Phonological Variation and Change in Nigerian Pidgin: A Longitudinal Panel Study Across Four Cities

Nigerian Pidgin is spoken by an estimated seventy-five million people as a first or second language and constitutes the most widely shared inter-ethnic communication medium in southern Nigeria, yet its phonological structure has been described primarily through synchronic study with limited attention to ongoing change. This dissertation presents the first longitudinal panel study of phonological variation and change in Nigerian Pidgin, tracking changes in ten phonological variables across four cities, Lagos, Port Harcourt, Warri, and Calabar, using real-time panel data collected in two waves separated by seven years. Acoustic analysis of consonantal and vocalic variables was conducted on recordings from one hundred and sixty speakers, forty per city, with eighty panel speakers re-recorded across waves and eighty cross-sectional speakers providing wave-two comparison. Variables examined include the TH-stop merger, the lateral approximant vocalization, and four vowel space parameters. Panel results demonstrate ongoing phonological change in all four cities, with TH-stopping completion progressing fastest in Lagos and slowest in Calabar, suggesting that Lagos Pidgin is at the vanguard of this specific change. Vowel space analysis reveals a pan-city front vowel raising trend consistent with a putative supralocal Pidgin norm development. However, city-specific patterns persist for posterior vowels, indicating that phonological change in Nigerian Pidgin follows different trajectories in different urban speech communities. The dissertation constructs an original model of polycentric change in a contact variety and contributes to the typology of phonological change in Pidgin and Creole languages. Keywords: Nigerian Pidgin, phonological variation, language change, longitudinal study, urban sociolinguistics.