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Part of
New Englishes, New Methods
Edited by Guyanne Wilson and Michael Westphal
[Varieties of English Around the World G68] 2023
► pp. 108–131

Question intonation patterns in Nigerian English

ORCID logo | University of Bremen
| TU Dortmund University

This study investigates the intonation patterns in wh-questions and yes/no-questions used by educated Nigerian speakers of English. It examines the possible influence of gender, ethnicity, and question type on the prosodic marking of questions. Audio recordings taken from the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English were annotated in Praat using the tones and breaks indices transcription convention. The results show that there are similar intonation patterns among Nigerian speakers. Both wh-questions and yes/no-questions tend to start with a level tone; while wh-questions end mostly with a falling tone, yes/no-questions end either with a falling or a rising tone. The results demonstrate that whereas gender has no significant effect, both ethnicity and question type significantly influence intonation patterns.

Keywords: intonation patterns, Nigerian English, tones and break indices, New Englishes, question forms
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Variation in Nigerian English
  • 3.Question intonation across Englishes
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Measuring intonation in English
    • 4.2Question forms
    • 4.3Speakers
    • 4.4Annotation and analysis
    • 4.5Regression modelling
  • 5.Findings and discussion
    • 5.1Initial boundary
    • 5.2Final boundary
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 April 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/veaw.g68.06oye
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