A Phonological Analysis of the Spoken English of the Efik-English Bilinguals

ABSTRACT 

The contact between English and Efik phonological features gives rise to problems that are exhibited by the Efik-English bilinguals as second language speakers. The aim of this study is to describe the segmental units of the spoken English of the Efik-English bilinguals. The 

study has its theoretical thrust on Contrastive analysis by Lado (1957) which describes the systems of languages by comparing them with others and predicting areas of difficulties so that the L2 learning difficulties are eased. It identifies sounds in English that present 

difficulty to Efik speakers of English and how these sounds are been realised. Primary and Secondary method of data collection were employed to elicit information from 30 respondents using random sampling technique. The analysis reveals that Efik has 21 phonetic 

consonants and 9 phonetic vowels, of which 15 consonants and 6 vowels are phonemic. The English segment as in [g, v, θ, ð, z, ʃ, ʒ, tʃ, dʒ] and [æ, ɒ, ʒ:, ə, ʌ, iə, eə, uə, əu, au] are absent 

in the Efik sound inventory, thus poses pronunciation difficulty for the Efik-English bilinguals. 

Keywords: Efik, phonology, segment, allophone, bilingual, contrastive analyis