A Study of Chadian Learners/ Speakers of English’s Pronunciation

Abstract

With the development of English as the world’s lingua franca, there is a serious rush for the language by many countries, which have no past history with Britain, the US or any other country of the Inner Circle (Kachru 1988). Chad, which was colonized by France is one of those countries (Anderson 2008). In those countries, where English is generally learnt as a foreign language by an elitist group, the language progressively develops and has local stable features among it speakers. With the increasing number of Chadian learners of English in Nigerian, Sudanese and Cameroonian universities, as well as in other English-speaking countries, it is interesting to look at the way they pronounce English words. From the interlanguage framework, this study analyses some speech produced by postgraduate Chadian learners of English (N=20). The focus is on some difficult consonants, consonant clusters, vowels and word stress.