Intelligibility of English Vowels Produced by Nigerian and Malaysian Speakers

Abstract

The widespread use of English language raises concerns about maintaining the mutual intelligibility across different nonnative English varieties. Some have viewed nonnative English varieties as distorted forms of English that cannot stand on their own which would cause the language to disintegrate into mutually unintelligible varieties. This study attempts to ascertain if there is mutual intelligibility between Nigerian and Malaysian English speakers as there is little exploration of the intelligibility of African English varieties to Malaysians and vice versa. Forty Nigerians and eighty Malaysian undergraduate ESL students took part in a vowel discrimination task. Nigerians listened to words recorded by Malaysian speakers while Malaysians, to Nigerian speakers. Seven pairs of vowels were chosen as target vowel contrasts tested. The result shows that Nigerians and Malaysians performed well in the discrimination task with performance above the guessing threshold for most of the selected pairs of vowel contrasts. The findings suggest that mutual intelligibility exists between the two recognized nonnative English varieties.