Syllable phonotactics in educated Nigerian spoken English
Syllable phonotactics in educated Nigerian spoken English

Summary/Abstract: There exists a dearth of corpus driven research on syllable phonotactics of Educated Nigerian Spoken English (ENSE). This study is geared towards filling this gap. It is a descriptive research project into the consonant cluster phonotactics of the spoken English mono-morphemic and polysyllabic words of educated Nigerians. The research considers the various reduction modes whether by insertion, substitution or elision (deletion) and the phonetic environments in which these phenomena thrive in Educated Nigerian Spoken English. The data comprised part of a corpus drawn from the International Corpus of English (ICE), Nigeria data, namely the broadcast interviews (b_int), broadcast news (b_new) and the unscripted speeches (un_sp). The ICE Nigeria data was compiled between 2010 and 2012 at the University of Augsburg and the University of Münster, Germany. The (One million) ICE Nigeria corpus is available online and accessible to interested linguists across the globe. 20 Nigerian postgraduate university students of English were also engaged for collaborative validation of the pronunciation features observed in the ICE, Nigeria data that was employed. The majority of the speakers in the ICE corpus used for this study have Yorùbá as their first language but the entire corpus comprises speakers of at least three major Nigerian Languages. The spoken texts span across formal, semi-formal and informal contexts, respectively. All contexts of feature occurrence were analyzed using both manual (perceptual) and instrumental Taiwo Soneye, Faleye James Oladunjoye 256 methods of analysis. Findings reveal the prevalence of a systematic deletion in triple clustered words in educated Nigerian spoken English (ENSE) some of which potentially lead to misunderstanding in specific contexts.

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