Pronunciation of English Words in Nigerian Comedy Movies: A Means of Identity Marking and Humour Creation

Abstract

Evidence abounds in the literature that pronunciation provides clues about speaker’s ethnic, social, educational, or occupational identity; ideology; or attitude etc. This paper on English pronunciation in Nigerian comedy movies seeks to investigate the extent movies characters’ pronunciation of English words reveals the characters’ ethnic identity as well as create humour among the audience. For the study, four Nigerian comedy movies were randomly selected, and data collected by playing the videos and listening to the pronunciation of English words as used by the characters. Ten adults, five males and five females were interviewed to ascertain the acceptability and patronage of the movies by the audience. For our analysis, the pronunciation of the words by the characters were phonetically transcribed and matched with the Standard English pronunciation. The words whose pronunciation did not match the Standard English were identified and aligned with the basic sound systems of some Nigerian languages, to be able to trace the ethnic identity of the characters. Our findings show that the way most of the characters in the comedy movies pronounce the English words was either borne out of their mother tongue influence. We discovered that the characters’ pronunciation was also influenced by their desire to create humour in order to entertain their audience, since entertainment is basic to comedy. Our respondents agree that humour enhances acceptability/patronage of the comedy movies. We recommend research into the aspect of identifying characters’ identity through pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax etc.