Tone Nature of Nigerian English

Many research on tone in Nigerian English dwelt around Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages. This work acoustically analyzed tone in Nigerian English (NE) focusing on some other Nigerian indigenous languages. The intention is to investigate spoken English of other speakers of Nigerian Indigenous languages and to add to the existing data on tone in Nigerian English. The study is based on the corpus gathered from twenty (20) respondents made up of final year undergraduates, Masters of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy students taken from two Universities in Nigeria. The respondents major in English language, and they fall into variety lll of Banjo’s (1971) classification. This study adopts Metrical Phonology as its theoretical framework, and it employs perceptual and acoustic methods of data analysis. The findings reveal that majority of the respondents realized the weak syllables in again /әˈgein/, magnet /ˈmægnɪt/, tested /ˈtestɪd/ with high tone, as against the pronunciation of the “Control” who speaks the Standard British English (SBE). Acoustically, the spectral slides show that the articulatory quality of sounds realized by the respondents are heavy and thick which indicates the prosodic quality of the first acquired language of the respondents. It was discovered that the respondents used longer time to realize some syllables compare to that of the Control. This study concludes that elements of Nigerian indigenous languages found in Nigerian spoken English is evidence that the variety of Nigerian spoken English has the nature of tone language. This corroborates Gut, (2002); Udofot, (2007) and Fajobi (2012).