An Analysis Of Flight Announcers’ Language At The Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos

 ABSTRACT

Flight announcers are pivotal in making sure that no traveller misses or boards the wrong flight when announcements are made in the airport; thus they must exhibit an excellent command of English in order to communicate effectively. Therefore, this research is motivated by the concern of how flight announcers in Nigerian airports pronounce their words during announcements. It is a phonological analysis on the language of flight announcers at the Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos. The main objective was to investigate their pronunciation patterns using three linguistic variables (/ǝ/, /ð/ and /Ө/) in line with the Labovian theory of linguistic variation. The research instruments employed were a questionnaire (used to elicit respondents’ demographics) and reading tests (comprising of word list, phrase list and sentence list). Output of the reading tests were recorded using a Remax RP1.8GB.OLED Digital Voice Recorder. Data was phonetically transcribed with the help of Phonetizer (online software that transcribes and pronounces) and the 17th edition of the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. It was then analyzed using descriptive statistics involving simple frequency and percentage. The result showed that exposure to native speakers, age of respondents and years of working experience in flight announcing as sociolinguistic factors; affect correct pronunciation while educational qualification and ethnic origin do not. It was also discovered that the retention of the strong forms in words like is, the, to, a in contexts where they ought to have been deleted was the recurrent phonological pattern; as almost all respondents made that mistake while reading the sentence list. As regards the announcers’ general use of language, the study showed that most respondents approximated the English phonemes with what they have in their mother tongue. At the same time, some respondents inserted and deleted vowels and consonants in words while some others exhibited cases of dialectically influenced personal speech handicap. This means that a person’s pronunciation could be attributed to mother tongue interference, variational, environmental and physiological conditions. Thus, flight announcers do not speak the Received Pronunciation (RP) but use a variety of Nigerian English. This is not only unintelligible to non-Nigerians but Nigerians too, especially when the flight announcers try to imitate foreign accents. In the long run, this could cause miscommunication resulting in travellers missing their flights or boarding the wrong flight. Finally, recommendations were made regarding steps that linguists, government agencies and the flight announcers themselves could do to improve their pronunciation pattern.