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

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.


Introduction
Chad is a Central African country with some 14,713,516 inhabitants according to latest United Nations estimates.As one of the former colonies of France, the French and Arabic languages are the official languages of the country.They cohabit with over 120 indigenous languages.French is the language of education and administration and Arabic is mostly used in commerce.So, each Chadian is supposed to speak at least three languages.Since 2008, in education, English is a compulsory subject besides French and Arabic, and is learnt from Sixième (first year in secondary school) as a foreign language.Since 2003, the massive presence of Americans, Canadians and Chinese involved in the oil exploitation in the south of the country by Esso Company (American), Glencore (Anglo-Swiss) and CNPC (Chinese), has made English a necessity in Chad.The presence of the Peace Corps volunteers in Chadian public schools within the framework of TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) programme solicited by the Chadian government from the United States also attests to this.To have a job with Esso and other oil companies, or the various NGOs (Non Governmental Organisations) that turn around oil drilling, English is an imperative.This new situation has thus pushed many Chadians to take the English language very seriously.In secondary schools, many English language teachers are of Cameroonian and Sudanese origin, as Chadians trained to teach the subject are not enough.The University of Maroua (in Cameroon), which opened in 2008, is a golden opportunity to Chad.Hundreds of Chadian secondary school teachers have already graduated from the Higher Teacher Training College of Maroua, and continue to spread English in their country.Given the increasing number of Chadians in Cameroonian universities, especially in the departments of English and Bilingual Studies of the Higher Teacher Training College as well as the Faculty of Letters and Social Sciences, and other departments of the University of Maroua, it has become interesting to investigate the way they pronounce some aspects of the English language.It should be noted that in all the departments of Cameroonian universities, English for Academic Purposes (called Bilingual Training / Formation Bilingue) is a compulsory subject for the first three years of university studies, and foreign learners are not exempted.This paper thus examines the way Chadian learners/ speakers of English produce some consonants, consonant clusters, vowels and word stress, which are areas that cause more intelligibility problems to non-native speakers of that language.The section below looks at the brief history of the English language in Chad to better explain / understand the study's subjects' production.and Protestant missionaries, the Peace Corps volunteers and the US Military.The English speakers first arrived in Chad little before 1900.One missionary of note, Peter Cameroon Scott from Scotland arrived in Southeast Chad in 1895 with the goal to evangelise.He brought the English language as well.Chadians were thus first exposed to English through religious texts.As the missions expanded, more English-speaking people came to the country.They began the teaching of English in the French schools and in the community, but still with the objective to convert to Christianity.It was at the end of colonisation in 1961 that English really began to spread through more American and British missionaries as well as United States sponsored programmes such as the Peace Corps.Today, the American presence in Chad is increased owing to oil drilling in the south of the country.Because of the way the French ruled their country, many Chadians were (and continue to be) frustrated with their control, and look at English as a brighter future.'The English language opens technological doors, educational doors, vocational doors, and even 'locational' doors' (Anderson, 2008).Chadian learners of English are presently very instrumentally motivated (Safotso & Ndoubangar 2018).
In Chad, English is not yet taught in all primary schools, but is compulsory in all secondary schools besides French and Arabic.In most private secondary schools, English language teachers come from Cameroon and Sudan, which share some cultures with Chad.One can also learn it in small private language institutes in/out of the capital city.In N'Djamena, a number of language centres run by Americans, Nigerians, Ghanaians and Kenyans have been offering English language programmes since 1986.They include the American Language Center (1999)

Methodology
The data analysed was produced by undergraduate and postgraduate Chadian student-teachers of the Department of English and that of Bilingual Studies of the Higher Teacher Training College of the University of Maroua.That specific group of subjects was chosen due to the fact that their level of English is quite advanced, and because they are the very teachers who, after graduation, will go back home to spread their accent in various Chadian secondary schools.In addition, some of them had already been teaching English in their country before coming back to school for further studies.All the informants spoke French and Arabic.Some of them also claimed to speak Gambai, Sara, Fufulde or Tupuri, which are some of the Chadian home languages which are also spoken in Cameroon, which share borders with Chad.The twenty subjects who took part in the study were distributed as follows: eight undergraduate and twelve postgraduate students comprising four girls and sixteen boys.Their ages ranged from 27 to 43 years.The exercise consisted in reading 24 test sentences for the consonants, 45 test words for consonant clusters, 25 test sentences for the vowels, and 80 test words for word stress that were audio recorded.An additional exercise focused on the reading of a number of test words for the third person singular / regular plural noun / possessive case marker -s, and the regular verbs past tense/ past participle marker -ed.This was completed by some free speech by the participants on everyday issues.The whole exercise took approximately 20-23 minutes per participant.The next section investigates the subjects' production of English consonants.

