Prosodic aspects of Standard Nigerian English Ulrike Gut

Nigerian English is a variety of English which has often been suggested to differ significantly from other varieties of English, especially in the area of prosody. This paper analyses the prosody of Standard Nigerian English and compares it to the prosody of Southern British English. Read and semi-spontaneous speech was analysed acoustically. Significant differences were found in speech tempo and speech rhythm, where Nigerian English groups separately from British English. Furthermore, Nigerian English syllable structure is different from that of British English, and the tonal structure of Nigerian English shows a smaller pitch range and a distribution of tone similar to tone languages