Vowels

Compared to the 23 vowels of Southern British English, NigE has a reduced vowel system, which is especially apparent in the less educated varieties: Basic Hausa English has 15 vowels, Basic Yoruba English and Basic Igbo English have 11 vowels each (Jibril 1986). As in any L2 variety of English, the vowel system of NigE reflects the vowel system of the speaker’s native language.

Table 1 lists the vowels of Educated Hausa English and Educated Southern NigE as described in Jibril (1986) and Jowitt (1991). The major differences between the Hausa English and the Southern NigE vowel inventories lie in the lack of phonemic vowel length and the lack of centralized vowels in the latter.

The distribution of these vowels in both Hausa English and Southern NigE is illustrated in Table 2.