Chadian Learners/ Speakers of English's Production of English Consonants
In the table below, as in the subsequent ones, the analysis mostly looks at the salient features of the subjects' productions, i.e. what characterises at least 60 percent of them, taking General British (GB) as the reference accent.As Cruttenden (2014: 80) argues, GB is not a different accent of the British English so far described as Received Pronunciation (RP), but 'an evolved and evolving version of the same accent under a different name'.In the description of GB consonants and vowels, compared with RP, the slight change is at the level of monophthongs and diphthongs.According to Cruttenden (2014), GB relatively pure vowels are /i:, i, e, ε:, a, ʌ, a:, ɔ, ɔ:, u, u:, ə:, ə/, e.g.set [set] , ten [ten], bed [bed]; care [kε:], fare [fε:].GB diphthongal vowel glides are /ei, ai, ɔi, əu, au, iə, uə / (Cruttenden, 2014).] (the desks).In French, the letter h is generally silent in most positions, or occasionally aspirated, e.g.habit, silhouette (dress, shape) [abi, silwεt].This feature is also attested in Cameroon Francophone English (Safotso 2012(Safotso , 2015)).The subject being Arabic speakers, many of the English consonants predicted to be problematic to Arabic-speaking learners of EFL (English as a Foreign Language) are confirmed with them (see Huthaily, 2003;Ezzeldin, 2011;Elkhair, 2014).Indeed, speakers of Sudanese Arabic have difficulties in pronouncing /s, z, θ, ð, p, b, ʃ, tʃ /.For example, they respectively substitute /b/ for /p/, /s/ for /θ/, and//f/ for /v/.The replacement of /p/ by /b/ was not produced by any of the subjects under study, maybe due to the positive transfer from French in which the two consonants are quite distinctive.One would also have expected a correct production of the dental fricatives /θ, ð/ which are attested in Arabic, e.g.
[θwar] (bull), [ðal] (liar), but the subjects failed to articulate them correctly.The section which follows, analyses the production of consonant clusters.

Production of Consonant Clusters
English consonant clusters are generally difficult to non-native learners/ speakers.Taylor (1995: 6) remarks that, because most languages probably have a somewhat simpler syllable structure than English, when speakers of such languages come to learning English, 'they face a bewildering array of unfamiliar clusters as well as familiar sounds in unfamiliar positions'.The table below summarises those produced by the subjects under study.Léon, 1987;Ezzeldin, 2011).The section below examines how the subjects articulate English vowels.

Chadian Learners / Speakers of English's Production of English Vowels
As in Section 4, Cruttenden's (2014) GB diphthongal vowels are taken as reference in the analysis.The table below summarises the subjects' production of monophthongs.In the table above, it can be noticed that all the thirteen GB monophthongs are problematic to Chadian learners / speakers of English.In their production, there is no long vowel.When they attempt to articulate the long vowel they add /r/ to the deviant segment, rendering the speech rhotic, e.g.order, large, were [ɔrda, larʒ, wεr] for GB [ɔ:də, la:dʒ, wə:].This can be attributed to Ababic which contains a lot of /r/ sound or to American English that the subjects are somehow exposed to.A corpus of 18 Arabic words shows that it can contain as many as 14 occurences of /r/.Indeed, as mentioned in the brief history of the English language in Chad, many Chadians are taught English by the Peace Corps volunteers, or learn it at the American Language Center.Another major striking feature of the subjects' speech is the replacement of the central vowels /ə:, ʌ, ə/ by the cardinal vowel /a/.This may originate from their Sudanese teachers, or the Kenyan ones, who run some linguistic centres in N'Djamena./ ə / is attested in French, but does not exist in Arabic, which has only eight vowels, namely /i, I, u, U, a, ae, ay, aw/.Though the pronunciation of the schwa /ə/ is quite easy, because it is a lax vowel, in West African and East African Englishes, speakers find it very difficult to pronounce.The replacement of the GB central vowels / ə:, ʌ, ə / by /a/ is characteristic of East African English (Zuengler, 1983).In West African English, the central vowels are generally replaced by /ɔ, ε/, e.g.must, words, London, turn, earth [mɔs, wɔds, lɔndɔn, tεn, εt] for GB [mʌst, wə:dz, lʌndən, tə:n, ə: θ] (Simo Bobda, 1994: 28-29).The next section looks at the production of diphthongs.

