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

尼日利亚英语的音韵学——国家和跨国的变异模式

• 批准号: 508621252
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Ulrike Gut
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Englisches Seminar
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 资助国家: 德国
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/508621252?language=en
• 关键词: phonology; Nigerian; English; national; transnational

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.

尼日利亚是非洲人口最多的国家，拥有无与伦比的语言、种族和文化多样性。英语在尼日利亚具有官方语言的地位，并在政治、司法、教育和媒体等所有正式场合使用。它发展了自己独特的结构特征，这些特征系统地区别于英语的其他变体。此外，尼日利亚英语的区域和社会语言学亚变体已经出现，部分原因是该国不同地区的不同殖民历史。虽然基于语料库的研究形态句法，词汇和语用特征的尼日利亚英语品种提供了许多新的见解，大规模的实证研究尼日利亚英语的语音仍然是不可能的，仍然局限于轶事观察和小的研究。这是该项目的目的是提供第一个基于语料库的描述的语音特性（元音库存，辅音库存以及语音过程，如辅音集群减少和TH-停止）受过教育的尼日利亚英语，并调查其区域以及社会语言学的变化。此外，尼日利亚英语的语音特性将被比较的加纳和尼日利亚英语的语音，英语的两个品种，已被提出共享许多功能与尼日利亚品种，由于其相互关联的历史。该项目的两个主要理论目标是一方面为后殖民英语的发展理论和模型做出贡献，另一方面测试泛西非英语变体是否存在的问题。具体而言，研究结果将显示是否以及在何种程度上endonormative泛尼日利亚（国家）的语音特征存在或是否系统的区域差异指向尼日利亚内的几个规范。因此，该项目将有助于世界英语的建模，允许高度的复杂性和“多规范的稳定”在后殖民品种的后期发展阶段。该项目从西非比较的角度出发，将进一步促进对世界不同地区英语的区域规范和（跨）国家规范之间关系的调查。这些目标将通过为ICE尼日利亚、ICE加纳的部分地区以及埃塞俄比亚英语数据创建（半）自动音素注释来实现，使用自动语音识别、强制对齐和贝叶斯元音共振峰跟踪。因此，本项目的方法论目标是建立一个最佳实践模式，为大规模语料库研究的后殖民英语的语音。