Thesis Abstract

This study has set to find out “an investigation on the level of phonological interference in the speech of Hausa-English bilingual A case study of Usmanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto.” It was to find out the features that distinguish Hausa accent from the Received Pronunciation. The Recorded speech of ten selected native speakers of Hausa was used. Students who were native speakers of Hausa were sampled. Phonological approach was used using snowball sampling technique. It was discovered that phonological features of Hausa 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 samples has been affected by their L1.

Thesis Overview

1.0        INTRODUCTION

To investigate on the level of phonological interference in the speech of Hausa-English bilingual, particularly among the Hausa speakers of English demands extra effort and great attention. This is because, it is observed that this problem is the result of the linguistic 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).

Phonology is the study of 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 sound (Osisanwo, 2009).

Hyman (1975:1) cited by Osisanwo (2009:3) says 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. 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’. To sum it up, Akmajian et al (2008:109) said: ‘phonology is the subfield of linguistics that studies the structure and patterning of sound in human language’. 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)