Production of Diphthongs
The subjects' production of diphthongs is summarised in the table below.Like the monophthongs, all the English diphthongs are difficult to Chadian learners.They generally reduced them to deviant monopththongs, or occasionally replace them by deviant diphthongs, e.g.hostile [ostil], dear [dia], for GB [hɔstail, diə].This feature is also characteristic of CamFE (Cameroon Francophone English) (Safotso, 2012(Safotso, , 2015: 449): 449).Indeed, / ia, ua, iε, uɔ/ are diphthongs of that variety of English, and are exhibited in the present study in the following words: dear, join, fear, poor [dia, ʒuan, fiε, puɔ ].It should also be noted that, like in CamFE, Chadian learners/speakers of English nasalize certain English vowels, e.g.Monday, don't, landlord [mɔde, dɔ, lalɔ] for GB [mʌndi, dəunt, landlɔ:d].This is certainly due to French which has a number of nasal vowels.The section below examines the articulation of the English triphthongs.

Production of Triphthongs
The table that follows outlines the way the subjects produce the English triphthongs.The table shows that, like other English consonants, all the five diphthongs are difficult to the subjects.They either monophthongise, reduce them to deviant diphthongs, or replace them by deviant triphthongs, e.g.tyrant, desires, goers, buoyant [tara, dizai, goas, buoja] for GB [taiərənt, dizaiəz, gəuəz, bɔiənt].The cause of the problem is difficult to find as French and Arabic have no triphthongs.It may perhaps find a justification in the subjects' home languages.But in general, English diphthongs and triphthongs are reputedly difficult to non-native speakers.The subjects' production of word stress is examined in the section that follows.

Production of Word Stress
Like the other areas of English pronunciation studied so far, word stress is also quite difficult to Chadian learners/ speakers of English as illustrated by Table 6 below.Although there are very few rules as to English word stress, some of the existing ones can be applied to half of the sample words of the table above.For example, in English, words ending in the suffix -ation such as ′region, recre ′ation, receive the stress on the penultimate syllable.In those ending in the suffixes -ity, -phy, the stress falls on the antepenultimate syllable, e.g.uni ′versty, perso ′nality, phi ′losophy.But the subjects' production shows that, in general, they stress almost all the syllables of the word, which results in a jerky syllable-timed rhythm as in ′Wed ′nes ′day, u ′ni ′ver ′sity, ′ma ′jes ′ty.This feature is very common in non-native speech (Taylor, 1981;Safotso, 2012Safotso, , 2015;;Hu, 2017).In a study conducted on the rhythm of 49 subjects of varied L1, Taylor reports that 25 were judged to have considerable difficulties with rhythm.Of those 25, 10 had very uneven and jerky rhythm.The other 15 had syllable-timed rhythm though four of them had no syllable-time native language (Taylor, 1981: 221).Hu (2017) remarks that Chinese EFL learners do not distinguish between stressed and unstressed syllables."They pronounce every syllable with the same force" (p.579).He attributes this to a negative transfer from Chinese rhythm.In Chadian learners/speakers' speech as in Cameroon Francophone English, the cause of the problem can be attributed to French, which is a syllable-timed language.

Conclusion
In summary, Chadian learners / speakers of English have their specific way of pronouncing English words.Their production is heavily influenced by French and Arabic, which are the official languages of Chad.This is attested by the presence of the French nasal consonants /ɔ, a /, the syllable-timed rhythm as well as the disorderly occurrence of the liquid /r / in the subjects' speech, which makes it jerky and rhotic.Spelling pronunciation (not studied here) is also characteristic of their speech.Because Chadians are French-speakers, the temptation may be to say that they speak a variety of CamFE, but Arabic that they also speak as an official language makes all the difference.Compared to other African non-native speech, it can be said that Chadian speakers / speakers of English's speech is at the crossroads of West African and East African Englishes.Their pronunciation is impacted in the East by Sudanese English and in the West by Cameroon English and Cameroon Francophone English.
Though not yet fully developed to be called a non-native variety of English, Chadian's speech is in the process to be in a near future, because of the interest that is now developed in English in Chad.

Table 2 .
Chadian learners / speakers of English's production of English consonant clusters

Table 3 .
Chadian learners / speakers of English's production of English monophthongs

Table 4 .
Chadian learners / speakers of English's production of English diphthongs

Table 5 .
Chadian learners / speakers of English's production of triphthongs

Table 6 .
Chadian learners / speakers of English's production of word stress