A Polylectal Approach to the Study of Phonological Interference in Yoruba English

Abstract

This paper sets out to discuss the factors within the learner and the environment that contribute to faulty speech performance of Yoruba learners of English. In doing this, samples of students' speeches from three major dialect groups within the Yoruba speech community were examined with a view to identifying the ethnic-based realizations of some English sound segments. The three dialect groups are Oyo, Onko and Ekiti.Attention is focused on the segmental aspects of the phonological problems of Yoruba learners of English looking at some of the sound segments on which earlier contrastive linguists have made several comments. With the polylectal approach used in this work, the paper has identified so me errors of generalized statements such as (a) all Yoruba speakers of English, irrespective of their linguistic background, make similar substitutions for the problematic sounds in English (b) the absence of certain sounds in Yoruba always causes problems for Yoruba speakers of English.This paper has proved that even in the area of bilingual problems on which it concentrates, classical contrastive analysis, based on monolectal comparison, has not been effective enough as a guide to the interference errors because some of the problems predicted never materialize. tt is also discovered that it only isolates and petrifies such potential problems without necessary integration and without practical reference to real language learning situation.