NEW ENGLISHES AND NIGERIA’S LINGUISTIC ECOLOGY: AN APPRAISAL OF NIGERIAN NEWSCASTERS’ STRESS PATTERNS AS MODEL FOR STANDARD NIGERIAN ENGLISH

Abstract

This study examines whether Nigerian newscasters (NNC) can serve as a model for Nigerian English. One newscaster each from four television stations: Broadcasting Television of Oyo State (BCOS), Television Continental (TVC), Channels TV and Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) served as sampled informants. Disyllabic, trisyllabic, polysyllabic words with different stress patterns from downloaded clips via YouTube was recorded on the Speech Filing System (SFS) version 1.4.1 for perceptual and qualitative acoustic analysis. Chomsky’s Linguistic performance served as the theoretical framework. Stress placement on the words by the newscasters was compared with the stress placement on the Standard English forms as indicated in the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Cumulatively, findings revealed that NNC had 65.8% accuracy in stress placement, with inappropriate use at 34.2%. NNC from Channels had 70%, TVC 73.3% while NTA had 63.3%, BCOS 60%. Thus, newscasters from the private stations outperformed their public counterparts. Results show that NNC can serve as model for standard Nigerian English.