Nigerian English

Jowitt, David

doi:10.1515/9781501504600

Cited by 37 publications

(89 citation statements)

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“…Created during the era of British colonial expansion, Nigeria is the most populous anglophone country in Africa [4]. English performs functions of both an official and a national language, although its status is not formally codified [5].…”

Section: Nigerian English and Its Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With Nigerian independence, the English language became a quasi-official language, although it is not mentioned as such in the constitution or any governmental statute or decree [5]. Today, English is the language of commerce and business, government and law as well as education and the media.…”

Section: Nigerian English and Its Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, to date most analyses have not relied on empirical data, with the exception of surveys. There are several notable book-length publications on NigE [1,5,19]. In particular, phonological [12,13,[20][21][22], syntactic [9], lexical [23][24][25][26], and morphological [9] aspects have been studied.…”

Section: Previous Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Diphthongs of Formal Nigerian English: A Preliminary Acoustic Analysis

Dyrenko

Fuchs

2018

Interspeech 2018

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Postcolonial varieties of English, used in countries such as Nigeria, India and Singapore, are subject to both local ("endonormative") and external ("exonormative") forces, the latter often in the form of British/American English. This gives rise to a stylistic continuum, where informal speech is more endonormatively oriented than formal/educated speech, which, nevertheless, is clearly distinguishable from British/American English. The formal end of the continuum is often regarded as the incipient local standard. Nigerian English (NigE) is the most widely spoken African variety of English, but empirical/quantitative descriptions are rare. In this pilot study, we present an acoustic analysis of eight phonological diphthongs produced in formal contexts by nine educated speakers of NigE with L1 Yoruba and drawn from the ICE Nigeria corpus. Results show that the NigE speakers produced more monophthongal realisations of English phonological diphthongs than speakers of British English (BrE) do, as measured by trajectory length in F1-F2 space. Phonetically, most of these vowels can be considered monophthongs. The results can be explained through two factors at work during the foundation phase of NigE: (1) historical L1 influence and (2) the native English input present in the country, which involved more monophthongal realisations of some phonological diphthongs than in present-day BrE.

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Section: Nigerian English and Its Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Nigerian English and Its Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Diphthongs of Formal Nigerian English: A Preliminary Acoustic Analysis

Dyrenko

Fuchs

2018

Interspeech 2018

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“…Among these European interest groups, the British trade contact which started from the beginning of the 17th century endured, from which an English-based pidgin was developed along the coast. Jowitt (2000) remarked that NPE "served as a language of trade for communication between Englishmen and Nigerians living along the Nigerian coast and pidgin was useful because it could be learned easily by both races". In the oil rich Niger-Delta, NPE has now developed to Creole as most of its population use it as their first language.…”

Section: Nigerian Pidgin Englishmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…A similar construction occurs in (13) with the temporal at describing the event in relation to the time of reporting (7:45 tomorrow) as Charlie informed. In (14), fo is used as locative at describing the event in relation to pitch perimeter where Zaharaddeen was posted to work the fixture. A similar construction occurs in (15), with the spatial preposition indicating place (train station).…”

Section: Is Atmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nigerian Pidgin English: Multi-Prepositional Functionality of “Fo” Among Nigerian Staff of Ces in Manchaster

2017

American Research Journal of English and Literature

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Given its degree of neutrality and linguistic simplicity among the culturally and linguistically heterogeneous people of Nigeria, it can be rightly argued that Nigerian Pidgin English (henceforth NPE) is currently undergoing a shift towards creolization. In the past, NPE was regarded as "unruly jargon", "vulgar" and "broken English" mainly associated with a socioeconomically deprived set of people. The reason for this negative perception was in connection to its origin as mainly a trade language which distanced its speakers from the speakers of language of the educated class, the lexifier English. This implies that the typical speakers of NPE were those who had little or no formal education. Recently, Nigerians have adopted a change in nomenclature from NPE to "Naija" because of its expanding functionality. The term "Naija" as used by the speakers of NPE refers to "Nigeria" as a country. The change to the reformed name is an attempt to erase the negative perception and attitude people have towards NPE as "broken English", argued to be either inaccurate or derogatory. NPE has become so popular that it is now recognized as one of the four commonly spoken languages in Nigeria while it competes with Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba-the country's national languages (Emananjo, 1985). It now operates as a de facto lingua franca, a bridge between social classes and ethnicities even when it lacks a standard orthography. The reality is that NPE, which was considered to be a debased, bastardized, jargonized and intellectually inferior language in Nigeria, is gradually growing to the status of language of wider communication. Media houses

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2023

Sounds of English Worldwide

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Nigerian English

Cited by 37 publications

References 0 publications

The Diphthongs of Formal Nigerian English: A Preliminary Acoustic Analysis

The Diphthongs of Formal Nigerian English: A Preliminary Acoustic Analysis

Nigerian Pidgin English: Multi-Prepositional Functionality of “Fo” Among Nigerian Staff of Ces in Manchaster

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