Sociophonetic study of young Nigerian English speakers

Abstract

This study examines the variable use of r-liaison and boundary consonant deletion processes in the speech of young Nigerian speakers of English. This is with a view to confirming the hypothesis that continuous speech processes (CSPs) can be socially differentiated in a speech community. A sample of 180 young educated Nigerian English (NigE) speakers, evenly stratified into gender and class, voiced 19 utterances and a short passage into digital recording devices and filled in 180 copies of a structured questionnaire. All tokens of r-liaison and consonant deletion produced at word and morpheme boundaries were identified and analysed statistically, using the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA). The only speech variation observed in the data was between male and female speakers in boundary consonant deletion, (F(1, 176) = 6.24, p = .013). The findings did not sufficiently demonstrate variability in the speech patterns of young NigE speakers in relation to r-liaison and boundary consonant deletion processes.

Keywords: connected speech, sociophonetics, r-liaison, boundary consonant deletion, Nigerian English