Nigerian English pronunciation preferences: A corpus-based survey of pronunciation variants

Abstract

This paper examines 48 lemmas that typically exhibit variable pronunciations in English in order to establish the variants preferred by Nigerian English (NigE) speakers. The data for the study were extracted from the spoken part of International Corpus of English (ICE)—Nigeria and analysed using descriptive statistics (frequency counts and percentage distribution presented on tables). The findings establish phonemic variability as a widespread phenomenon in NigE, which is conditioned by a combination of exonormative and endonormative factors. The study concludes that, although NigE is largely influenced by the exoglossic Standard varieties, it is undergoing critical norm development which deserves to be codified in order to achieve endonormative stability. The present findings are, therefore, recommended as valuable resources for a future edition of a NigE dictionary as an important step towards standardisation.

Keywords

• free variation
• Nigerian English
• English as a second language
• ICE-Nig. Corpus
• pronunciation preferences