The prosody of Nigerian English

Ulrike Gut

Universität Bielefeld

A wide variety of “Englishes” are spoken in Nigeria, and diversity in terms of phonology, vocabulary, and syntax is great, ranging from Pidgin English to a near approximation of Southern British Standard (SBE). This paper will focus on the variety that has been termed “Standard Nigerian English” (Bamgbose 1982) and that is the variety spoken by most university-educated Nigerians. Standard Nigerian English has been described to differ systematically from British English in the areas of stress, rhythm, and intonation (Bamgbose 1971, 1982; Jibril 1986; Ufomata 1996; Jowitt 2000). Differences in word stress and the usage of sentence stress have been pointed out: sentence stress is not used for emphasis or contrast and given information is not usually deaccented. In the area of rhythm, it has been suggested that Nigerian English has a syllable-timed rather than stress-timed rhythm. Vowel reduction is less pronounced than in British English, which leads to a perceptual impression of equal weight and length of each syllable. In the area of intonation, finally, it has been suggested that Nigerian English reflects the prosodic structure of the speaker’s native language and that stressed syllables are associated with a high tone and unstressed syllables with a low tone (Wells 1982).

Five speakers of Nigerian English and one speaker of British English were recorded reading and retelling a story. The speakers’ native languages are Igbo, Ibibio, Edo, Yoruba and Efek. The recordings were analysed instrumentally and transcribed prosodically using a ToBI-style (Silverman et al. 1992) system. In addition, the length of syllables and vowels was measured. Using the rhythm index developed by Low & Grabe (1995) and the rhythm ratio developed by our working group (Gibbon & Gut, 2001) we show that Standard Nigerian English rhythm is not more syllable-timed than SBE. The differences in successive syllable durations are equally great in British English and Nigerian English. A difference between Nigerian English and British English speech rhythm, however, was found for the duration of vowels. Some of the Nigerian speakers and especially in the semi-spontaneous speech of retelling the story produce vowels of more equal duration than the British English speaker. It is thus the ratio of vowel duration and consonantal duration within the syllable that distinguishes Nigerian English from SBE.

In terms of sentence intonation it was found that Nigerian English reflects characteristics of the local tone languages: nearly all syllables have a level tone with contour tones only occurring at intonational phrase boundaries. A right-spreading rule for multisyllabic words will be proposed.

References

Bamgbose, A. (1971). The English Language in Nigeria. In: J. Spencer, The English language in West Africa, London: Longman, pp. 35-48.

Bamgbose, A. (1982). Standard Nigerian English: Issues of Identification. In: B. Kachru (ed.), The other tongue. English across cultures, Oxford: Pergamon Press, pp. 99-111.

Gibbon, D. & Gut, U. (2001). Measuring Speech Rhythm.

Jibril, M. (1986). Sociolinguistic variation in Nigerian English. English World-Wide 7, 147-174.

Jowitt, D. (2000). Patterns of Nigerian English Intonation. English World Wide 21:1, 63-80.

Low, E. & Grabe, E. (1995). Prosodic patterns in Singapore English. Proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences, Stockholm, vol. 3, 636-639.

Silverman, K., Beckman, M., Pitrelli, J., Ostendorf, M., Wightman, C., Pierrehumbert, J. & Hirschberg, J. (1992). “ToBI: a standard for labeling English prosody”. Proceedings, Second International Conference on Spoken Language Processing 2, Banff, Canada, pp. 867-70.

Udofot, I. (1997). The rhythm of spoken Nigerian English. PhD dissertation, University of Uyo.

Ufomata, T. (1996). Setting Priorities in Teaching English Pronunciation in ESL Contexts. http://pitch.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/shl9/ufomata/titi.

Wells, J. (1982). Accents of English.