Intonation

Compared to native varieties of English, NigE intonation seems simplified. Most utterances, both in read and spontaneous speech, have a falling tone. Rising tones are relatively rare and occur mostly in yes-no questions and tag questions. Complex tones such as fall-rises and rise-falls are even rarer (Eka 1985; Gut 2003).

Gut (2003) investigated the native language influence on NigE intonation. All Nigerian languages are tone languages, where pitch is lexically significant, contrastive and relative. Tone is associated with tone-bearing units such as the syllable or the mora and differences in relative pitch are used to convey lexical and grammatical distinctions. Hausa and Igbo have two tones H (high) and L (low), and Yoruba has three tones: H (high), M (mid) and L (low). Gut (2003) tested the hypothesis that in NigE, like in tone languages, every syllable is associated with a tone and arrived at a first tentative proposal of NigE intonational phonology: two tones are sufficient to describe NigE intonation: H and L. There is initial raising, which causes initial low tones to appear phonetically as a mid tone. Equally, downstep lowers high tones on the second and subsequent lexical words to a phonetic mid tone. NigE has two boundary tones: H% and L%, which may combine with the level tones to form the contour tones HL and LH. A low boundary tone can suppress the H of a lexical word. This proposal now needs to be tested with a wider range of speech types and speakers.

In general, the pitch range in NigE is smaller than in British English (Eka 1985), but Jowitt (1991) reports an exceptionally wide pitch range in Yoruba English in some constructions. For example, a relative pronoun introducing a restrictive clause has a very high tone, as well as a sentence-initial if.