Attitudes of Nigerian expatriates towards accents of English
-
Kingsley Oluchi Ugwuanyi
and
Folajimi Oyebola
Abstract
This study investigated the attitudes of Nigerians living in Europe towards accents of English. It has been observed that as migrants settle in new communities, they enter new linguistic ecologies, which tend to influence their linguistic behaviours. Language attitudes research focusing on migrants has shown that migration significantly impacts upon migrants’ attitudes towards the new (varieties of) languages to which they are exposed. In light of this and in response to the paucity of research on attitudes of Nigerian/s (migrants) towards varieties of English, this study investigated the attitudes of Nigerian expatriates living in two European countries (the UK and Germany) towards accents of English, using a verbal-guise technique. The results demonstrate that whilst there are overall positive attitudes towards Nigerian English, British English is rated more positively for both status and solidarity. The results also indicate that differences in the background variables examined have no significant influence on informants’ evaluations.
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Verbal-guise task (VGT)
Dear participant,
We are undertaking an investigation with a focus on speakers of English in Europe. In the questionnaire, you will be asked about your thoughts on different accents of English. Your participation will involve listening to some recordings and doing a rating task. This exercise is anonymous and confidential. The whole process should not take more than fifteen minutes.
Thank you!
Section A (Background Information)
Please complete this section with information about yourself
Gender: Male Female
Age range: (16-19) (20-29) (30-39) (40-49) (50+)
Occupation: ____________________________
First language: ______________________________
Other languages: __________________________
How long have you lived in Europe? ______________
Other countries visited, if any _____________
Duration of stay in Europe: ____________
Resident country in Europe: ___________
Other countries visited and duration of stay (in bracket) :___________
Section B
Listen carefully to the recordings and indicate your impressions of each speaker among the thirteen criteria. As you listen, please indicate your degree of agreement or disagreement with the speaker’s possession of the qualities in question from scales 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 6 (Strongly Agree).
You may listen to each speaker more than once but make sure you complete the list of traits for each speaker before proceeding to the next one. Speaker 1 [11]
| Strongly disagree (1) | Disagree (2) | Slightly disagree (3) | Slightly agree (4) | Agree (5) | Strongly agree (6) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | The person sounds refined | ||||||
| 2. | The person sounds competent | ||||||
| 3. | The person sounds sincere | ||||||
| 4. | The person sounds foreign | ||||||
| 5. | The person sounds convincing | ||||||
| 6. | The person sounds modest | ||||||
| 7. | The person sounds educated | ||||||
| 8. | The person’s speech is intelligible for me | ||||||
| 9. | The person sounds friendly | ||||||
| 10. | The person sounds trustworthy | ||||||
| 11. | The person sounds polite | ||||||
| 12. | The person sounds confident | ||||||
| 13. | The person would make a good linguistic role model for Nigerians |
Section C
Accent Recognition Test
Please listen to the recordings again and indicate by ticking [√] from the options in the table below what you think the nationalities of speakers are.
| American | British | Ghanaian | Nigerian |
|---|---|---|---|
| Speaker 1 | |||
| Speaker 2 | |||
| Speaker 3 | |||
| Speaker 4 |
Reading passage
Why is Nigeria called the giant of Africa?
With a population of over one hundred and eight-six million people, Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa, the most populous black nation on earth, and the eighth-most populous in the world.
With an annual gross domestic product of about four hundred billion dollars, Nigeria has the largest economy in Africa.
Nigeria is home to Lagos, the sixth-largest urban centre in the world.
Nigeria is the only African country listed among the “Next Eleven” economies poised to become the biggest economies in the Twenty-first century.
The Nigerian economy is the fourth fastest-growing in the world.
At one hundred and twenty-five trillion cubic feet, Nigeria has the seventh-largest gas reserves in the world.
Nigeria has Africa’s largest university-educated population of approximately thirty-five million.
Nigeria has Africa’s largest and most prosperous middle class of approximately fifty million.
Nigeria has one of the top three most powerful military forces in Africa.
Nigeria is the first and only Black country in the world where cars are locally manufactured, not assembled.
© 2022 Faculty of English, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland
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Articles in the same Issue
- Table of contents
- A dependent case approach to complex event nominals in standard Arabic
- Word-formation and reduplication in standard Arabic: A new distributed morphology approach
- Predicting foreign language skills based on first languages: The role of lexical distance and relative morphological complexity
- Formulaic language in oral academic discourse socialization of graduate students in a Northern Cyprus university
- ‘Leftover women’: A sociolinguistic study of gender bias in Chinese
- The syntax of plurals of collective and mass nouns: Views from Jordanian Arabic
- Attitudes of Nigerian expatriates towards accents of English
- Synthetic -BLE compounds VS. -BLE adjectives: Issues in the external and internal syntax
- English loan translations in Polish in the area of computers: Syntactic aspects
- Engagement in Chinese criminal judgments
