Intonation and Attitude in Nigerian English

Abstract

Intonation is an important phenomenon in language believed to have strong effect on communication. It is often said in reference to the primacy of intonation meaning over lexical content that "It's not what you said, it's how you said it!”. To this effect, a number of scholars have argued that intonation conveys different attitudes in English and is principally responsible for misunderstandings between native and non-native English speakers. This paper, therefore, attempts to ascertain the extent to which Nigerian speakers of English use English intonation tunes to express attitude as it is in Standard British English. Twenty-two subjects comprising television reporters using English for their professional assignments and confirmed to have been exposed to basic training in English intonation during their academic studies and/or in the course of their professional training were made to read five utterance items designed to test their knowledge of attitudinal function of intonation. The analysis shows that the respondents were deficient in the use of English intonation tunes to express attitude as they only scored 15.5% overall appropriate production of intonation tunes in the utterance items. It was concluded that the subjects demonstrated a restricted use of intonation in communication, as intonation was rarely used to express attitude. This confirms earlier claims that Nigerian English users make restricted use of the complex intonation tunes of English especially those tunes assigned to reflect the speaker’s attitude to the listener or what is being said.