The phonology of Nigerian English – national and transnational patterns of variation

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Nigeria, the most populous nation in Africa, boasts an unparalleled linguistic, ethnic and cultural diversity. English in Nigeria has the status of an official language and is used in all formal contexts, in politics, jurisdiction, education and media. It has developed its characteristic structural properties, which differ systematically from and distinguish it from other varieties of English. Moreover, regional and sociolinguistic sub-varieties of Nigerian English have emerged, in part due to the diverse colonial history of the different parts of the country. While corpus-based research on morphosyntactic, lexical and pragmatic features of Nigerian English varieties has provided many new insights, large-scale empirical research on the phonology of Nigerian English has remained impossible and is still restricted to anecdotal observations and small studies. It is the aim of this project to provide the first corpus-based descriptions of the phonological properties (vowel inventory, consonant inventory as well as phonological processes such as consonant cluster reduction and TH-stopping) of educated Nigerian English and to investigate its regional as well as sociolinguistic variation. Moreover, the phonological properties of Nigerian English will be compared to the phonologies of Ghanaian and Cameroonian English, two varieties of English that have been proposed to share many features with the Nigerian variety due to their interconnected histories. The two major theoretical objectives of the project are to make a contribution to theories and models of the development of postcolonial Englishes on the one hand, and to test the question of whether a pan-West African variety of English exists on the other. Specifically, the findings will show whether and to what extent endonormative pan-Nigerian (national) phonological features exist or whether systematic regional differences point towards several norms within Nigeria. The project will thus contribute to the modelling of World Englishes that allows for a high degree of complexity and “multinormative stabilization” in the later developmental stages of postcolonial varieties. With its comparative West African perspective, the project will further contribute to the investigation of the relationship between regional and (trans )national norms of English in different parts of the world.These objectives will be achieved by creating (semi-)automatic phonemic annotations for ICE Nigeria, parts of ICE Ghana as well as Cameroonian English data, using emerging technologies such as automatic speech recognition, forced alignment and Bayesian vowel formant tracking. The methodological aim of this project is therefore to establish a best-practice model for large-scale corpus studies of the phonologies of postcolonial Englishes.