THE EFFECT OF YORUBA ON THE SPOKEN ENGLISH OF MUSHIN MARKET WOMEN (ENGLISH AND LINGUISTIC PROJECT TOPICS AND MATERIALS)
ABSTRACTThis study examined the effect of Yoruba language on the sound system of spoken English language among the indigenous Mushin Yoruba market women in Lagos. It was to find out the features that distinguish Lagos Yoruba accent from the received pronunciation. The speech of ten selected market women from Mushin Lagos was used. Market women who were native of Mushin and who have been doing business in Lagos market were sampled. Phonological approach was adopted using snowball sampling technique. It was discovered that phonological features of Nigeria English such as substitution, under-differentiation, spelling pronunciation, epenthesis and simplification of consonant cluster were the common features found in the oral English of the samples. The English of the sample has been affected by their L1.
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1 Background of the Study
This study is carried out to examine the effect of Yoruba on the spoken English of Mushin market women in Lagos state. The need to examine and correct the wrong pronunciation of English words in many Nigerian market women, particularly among the Mushin market woman in Lagos demands extra effort and great attention. This is because, it is observed that this problem is the result of the features found in their indigenous languages which are transferred to the sound system of the English language. Their English phonetics reflects the structure of the sound system of their mother tongue (Osisanwo 2009). With respect to this, we shall discuss the term phonology.
Phonology is the sound system of a language. It is the study of the properties of the sound system of a given language. It is the systematic study of how the speech sounds function and are organized in human languages. Hyman (1975:1) cited by Osinanwo (2009:3) asserted that, the goal of phonology is to study the properties of the sound system which speakers must learn and internalize in order to use their language for the purpose of communication. According to Oyebade (1998:2) phonology is the scientific study of the arbitrary vocal symbol used in human speech and the pattern into which these symbols produce intelligent, meaningful utterances.
Akmajian et al (2008:109) asserted that ‘phonology is the subfield of linguistics that studies the structure and patterning of sound in human language’. Hence, speakers of Nigerian English are still facing a lot of pronunciation problems as a result of their L1 influence on their spoken English (Alabi, 2007). So many works have been done on the segmental features of the phonology of Nigerian English such as Utin (2009) based on the Anang accent of English language.
