieties as dialects in their own rights. This paperhas adopted the contributions of Trudgill (1986), Preston (1989), Ferguson and Gumperz (1970) among others informing a framework for the analysis of the phonemes of Standard English as they were rendered by the selectedNigerian subjects for the study. Speeches of one hundred and fifty (150) Nigerians who are of the Northern, Westernand Eastern origin were sorted for perceptual and acoustic analyses. The three ethnic groups had 50 participants each,to ensure a national outlook, excluding the minority groups. The formal and casual styles in relation to variabilitywere considered in this research, taking a cue from Labov (1966).The articulations of the subjects used for theexperiment suggested varying dialectal traces. This formed the basis for the identity markers of fricatives, stops,sonorants, liquids and other obstruents emphasized in the study. The findings in this study further suggest thatdifferent regions in the world may have areas of convergence and divergence of phonemes from the Standard English.These possibilities have informed our conclusion that regions thus have areas of comparative advantage over othersin phoneme articulations.

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