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Acoustic study of vowel quality in Ghanaian English

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2025

Christopher Ankomah Open the ORCID record for Christopher Ankomah [Opens in a new window]
Christopher Ankomah*
Affiliation:
Department of English, University of Cape Coast, Cape Coast, Ghana
*
Corresponding author: Christopher Ankomah; Email: krisanko31@gmail.com
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Abstract

Discourse on the existence of Ghanaian English (GhE) has provided several works leading to the descriptions of GhE pronunciations, especially vowels. However, the major challenge is that most of these studies, impressionistically, have provided different numbers of the English monophthongal vowels used in the Ghanaian context and often discount the existence of certain vowels used in GhE. Consequently, the present study employed the acoustic approach to investigate the English monophthongs produced by 40 educated Ghanaian speakers of English. The purposive sampling was used to select those with first degree to study. The descriptive research design was used to study the formant one and two of the vowels. The vowels were studied within three different contextual realisations: in citation, in sentences and in spontaneous speech. The results revealed that the Ghanaian speakers of English employed in this study realised the English vowels /iː, ɪ, e, a, ɑː, ɒ, ɔː, ʊ, uː ʌ, ə/. The /ɜː/ vowel was shortened while the /æ/ was replaced with the /a/ vowel. This suggests that most of the Ghanaian speakers of English in this study could produce more RP vowels, contrary to earlier studies.

Keywords

acousticsformant frequencyGhanaian Englishmonophthongsvowel quality

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Research Article
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English Today , First View , pp. 1 - 8
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press.

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