| Author: | Aboh, Sopuruchi Christian |
| Title: | Accent and social evaluation : a sociolinguistic analysis of language attitudes and stereotypes in university settings in Nigeria |
| Advisors: | Ladegaard, Hans J. (ENGL) |
| Degree: | Ph.D. |
| Year: | 2024 |
| Subject: | Nigeria -- Languages Sociolinguistics -- Nigeria English language -- Nigeria Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations |
| Department: | Department of English and Communication |
| Pages: | xiv, 292 pages : color illustrations, maps |
| Language: | English |
| Abstract: | Nigeria, a multilingual and multicultural country in West Africa, is an underexplored context in sociolinguistics and therefore doing language research in this ‘new’ environment may yield interesting findings. Owing to its colonial legacy with Britain, English is the official language spoken by most Nigerians. Because different indigenous languages serve as many Nigerians’ L1, this L1 impacts their English language usage, resulting in different varieties of English being used in Nigeria. However, attitudes towards varieties of Nigerian English, specifically Hausa English (HE), Igbo English (IE) and Yoruba English (YE) spoken by the major ethnic groups in Nigeria, have not received much attention. To address this gap, the present study adopts a mixed methods research design comprising a verbal-guise experiment and a questionnaire focusing on Nigerian culture and identity, focus group discussions, and speech elicitation tasks to (1) elicit Nigerian students’ attitudes towards HE, IE, and YE; (2) explore the effects of gender, religion and ethnicity on language attitudes; (3) investigate the relationship between attitudes towards HE, IE, and YE and attitudes towards Hausa, Igbo, and Yoruba cultures; and (4) ascertain the relationship between participants’ actual language behaviour and their attitudes towards HE, IE, and YE. Participants in the study were 406 undergraduate students drawn from three Nigerian universities, representing Igbo-, Hausa/Northern-, and Yoruba-speaking people. Critical discursive psychology, social identity theory, ethnolinguistic vitality theory, and language-culture consonance/discrepancy hypothesis informed the data analysis and the discussion of the findings of the study. The findings from the first research objective, which elicited attitudes towards HE, IE and YE in a verbal-guise experiment, show that YE received more favourable ratings on status and quality of language dimensions than HE and YE. The findings also demonstrate that participants found it challenging to distinguish between speakers of Igbo and Yoruba Englishes, which points to the possibility of language change in progress in the speech of Igbo and Yoruba ethnic groups in southern Nigeria. With respect to the effects of social variables on language attitudes, the findings from the verbal-guise experiment demonstrate that gender, religion, and ethnicity had significant impact on attitudes towards speakers of the three Nigerian Englishes. In the focus group discussions, participants’ discursive construction of gender identities in relation to language attitudes uncovered three themes: women were seen as more linguistically ‘sophisticated’ than men, socialisation was seen as an influence on men and women’s speech, and differences in men and women’s speech were seen as a function of the anatomical differences of both genders. Three dominant themes emerged from the analysis of the construction of religion in discourse: Christians were positioned as more fluent in English than Muslims, Christians and Muslims’ English usage was seen as a function of ethnic background, and no religious-based difference in English usage was identified. Findings from the third research objective, which investigated whether there is a correlation between attitudes towards language and the culture of the group that speaks the language, show that there is no correlation between attitudes towards HE, IE, and YE varieties and Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba cultures. In terms of how these three ethnolinguistic groups were constructed in the focus groups, the dominant themes that emerged include: contradictory attitudes about the Hausa people and their language and promoting ingroup favouritism, social hierarchy and using personal experiences to support the evaluations of the cultural Other, and constructing positive ingroup distinctiveness and equilibrium between negative and positive representations. The last research objective explored the relationship between participants’ attitudes towards HE, IE, and YE accents and their actual linguistic behaviour and found that linguistic behaviour was correlated with more positive attitudes. Overall, the findings of this study allow for a better understanding of stereotype formation in educational settings and language-based stigma towards certain Nigerian Englishes. More importantly, the study provides a holistic account of the three components of language attitudes: affect, behaviour, and cognition. The findings have important implications for ethnolinguistic vitality theory, decoloniality of language and knowledge, language-in-education policies, and language and social justice in applied linguistics research. |
| Rights: | All rights reserved |
| Access: | open access |
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