English

One prognosis that became an outgrowth of the Sapir-Whorfian hypothesis is the notion that the culture of any given society, to a large extent influences, and ultimately determines the type of language that would exist. This study anchors its findings on this framework. It generally investigates into the spoken Englishes in a multilingual environment, Nigeria and, particularly, notes the various instances of hybridized (acculturated) variants emerging among the speakers from different linguistic backgrounds. Using a corpus-based approach, the author took samples from respondents in four Nigerian universities, comprising mainly final-year university students from nineteen linguistic groups. The universities, located in different parts of the country, were randomly selected so as to capture different linguistic groups of educated Nigerians. The corpus, a 75-worded paragraph, was read into an MP3 player by the respondents, and then loaded into a Gateway Computer. The data was first ana...

From all indications, there seems to exist at present, although tacitly, some degree of unanimity among language experts the need to fashion out a national standard spoken English in Nigeria if the country is to continue with the language indefinitely as a medium for communication (Banjo, 1971, 1995; Odumuh, 1981; Gut, 2004, 2010; Josiah and Babatunde, 2011). One basic requirement for such an experiment is the knowledge of the phonemic inventories that adequately describe the variety of English to be adopted to facilitate both national acceptability and international intelligibility. This is the preoccupation of phonemicization – a linguistic doctrine which defines the procedure by which a linguist or an analyst interprets the sounds of a language as a specified set of phonemes along with the variations that occur(Trask, 1996). This paper undertakes a historical survey of phonemicization experiment in Nigerian Spoken English (NSE) from the 1950s to the present. It analyzes its conte...

From all indications, there seems to exist at present, although tacitly, some degree of unanimity among language experts the need to fashion out a national standard spoken English in Nigeria if the country is to continue with the language indefinitely as a medium for communication (Banjo, 1971, 1995; Odumuh, 1981; Gut, 2004, 2010; Josiah and Babatunde, 2011). One basic requirement for such an experiment is the knowledge of the phonemic inventories that adequately describe the variety of English to be adopted to facilitate both national acceptability and international intelligibility. This is the preoccupation of phonemicization – a linguistic doctrine which defines the procedure by which a linguist or an analyst interprets the sounds of a language as a specified set of phonemes along with the variations that occur(Trask, 1996). This paper undertakes a historical survey of phonemicization experiment in Nigerian Spoken English (NSE) from the 1950s to the present. It analyzes its conte...

This paper investigates the speech of Martin Luther King (Jr.) titled: “I Have a Dream”, presented in 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial. This speech is selected for use because it involves a speaker and an audience who belong to a particular speech community. The speech is about the failed promises by the Americans whose dream advocate equality for all. The pragmatic analysis adopted in this paper anchors on the illocutionary force of the speech acts theory, following the five classifications by Seale (1975), with the aim of identifying the speech acts and the sentence structures found in the speech. The authors attempt an introspective probe into the far-reaching outcome of the speech made some six decades ago. Adopting a pragmastatistic approach, the authors reveal the speaker’s use of the five illocutionary acts and five major structural sentence sub-types, all of which point to the future state of the American people, including African-Americans. There are excessive use of representa...

Research into the specific phonological features that distinguish Educated Nigerian Spoken English (ENSE) within the purview of the New Englishes is still scarce. In particular, there is hardly any systematic, corpus-driven study on the juxtapositional assimilatory processes in Nigerian English to date, hence this current study. Its main objective is to examine the variety of English spoken by university students categorized as "Educated Nigerian English" (see Eka 1985, 2000; Odumuh 1987; Udofot 2004) and to identify patterns of juxtapositional assimilation that are peculiar to it. This is with a view to increasing the quantum of available data on this variety of English. The study is based on the corpus gathered from one hundred final-year university students from five Federal Government-owned universities in Nigeria. The respondents were drawn from nineteen linguistic groups including the three major Nigerian languages (Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo) and some "minor-group&...

The spoken English in Nigeria exhibits features that are explicitly distinctive, and thus, a cynosure for linguistic investigation. This paper undertakes a study of the pronunciation patterns of English words by final-year university undergraduates drawn from four Nigerian universities. Sixty-five (65) respondents, all of them Nigerians, were selected from nineteen linguistic groups using the stratified random sampling technique. The subjects for the study comprised Nigerians with varying sociolinguistic, ethnic, cultural and educational backgrounds. Adopting an eclectic approach for its theoretical thrust, the paper observes that the performance of the respondents poses some major challenges to L2 teachers of English in Nigeria generally. However, the researchers equally observe that there are some prospects depending on the approaches or methodologies adopted for learners and trainees. Based on this observation, the study re-emphasizes the need for appropriateness in pronunciation...

This paper investigates the first inaugural addresses of two presidents: Nigeria’s Goodluck Ebele Jonathan (2011) and America’s Barrack Obama (2009). These speeches have been selected because they come from speakers and leaders who are products of two conspicuous socio-political regions. Working within the Speech Acts Theory, the study considers the illocutionary forces in the speeches as well as the face-threatening and face-saving acts respectively, with the aim of identifying the similarities and differences in the speeches. The result shows that the speeches are relatively alike because each speaker speaks for his entire nation, regardless of his political party, and both speeches show a preponderance of ‘representatives’ and ‘commissives’. However, while President Jonathan’s commissives show predominance in the use of modal verbs to express intention, President Obama’s commissives consist of modal verbs and infinitive clauses to project volition and intention.

