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

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，在政治、司法、教育和媒体等所有正式场合都使用英语。它形成了自己独特的结构特征，与其他英语变体有系统的区别和区别。此外，尼日利亚英语的区域性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。虽然基于语料库的尼日利亚英语变体的形态句法、词汇和语用特征的研究提供了许多新的见解，但对尼日利亚英语音系的大规模实证研究仍然是不可能的，仍然局限于轶事观察和小型研究。这个项目的目的是提供第一个基于语料库的尼日利亚教育英语的音韵学特征描述（元音清单、辅音清单以及音韵学过程，如辅音集群减少和th停顿），并调查其区域和社会语言学差异。此外，尼日利亚英语的音韵学特性将与加纳英语和喀麦隆英语的音韵学进行比较，这两种英语由于其相互关联的历史而被认为与尼日利亚英语有许多共同的特征。该项目的两个主要理论目标是一方面为后殖民英语发展的理论和模型做出贡献，另一方面测试是否存在泛西非英语变体的问题。具体地说，研究结果将表明是否存在规范性的泛尼日利亚（国家）语音特征，以及在多大程度上存在，或者系统的区域差异是否指向尼日利亚内部的几种规范。因此，该项目将有助于建立世界英语的模型，使其在后殖民时期的发展阶段具有高度的复杂性和“多规范稳定性”。从西非的角度来看，该项目将进一步有助于研究世界不同地区的区域和（跨）国家英语规范之间的关系。这些目标将通过使用自动语音识别、强制对齐和贝叶斯元音形成峰跟踪等新兴技术，为ICE尼日利亚、ICE加纳部分以及喀麦隆英语数据创建（半）自动音位注释来实现。因此，本项目的方法学目标是为后殖民英语音系的大规模语料库研究建立一个最佳实践模型。

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.