An Analysis of the Production of the Diphthong [ʊə] in Nigerian English

Abstract

The work discusses the realization of the diphthong /uə/in contrast with the RP prescription of the diphthong. The study is based on the concepts of interference, which is associated with the concept of contrastive Analysis (CA) and language transfer, which assumes that second language learners have the tendency to transfer the features of their native language to their second language utterances. The study was carried out in Nigeria with educated students from the Department of English, University of Jos, and Nigerian Television Authority College (NTA TVC), all in Jos, Nigeria, as the population of the study. Twenty respondents- fifteen from each of the duo institutions who were between 17 and 25 years old- were purposefully selected. The survey was based on a list of eight words. The students were asked to read the selected words from Roach (2004) on Diphthongs. The researcher carefully recorded their pronunciations on a tape recorder and analysed them accordingly. The analysis led to the observation that Nigerian speakers of English have challenges with the diphthong in question because the schwa [ə] is absent in Nigerian English. The absence of this diphthong makes the realization of this diphthong very difficult and most often results in a complete replacement of the diphthong by a single vowel. The characteristic feature of the centering diphthongs is that the realization starts from the stronger vowels [i], [u], [e]  to a weaker vowel, the [ə]. Whereas in the closing diphthongs, the glide starts from the [ə], which is a weak vowel and ends on a weaken [u]. Again, there is apparent and evident difficulty in NigE in realizing these sounds. This is primarily so because the [ə] is not a sound in NigE; as such, the pronunciation of words with a diphthong containing this sound is constantly unstable. The study concluded that Nigerian speakers of English do encounter phonetic problems due to the transfer of their L1 (mother tongue) features into the target language (RP). Some of the factors responsible for this are the lack of correlation between English spellings, pronunciation and mother tongue interference, among others.