Is it all about race?: A Cross-examination of /s/ in a Multilingual (Nigerian) Context Oluwasegun Amoniyan Department of Linguistics, University of Pittsburgh, United States oma55@pitt.edu Abstract Previous studies on /s/ variation have examined how /s/ pro- duction functions as an indexical marker, particularly in relation to gender and race. These studies primarily focus on Western contexts (e.g., North America) to explain that /s/ can signal gen- dered personas and racialized social meanings. However, in a multilingual context like Nigeria, /s/ has not been explored to identify motivation(s) for /s/ variation. This study, therefore, examines /s/ production in Nigerian English (NigE), focusing on the factors that condition /s/ varia- tion. The study samples 4,056 tokens of /s/ from the ICE-NigE and they are analyzed using center of gravity, zero crossings, duration, and skewness to explain /s/ frontness or backness. The results reveal that ethnicity and year of birth influence /s/ variation. The younger speakers produce fronted /s/, and older speakers realize a more retracted /s/. While /s/ is more fronted among the Igbo NigE speakers, it is more retracted among Yoruba and Hausa NigE speakers, and the absence of gender difference may highlight the importance of ethnicity rather than gender in a multilingual context. Index Terms: /s/-production, Nigerian English, acoustic cues, ethnicity, multilingual context, spectral change 1. Introduction The study of linguistic variables, such as /s/ production, has traditionally focused on examining how linguistic and sociolin- guistic factors condition phoneme realization. These factors provide insights into the production of /s/. For example, /s/ production has been investigated from gender, race, and social identity [1, 2, 3]. These studies have highlighted how /s/ pro- duction indexes speaker’s identity and social constructs (e.g., gay-sounding or ’feminine’ speech), but these analyses have frequently been framed within monolingual or racialized con- texts, such as in North America and Europe [4]. In contrast, this study shifts the focus to a multilingual context, where phe- notype and skin color are not the major marker of identity, and linguistic variations are motivated by sociocultural factors [5]. Research in racialized contexts often indexes /s/ variation (as frontness or backness) with gendered or racial performance. These studies explore /s/ as an index of queer identity in San Francisco, exemplifying its role in the construction of identities beyond normative gender binaries [6, 7]. Other studies investi- gate /s/-fronting in Southeast England, linking it to social strat- ification and gender identity [8]; associate /s / with transgender and queer identities, highlighting its role in stylistic bricolage and the negotiation of gender [9, 4]. While these studies ex- plain /s/ as a social identity construct, they remain constrained by the racial and gendered frameworks within which they are situated. In a linguistically diverse country such as Nigeria, with more than 200 million speakers [10], racism plays an incon- sequential role in /s/ productions [5]. Instead, factors such as ethnicity, multilingualism, level of education attainment, and speaker’s professions motivate variation of sound production (e.g., NURSE vowels) [11, 12]. Since no available sociopho- netic study explores /s/ variation in a multilingual Nigerian con- text, we aim to examine the motivation for /s/ variation in NigE to augment previous studies on /s/ and highlight primary deter- minants of /s/ in a linguistically diverse ecology. The result of this study is important for our understanding of the /s/ variable in different linguistic contexts. Unlike monolingual or racially stratified contexts, /s/ pro- duction in NigE may reveal the influence of ethnicity and other factors following the results of NURSE vowel realiza- tion in [11, 12]. These may explain a phonetic variation of /s/ without NigE speakers doing/performing gender or ethnicity [13, 14, 15] that is similar to performativity in Western contexts [6]; instead, the NigE speakers produce /s/ naturally, however, speaker’s ethnicity differentiates one from another. Despite the naturalness, the difference by ethnicity is perceptually evident. Hence, investigating /s/ in NigE offers another panorama to /s/ variation, driven by differences in ethnic groups (and speaker’s geographical location - region) in a multilingual context rather than in the Western contexts that is heavily available in the race literature. Moving beyond the scope of race-centric investigation of /s/, we aim to examine the potential influence of multilingual ecology on /s/ variation and explain the intersectionality of eth- nicity, gender, and age factors that condition /s/ production. The findings will augment our knowledge of /s/ and highlight the importance of examining the phenomenon from linguistically diverse contexts. 2. Methodology 2.1. Procedure for data elicitation To analyze /s/ production, we selected 42 (20 males, 22 females) high-quality audio files from ICE-NigE with minimal back- ground noise, echoes, speech interruption, or multiple speak- ers simultaneously. The /s/ was produced by Igbo, Hausa, and Yoruba NE speakers. The metadata of these speakers in the ICE-NigE included the speaker’s ethnicity, gender (female as a baseline), and year of birth between 1950s and 2000s ( ¯ x = 47, SD = 13.79). The audio files and transcriptions were force- aligned using WebMAUS Basic [16], which generated anno- tated TextGrids with segment boundaries. These were manually aligned where necessary in Praat [17] using auditory and spec- trogram cues to mark /s/ onset and offset, and a modified Praat script extracted CoG, duration, skewness, and number of zero Interspeech 2025 17-21 August 2025, Rotterdam, The Netherlands 3364 10.21437/Interspeech.2025-94