The aim of this study is to investigate whether the form of English spoken by Nigerian newscasters enjoys the status of a standard in Nigeria. The study employs a verbal guise test and a questionnaire to measure the attitudes of 137 Nigerian participants towards the variety of English used by Nigerian newscasters. The findings show that an exonormative orientation is still present in Nigeria: both British and American English accents are preferred over a Nigerian one for Nigerian newscasters, and a British accent is perceived to be more prevalent than a Nigerian one in Nigerian newscasting. However, the results of the verbal guise test demonstrate that there are very positive attitudes towards all Nigerian newscasters’ accents. The results also show that neither gender nor a stay abroad has a significant effect on Nigerians’ attitudes towards newscasters’ English, but that the age group of the participants significantly influences their evaluations: the older participants rated the newscasters’ English accents higher than the younger ones. Overall, the findings of the study suggest a limited potential of Nigerian newscasters’ English becoming a model of English in Nigeria, as British English as an exonormative norm seems to continue to play a major role.
This study examines the use of general extenders in Nigerian English, from a variational corpus-pragmatic framework, with British English as a reference variety. The data are extracted from the Nigerian and British components of the International Corpus of English . The results reveal that Nigerian English has patterns of use of general extenders that differ systematically from British English. Overall, Nigerian English users employ general extenders less frequently than British English users, as a result of a low preference for disjunctive extenders; there are no significant differences in the frequency of adjunctive and other general extenders between Nigerian and British English users. The study also identifies variants of general extenders unique to Nigerian English such as and all that one, and and other things (like that). In all, the results indicate that register and regional differences play important roles in determining general extender usage among English users.
The focus of the study is media perspectives on Boko Haram insurgency and herdsmen-farmers clashes in Nigeria. These security issues have been commented on, in Nigerian newspapers. In order to show the social attitudes of different news organisations in Nigeria to the operations of Boko Haram insurgents and nomadic herdsmen, the study analysed news editorials from The Punch and The Guardian (South-Western region), Vanguard and The Sun (East) andLeadership and Daily Trust (Northern Region). The editorials were those published in the heatof the conflicts between 2014 and 2016. The analysis focused on the representations of Agents and activities and media’s perspectives on both security issues through the analysis of process options. Our findings show that all the newspapers syntactically positioned the Boko Haram insurgents and cattle herders as Agents of destruction and death and syntactically portrayed Nigerians and farmers as the victims /affecteds of these security issues. The process options show that the newspapers did not, in any way, try to obscure the activities of these groups, rather, they decry such.
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
customersupport@researchsolutions.com
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.