Homogeneity and heterogeneity in the pronunciation of English among Ugandans

Abstract

<jats:p>English is an official language in Uganda and is said to be in its nativization phase when placed within Schneider's (2007) model of the trajectorial development of Englishes (Isingoma &amp; Meierkord, 2019). In the present study, we delineate the general features of the Ugandan accent of English (i.e. those that cut across regional or ethnic boundaries) as well as features that evince variability among Ugandans due to regional or ethnic background. The first description of the phonological features of the variety of English spoken in Uganda is included in Fisher's (2000) seminal paper on this L2 (second language) variety of English. Another description of these features is found in Nassenstein (2016). Both Fisher (2000) and Nassenstein (2016) provide a short section, outlining the features which are similar to the general features of L2 Englishes, notably the restructuring of the phonemic system, e.g. /a/ replacing /ɜ:, ɑ:, ʌ, ə/ and the free variation of [l] and [r], although the latter occurs regionally (see similar findings on L2 varieties of English in Bailey &amp; Görlach [eds.] 1984; Platt, Weber &amp; Ho, 1984; Schmied, 1991; Simo-Bobda, 2000; Atechi, 2004; Schneider et al. [eds.], 2004; Tsilimos, 2018; among others). Additionally, Simo-Bobda (2001) and Schmied (2004) describe more or less the same features but in a more detailed way under the label ‘East African English’ (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania). Schmied (2004) posits three reasons that underlie the features in question: substrate influence, simplification and spelling pronunciation. To these studies, we add a more focused study on one particular aspect of the Ugandan accent(s) of English, namely by Meierkord (2016), who looks at diphthongs and how they are realized by speakers of different L1s. Her findings demonstrate variability but also convergence in the idiomorphic pronunciation of diphthongs by Ugandans.</jats:p>

Research on Open Oral English Scoring System Based on Neural Network

“…Generally speaking, the basic process of computer automatic speech recognition is as follows: ① the recognition system establishes a search grid according to the given grammar and acoustic model library; ②speech signals are collected, the signals are denoised, and speech features are extracted; and ③ the extracted speech features are processed by the decoder, and the decoder finds the most matching one in the search space as the recognition result according to the input speech features. In other words, ASR can be divided into three parts: feature extraction, model base, and pattern matching [ 29 ].…”

Homogeneity and heterogeneity in lexical stress placement among Ugandan speakers of English as an L2: a view from usage-based perspective

“…Table 1 below shows how Ugandans pronounce the words in Figure 1 above. Note that the transcription for the Ugandan accent used here follows the sound patterns as provided by Nassenstein (2016) and Adokorach and Isingoma (2020) 1, there is a clear shift of primary stress, from where it is supposed to be in RP, to a different syllable. For example, while success has its primary stress on the second syllable in RP, it has its stress on the first syllable among (most) Ugandans.…”

“…Participants were asked to read aloud selected English words: there were words in isolation as well as words in sentences (see Hung, 2000;Adokorach & Isingoma, 2020;Schröder et al, 2021 on the use of word lists). Note that it was necessary to have sentences in order to capture variable stress patterns triggered by word class pairs (e.g.…”

“…The pronunciation of English in Uganda has often been measured against Standard British English based on Received Pronunciation (RP) (e.g. Fisher, 2000;Nassenstein, 2016;Meierkord, 2016;Adokorach & Isingoma, 2020). While research into Ugandan English has gained momentum in the last two decades, it is only the four works above that have dealt with or made mention of its phonological features.…”

“…Meierkord (2016), on the other hand, expatiates on how Ugandans pronounce English diphthongs. Recently, Adokorach and Isingoma (2020) have provided an elaborate account on the pronunciation of English by Ugandans and have posited that while there are Monica Adokorach & Bebwa Isingoma: Homogeneity and heterogeneity in lexical stress placement among Ugandan speakers of English as an L2 some phonological features that cut across, there is indeed more than one homogeneous accent among Ugandans due to substrate influence from the different ethnolinguistic groups. However, none of the above studies has looked at primary lexical stress placement, save for Fisher (2000), who simply mentions three words in which Ugandans place primary stress differently from RP.…”