AITCHES IN THE BILINGUAL YORUBA SPEAKER OF ENGLISH

ABSTRACT

This research examines the unmarkedness and markedness of aitches in Yoruba speakers' speech. It  is an extension of the literature on the realisation of the glottal fricative in the spoken English of Yoruba speakers. This study focuses on  H-dropping,H-insertion,  and H-hypercorrection in the speech of secondary school students. The data used for this work was obtained from students reading out a text infected with H-full and H-less words. Through  the audio recordings of students reading out the text and some words,it was discovered that there are alot of unmarked structures, ranging from deletion,epenthesis, neutralisation,etc. The findings also shows that articulating some h variable is natural to these L2 speakers compared to other bilinguals in Nigeria. They are able to realise the silent h and the syntactically conditioned h due to the language transfer defect.