Comparative Analysis of Idiosyncrasy, Content and Function Word Distributions in the English Language Variants of Selected African Countries
Adeola Opesade, Tunde Adegbola, Mutawakilu Tiamiyu
International Journal of Computational Linguistics Research, Vol. 4, No. 3, 2013.
DOI: 
Link: http://www.dline.info/jcl/fulltext/v4n3/3.pdf
Abstract:
All natural languages exhibit a great deal of internal variations in terms of a specific set of linguistic items or human speech patterns such as sounds, words or grammatical features which can uniquely associate with some external sociolinguistic factors such as geographical area or social group. The present study investigated the probabilities of occurrence of seventeen function words, thirteen content words and three idiosyncratic features in the electronic texts worded in the English language variants from Cameroon and four West African countries, namely Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The findings show that there is no significant difference in the distribution of the word â€˜theâ€™ among all corpora. Multiple comparison tests revealed different levels of relationships among the countriesâ€™ corpora. The study reveals linguistic similarities between the Sierra-Leonean and Liberian texts and between the Ghanaian and Nigerian texts, while Cameroonian corpus was found to be the most significantly different from that of Nigeria.