Is it all about race?: A Cross-examination of /s/ in a Multilingual (Nigerian) Context

This study investigates sociophonetic variation in the production of the voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ in Nigerian English (NE), a multilingual and multiethnic variety of English that has not been extensively analyzed in this regard. While prior research has shown that /s/ can index gendered and racialized identities in Western contexts (e.g., North America), little is known about how /s/ production varies in postcolonial, linguistically diverse environments like Nigeria. Drawing on 4,016 /s/ tokens extracted from the International Corpus of English–Nigeria (ICE-Nigeria), we analyze acoustic cues—Center of Gravity (CoG), skewness, zero crossings, and duration—to characterize /s/ frontness and backness. These measures capture articulatory patterns that signal social meanings. Our results show that ethnicity and birth year significantly shape /s/ variation, while gender plays a negligible role. Younger speakers tend to produce more fronted /s/ realizations, whereas older speakers show a preference for more retracted forms. Igbo NE speakers display consistently fronted /s/ productions, in contrast to Yoruba and Hausa speakers who produce more retracted variants. These findings suggest that in NE, /s/ variation is socially meaningful and conditioned more strongly by ethnic identity and generational shifts than by gender, challenging assumptions derived from Western-centric studies. All extracted acoustic acoustic measurements and the social demographic information are included in this repository for further analysis and replication. The audio can be found via https://sourceforge.net/projects/ice-nigeria/