PHONOLOGICAL MARKERS OF NIGERIAN ENGLISH

Phonology, one of the branches of linguistics, deals with the organization of the speech sounds of a language. For a global language such as English, such phonology will be determined not just by the English and English itself, but by the tongues of its various speakers either as its second language users or its foreign language users. Such phonology will also be determined by the environment of the new users. The peculiarity of such a usage will be noticed in such areas as tone and intonation, inflections, articulation and pronunciation, stress assignment and accents. Nigerian English is a concomitant of the European expedition and colonialism with its own distinct phonological features which is often not coterminous with the native speakers'. Therefore, this paper centres on the uniqueness of the phonological conventions of second language speakers of English in Nigeria.Keywords: Phonology, Nigerian English, phonemes, stress assignment, intonation, pronunciation