Patterns of Nigerian English intonation

Jowitt, David

doi:10.1075/eww.21.1.04jow

Cited by 37 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…First, we noted the presence of more stressed syllables in the output of the experimental group than in that of the native speaker. This corroborates the observations made by Eka (1985Eka ( , 1993, Udofot (1993Udofot ( , 1997, Jowitt (1991Jowitt ( , 2000 and, most recently, Gut (2002). Next, we observed a difference in the arrangement of S and W syllables from that of the native speaker.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Stress and rhythm in the Nigerian accent of English

Udofot

2003

EWW

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This paper undertakes the investigation of the disposition to stress of Nigerian users of English and the nature of spoken Nigerian English rhythm. The subjects of the study were sixty Nigerians of varied socio-economic, educational and ethno-linguistic backgrounds and a native (British) English speaker, whose productions from reading a passage and speaking freely for three minutes on a common topic were analysed metrically, acoustically and statistically, using a modified version of the Metrical Theory, the Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Signed Ranks Test and the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). In spite of earlier classifications, the study assumes the existence of three varieties of spoken Nigerian English characterized by their disposition to stress and speech rhythm: the "Non-Standard", the "Standard" and the "Sophisticated" varieties, which are individually different but collectively similar yet different from Standard British English, represented by the control's performance. The existence of the three varieties is confirmed by the data. The common performance features include a tendency to stress more syllables in words than the native speaker. This feature, which is traceable to the influence of the syllable-timing rhythm of the subjects' mother tongues, tends to characterize the Nigerian accent of English; but whereas the Non-Standard Variety conforms to the syllable-timing description the Standard and Sophisticated Varieties require further investigation.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 89%

Stress and rhythm in the Nigerian accent of English

Udofot

2003

EWW

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“…He also claims that sometimes when British English speakers use a rising tone to show incompleteness of information, Cameroon English speakers make use of a falling tone. Talla Sando Ouafeu (1999) further holds that Cameroon English speakers tend to choose the last lexical item in the tone group as the nucleus irrespective of the context of interaction, a phenomenon also reported by Jowitt (2000) in Nigeria English intonation called “end‐stress.” In a more recent study on Cameroon English intonation, Talla Sando Ouafeu (2005) found that speakers of this new English make extensive use of the falling tone in contexts where the rising tone is the most expected, which led him to conclude that the “falling tone does a lot of work in Cameroon English intonation” (p. 168). Talla Sando Ouafeu (2005) also demonstrated that unlike speakers of other new Englishes, Cameroon English speakers clearly differentiate between new information and given information intonationally in the discourse structure by making the former more prominent than the latter.…”

Section: Cameroon English Intonationmentioning

confidence: 91%

“…Jowitt (2000) aptly comments in a paper on the intonation of Nigerian English that there is a striking neglect of intonation in studies of non‐native Englishes. In corroboration of Jowitt's statement, it is important to note that non‐native English varieties and African varieties of English in particular have indeed been described quite comprehensively with respect to some components and only very partially as regards other aspects.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Listing intonation in Cameroon English speech

Ouafeu

2006

World Englishes

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Compelling evidence from the literature on English intonation suggests that the tone patterns of some sentence types like lists have been grossly underresearched. This undercharacterization of listing intonation in English is inferable from the paucity of literature on this topic. The main thrust of this study is to report the findings from the auditory and acoustic analyses of the intonation of lists in read Cameroon English speech. No previous investigation has been aimed at finding out the tone types which Cameroon English speakers assign to items in lists while reading a text aloud. The analysis of a two-paragraph passage shown to 83 Cameroon English speakers, both female and male, to read revealed that items in lists read aloud are uttered with four tone types in the following descending order of frequency: the level tone, the rising tone, the falling tone and the falling-rising tone. These findings, on the one hand, are inconsistent with those documented so far with respect to native English varieties, and, on the other hand, have profound implications for the teaching of intonation to speakers of this non-native variety of English.

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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 socio-economically 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 Studies on NPE revealed that it derives its vocabulary from English (superstrate), and its sound system from the syntax of the local languages (substrate). This study examined how the preposition "fo" (English "for") functions differently in various context, and what inherent meaning it has that explains its semantic versatility. The study was conducted with fifteen (15) Nigerian staff of CES, all within the age bracket of between 20 and 40 years. Four (4) participants were females while eleven (11) were males. The data were collected through naturally occurring casual speech. The findings revealed that "fo" can coincide with the English "for"; "fo" can function as a possessive marker when it precedes a proper noun; "fo" can function as "in" both as spatial and temporal; "fo" can function as "inside" (spatial) to overtly indicate the relationship between direct and indirect objects; "fo" can function as "on" (spatial locative [positional] & temporal), the interpretation of which is determined by the listener's semantic instinct at notional level coupled with the type of nominal in the string; "fo" can function as "of" to indicate a point of reference; "fo" can function as "by" (preposition of agent); and "fo" can also function as the spatial "to" (directional) among other roles. This study further revealed that "fo" in NPE is used to specify the mood and attitude of the speaker. With the findings fr...

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Patterns of Nigerian English intonation

Cited by 37 publications

References 0 publications

Stress and rhythm in the Nigerian accent of English

Stress and rhythm in the Nigerian accent of English

Listing intonation in Cameroon English speech

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

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