Abstract
The multilingual situation in Nigeria is a focal point for research, given its asymmetrical nature and attendant challenges regarding language choice and policies, as well as its impacts on the English language, which has become the official language of the country. As a result of the sociolinguistic complexity of the country, English has become domesticated thereby manifesting diverse ethnic tongues-influenced features, especially at the phonological level, and resulting in different varieties of English in the country. Despite that substantial efforts have been made by scholars to delineate the phonology of educated Nigerian English accent (ENEA) to serve as the standard variety, a gap still exists because of conflicting results that characterize such attempts. Using a qualitative method and sourcing data from secondary sources, this study therefore examines, the multilingual state of Nigeria and how it poses a challenge to the codification of what can be regarded as the standard spoken Nigerian English. It further highlights the variants of Received Pronunciation (RP) vowels some of which occasioned by different regional tongues. For instance, [ɛ] and [ia] are found to be variants of RP’s [eə] and [ɜ:] as found in the pronunciation of stare and stir respectively. While those from Yoruba ethnic group would realise [ia], other groups would realise [ɛ]. The study concludes that ethno-regional affiliation of ENEA substantially impacts on speakers’ realisation of vowels. It then suggests the need for more ethno-regional studies of Nigerian spoken English, particularly from a comparative angle to identify cases of free variation resulting from different ethnic tongues, which can pass as a phonemic system of ENEA.
Keywords: Multilingualism in Nigeria, Nigerian English, Phonemic variation, Language codification, Asymmetrical language distribution