Research into the specific phonological features that distinguish Educated Nigerian Spoken English (ENSE) within the purview of the New Englishes is still scarce. In particular, there is hardly any systematic, corpus-driven study on the juxtapositional assimilatory processes in Nigerian English to date, hence this current study. Its main objective is to examine the variety of English spoken by university students categorized as "Educated Nigerian English " (see

This study examined the nucleus element in the syllable structure realized by Nigerian-English bilinguals and compared it to same in Standard British English (SBE). The purposive sampling technique was used to select seventy (70) undergraduate students in the University of Uyo, Nigeria, comprising respondents from ten (10) linguistic groups.  These included the three (3) major-group languages: Igbo Yoruba and Hausa and six minor-group languages: Idoma, Igala, Eket, Anaang, Oro and Ogoni. The instrument used was tagged “Pronunciation Package for Nigerian English Users” (PPNEU), which contained a passage in which the nuclei of forty five (45) words were tested. The control was a native speaker of English. The data were analyzed perceptually using simple percentages. The result showed that the nucleus element in Nigerian English is characterized by substitution, vowel insertion and vowel neutralization, as stronger vowels were substituted for weak ones. For instance, [ɔ] was substituted for /ʌ/ and /ə/ in certain phonological environments. Equally, [ɑ] was inserted in the final syllable of global /ˈgləʊbəl/. It was concluded that some P-rules such as vowel reduction and schwa deletion do not apply markedly in Nigerian spoken English. The study also concluded that the nuclei elements in his variety of English differ significantly from those of Standard British English, thus signifying that in a second language environment, the segmental phenomena inevitably acquire new features resulting in unpredictable phonological forms that suggest an evolving endonormative patterning in Expanding Circle Englishes.

Electronic discourse is known to evolve a disparate set of communication models globally. It takes various forms: email, text messages, tweeter, chat rooms, Internet relay chat, world wide web pages and websites, among others. This study particularly investigated WhatsApp messages as a sub-set of Internet discourse and adopts Internet stylistics and technological determinism theory (TDT) for its theoretical thrusts. A group chat tagged “012 UNIUYO Grammarians” was created online comprising mainly final-year university undergraduates, all of them Nigerians. There were a total of seventy-eight participants enlisted in the group chat out of which twenty-four chatters were randomly selected for the study. From this number, eighty-two chats were harvested using AntConc 3.4.4 (a corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis) and then subjected to feature analysis. The findings reveal an emerging trend in English usage in Nigeria: first, code-switching, shortened forms, abbreviations and acronyms were discovered to be prominent features in WhatsApp chats; second, there were exceptional use, and sometimes, total absence of punctuations in some of the chats; third, slang expressions, pictographs, emoticons and other semiotic devices for meaning extension featured prominently in the chats; fourth, there were  predominant use of alphanumeric features, neologisms, pidginization, graphical and other kinaesthetic devices along with innovative use of stylized spellings of lexemes, syntactic structures and semantic expressions. From these findings, the researchers conclude that Internet language is so dynamic in an L2 environment to the extent that no force can limit its creative use, let alone provide a monolithic standard for a unilateral, global model.

This study examined the nucleus element in the syllable structure realized by Nigerian-English bilinguals and compared it to same in Standard British English (SBE). The purposive sampling technique was used to select seventy (70) undergraduate students in the University of Uyo, Nigeria, comprising respondents from ten (10) linguistic groups.  These included the three (3) major-group languages: Igbo Yoruba and Hausa and six minor-group languages: Idoma, Igala, Eket, Anaang, Oro and Ogoni. The instrument used was tagged “Pronunciation Package for Nigerian English Users” (PPNEU), which contained a passage in which the nuclei of forty five (45) words were tested. The control was a native speaker of English. The data were analyzed perceptually using simple percentages. The result showed that the nucleus element in Nigerian English is characterized by substitution, vowel insertion and vowel neutralization, as stronger vowels were substituted for weak ones. For instance, [ɔ] was substituted for /ʌ/ and /ə/ in certain phonological environments. Equally, [ɑ] was inserted in the final syllable of global /ˈgləʊbəl/. It was concluded that some P-rules such as vowel reduction and schwa deletion do not apply markedly in Nigerian spoken English. The study also concluded that the nuclei elements in his variety of English differ significantly from those of Standard British English, thus signifying that in a second language environment, the segmental phenomena inevitably acquire new features resulting in unpredictable phonological forms that suggest an evolving endonormative patterning in Expanding Circle Englishes.
Key Words: Syllable Structure, Nucleus element, Nigerian English, Expanding Circle Englishes, spoken English

Electronic discourse is known to evolve a disparate set of communication models globally. It takes various forms: email, text messages, tweeter, chat rooms, Internet relay chat, world wide web pages and websites, among others. This study particularly investigated WhatsApp messages as a sub-set of Internet discourse and adopts Internet stylistics and technological determinism theory (TDT) for its theoretical thrusts. A group chat tagged “012 UNIUYO Grammarians” was created online comprising mainly final-year university undergraduates, all of them Nigerians. There were a total of seventy-eight participants enlisted in the group chat out of which twenty-four chatters were randomly selected for the study. From this number, eighty-two chats were harvested using AntConc 3.4.4 (a corpus analysis toolkit for concordancing and text analysis) and then subjected to feature analysis. The findings reveal an emerging trend in English usage in Nigeria: first, code-switching, shortened forms, abbreviations and acronyms were discovered to be prominent features in WhatsApp chats; second, there were exceptional use, and sometimes, total absence of punctuations in some of the chats; third, slang expressions, pictographs, emoticons and other semiotic devices for meaning extension featured prominently in the chats; fourth, there were  predominant use of alphanumeric features, neologisms, pidginization, graphical and other kinaesthetic devices along with innovative use of stylized spellings of lexemes, syntactic structures and semantic expressions. From these findings, the researchers conclude that Internet language is so dynamic in an L2 environment to the extent that no force can limit its creative use, let alone provide a monolithic standard for a unilateral, global model.